The Sleazy Always Rise to the Top

I just ran across this report on BBC:

The Swiss multinational Nestle is buying milk from a farm seized from its white owners and now owned by the wife of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe.

Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper said up to 1m litres of milk a year are being sold to Nestle from the farm.

Nestle says it has no contract with the farm, but buys milk on a cash on delivery basis after other suppliers went out of business.

The company says its products help meet the food needs of Zimbabwean consumers.

Mrs Grace Mugabe is subject to US and EU sanctions, along with her husband and some other Zimbabwean officials.

But since Nestle is based in Switzerland it is not bound by those sanctions.

The newspaper said that Mrs Mugabe had taken over at least six of Zimbabwe's most valuable white-owned farms since 2002, including the Gushungo Dairy Estate in Mazowe, north of the capital Harare.

In a statement sent to the BBC, Nestle says that since the collapse of Zimbabwe's dairy industry it has been forced to buy milk on the open market "from a wide variety of suppliers on a non-contractual basis" for its factory in Harare.

"This includes milk from the Gushungo Dairy Estate which today accounts for between 10 and 15% of Nestle's local milk supply," the statement said.

"Had Nestle decided to close down its operations in Zimbabwe, the company would have triggered further food shortages and hundreds of job losses among its employees and milk suppliers in an already very difficult situation."

I just chalk it up as another example of how the sleazy either worm their way to the top or how the brutal rape & pillage their way to the top. The joke is that we are sold a Horatio Alger story that those who rise do so because of merit. My experience in life was that most managers were incompetent and that most of the "rising" was done through cronyism and favouritism. I'm willing to admit that the average manager was smarter & more motivated than the average worker, but there were a lot more workers and a very sizable portion were far more competent than most of the managers I knew over my working career.

Sadly, corruption and the abuse of power have been with us since the start. I'm a sucker for idealism, so I really like the idea of meritocrazy and giving everybody a fair shot at going to the top. But that really is a fairy tale. The only time true "outsiders" make it to the top is when the rich and powerful reach down and "promote" some outsider (in school that is via scholarships to the "deserving" poor) and you get the oddball outsider rising. As best I can tell this is pure propaganda. It is done so that the rich & powerful can say "see, you really can rise" and it is done to assuage what feelings of guilt they have for their own inside track to the top.