Perverse rewards.

Typically, experiments involving the administration of random rewards and electric shocks are conducted on rats in laboratories. These experiments--all hellish enough to serve as PETA recruiting material--have revealed much about rodents' reactions to cruel and totally arbitrary environments, in which there is no "right" or "wrong" and consequently nothing to learn. But if you look outside of the cage--I mean, the box--you will see that the same kind of experiment is now being conducted using human subjects, and on a population-wide scale.

Consider the case of Stephen Crawford, former co-president of Morgan Stanley, who was rewarded for three months of presiding over the company's decline with a $32 million pay-off. That's $32 million for screwing up, or, if we generously assume he put in ten hours a day at this task, about $30,000 per hour. Contrast that to the person who cleaned Crawford's office during his brief tenure and is likely paid far less than $30,000 a year for doing first-rate work. At least no one is attributing Morgan Stanley's problems to a buildup of dust bunnies in the executive suites.

Within the corporate culture in general, achievement is no longer connected to reward or failure to punishment. CEOs routinely see their earnings rise by millions while their companies' stock plummets. Meanwhile, at lower levels in the hierarchy, white collar folks get laid off simply because they have been successful enough to make their salaries a tempting cost cut. Thus, the relationship between accomplishments and success seems to have been inverted. "Wall Street has traditionally rewarded people who succeeded," a consultant on executive pay told The New Fork Times. "Now they are rewarding people who fail."

Moving into the realm of politics, take the case of Karl Rove, the man who--all the current evidence suggests--outed CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson in retaliation for her husband's refusal to go along with the myth of an Iraqi nuclear threat. If a Democrat were to reveal the identity of a CIA agent or otherwise leak classified material to the press, you may be sure he or she would be tarred, feathered, and suspended from a lamppost within hours of the crime. But Rove carries on with his vicarious presidency--continuing to promote Bush's voter-repelling Social Security plan and playing a visible role in the selection of the new Supreme Court justice.

Far more serious crimes are no less amply rewarded. Of the top perpetrators in the various prisoner abuse scandals, Donald Rumsfeld still holds his post as Defense Secretary; Condoleezza Rice has been promoted to Secretary of State; and torture-memo lawyer Alberto Gonzales has moved up to become the Attorney General. Only one general with a hand in the abuse--Janis Karpinski, the former head officer at Abu Ghraib--has suffered a demotion. Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, is being considered for promotion to four-star general, and Major General Barbara Fast, his head of intelligence-gathering in Iraq, has been given command of an Arizona army base where soldiers are taught interrogation techniques.

And what about the war itself?. Four years ago, a Saudi militant, based in Afghanistan, engineered the 9/11 attack, leading the United States to invade ... Iraq. What message does this send to Norway or Lesotho? That when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, there is no connection between crime and punishment or even cause and effect?

It is too soon to say what the results of this first-ever experiment on humans will be. Animals subject to "noncontingent" punishments and rewards--i.e., those unconnected to any prior choices or behaviors--tend to get a little psychotic. In a classic study undertaken by psychologist Martin Seligman, dogs subjected to unavoidable shocks for no reason at all developed a condition called "learned helplessness," and lost the ability to avoid future shocks even when avoidance was possible. Similarly with rats: After being subjected to undeserved torments, they simply give up and huddle in a corner of their cage.

And never doubt for a moment that our leaders are capable of conducting such experiments on humans. Jane Mayer revealed in the July 11 New Yorker that Seligman's results with tortured dogs have been of interest to the military and may have influenced the bizarre treatment of "enemy combatants" in various detention spots around the world. Not to mention the fact that being held indefinitely without charges is itself a supremely noncontingent punishment.

I'm not saying "we're all in Guantanamo now," or anything as melodramatic as that. Most of us, after all, enjoy infinitely more comfortable day-to-day living conditions than those offered to detainees. But we are all being subjected to the same sort of experiment--and will be until we overcome our "learned helplessness" and get up on our hind legs again.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive. Her latest book is "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream."