The Abuse of Power

1. The Abuse of Power “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.” Abraham Lincoln

2. All about the incentive • There are three basic flavors of incentive that drive business decisions and communication • Economic • Social • Moral • Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack "sin tax" is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. • The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. • When the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.

3. Cheating Pays? • Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. • Cheating is a primeval economic act: getting more for less. • It isn't just the boldface names-inside-trading CEOs and pill-popping ballplayers and perk-abusing politicians-who cheat. • It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. • It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees' hours to make his own performance look better. • It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him.

4. Cheating Pays? • Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987 • Seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? • It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. • Suddenly, seven million children-children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year's 1040 forms-vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States. • The incentive for those cheating taxpayers was quite clear. The same for the waitress, the payroll manager, and the third grader. But what about that third grader's teacher? Might she have an incentive to cheat? And if so, how would she do it?

5. Facts About Poverty • Nearly three billion people live on less than two dollars a day • The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the poorest 48 nations is less than the wealth of the world’s three richest people combined • Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names

6. Facts Continued • Less than one percent of what the United States spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2005 and thirty percent through college • 1 billion children live in poverty • 640 million live without adequate shelter • 400 million have no access to safe water • 270 million have no access to health services • 10.6 million died in 2004 before they reached the age of 5 (roughly 29,000 per day)

7. What are Five Types of Power? • Position power (legitimate status in hierarchy) • Coercive power (can punish people who resist; use of fear) • Reward power (give grades, money, punishment, better assignments) • Expert power (have competence or expertise) • Referent power (use attractiveness or friendship to get your way)

8. Spectacle of Oppression and Carnival of Resistance

9. What is Oppression? • Being without power, when you can get power • Only doing what another wants you to do who has power over you due to their social position, rewards and coercions, their technical expertise or referent (attraction) that you lack. • Not being able to voice what you want because you do not believe in your voice • Not being conscious of the power game • Not being conscious of the resources you have to transcend oppression • Being temporarily without power (disempowered) • A conflict of power between the oppressors and the oppressed

10. Festivalism • Festivalism is the dream of a metamorphosis of capitalism into something less predatory. Festivalism begins with the deconstruction of advertising, texts of spectacle, exploitation, and a less violent capitalism.

11. Examples of Oppression • Oppressive Interpersonal Relations • A College Dean who harassed female secretary into quitting because he refused to protect her from a university employee that was sexually harassing her. • Oppressive Thought Control • The spectacle of 3,000 TV, Radio, Magazine and bill board ads you see each day telling you how to be happy, how material purchase make you happy, what a society should be, and how the world will progress (through biotech, genetically-modified foods, diamonds, and cosmetic surgery). • Oppressive Employment Relations • Kukdong Factory in Mexico 2003 where young women were beaten and sent to hospital after daring to protest maggots in food, ask for bit of a raise, and organize an independent union action. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/usas/ • Oppressive acts of Discrimination

12. Examples of Oppression • Global Oppression   • Out of the top 100 economies of the world over half are corporations, not countries. • The top 20% of the U.S. population has 84.6% of the wealth, while the lower 40% live on half of one percent of the wealth  • Oppressive Corporate Moral Decay • Enron's series of scandals concerning insider trading by executives, hiding the facts from employees, cheating on their balance statements by hiding debt in off-the-balance-sheet partnerships headed up by Enron executives. The loss by investors, employees, communities.. Add Arthur Anderson, who got paid many millions to engage in creative accounting practices, tried to cop a plea by putting up hundreds of millions

13. How to change an oppressed workplace?  • Explore your own situations of oppression.  • Question 1 • What are the types of Oppressions that you face at work (or in school)? • Question 2 • Pick one that you can share in class. Describe it briefly  • Question Set # 3: • Answer following SEPTET questions about the situation of oppression you picked

14. SEPTET questions • WHO? (the agents or characters - antagonist and protagonist involved in the oppression; who is involved) • WHAT? (act or behavior that was oppressive; what) • WHEN/WHERE? (scene or spectacle situation of the oppression; when and where) • WHY? (What was their motive and your motive or purpose in the scene of oppression; why are characters acting this way) • HOW?  (By what means or agencies/instruments were you being oppressed; how) • DIALOG? (Write down a dialog/script between you and your oppressor that happened in one scene of oppression; they said and you said, etc.) • RHYTHM? (Describe one body rhythm [like a dance movement] and one sound [not a word] that expresses your inner feeling and emotion of oppression during one moment/act/scene of oppression. Next what body rhythm and sound rhythm express the feeling and emotion of the oppressor during same moment.  • FRAME? Describe the ideology/idea systems of the oppressor and the oppressed person; It can be a world view that legitimates the behavior of oppressor and another world view legitimating or rationalizing behavior of the oppressed person.

15. References • http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/388/games_of_power.htm • http://peaceaware.com/special/1/pages/festivalism.htm • www.globalissues.org • www.antipovertyweek.org