by Alan Briskin | Collaboration, Collective Folly, Collective Wisdom, Conflict, Conscious Capitalism, Consciousness, Politics
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Sixteen
The Dark Prophet
Part II: Capitalism’s Shadow
Time Range: 1867-1883, 2012
It is easy to dismiss Marx as a revolutionist or even as a theorist of socialism, but much harder to ignore his warnings about capitalism. He had discovered the Achilles’ heel of economic arrangements that celebrated their ability to create prosperity, generate innovation, and provide a bounty of goods and services as well as jobs. Capitalism proclaimed itself the final act in the history of economic evolution. Marx refuted the claim. His diatribes, as painful and polarizing as they were, force us to become conscious of capitalism’s other consequences.
We are confronted with capitalism’s shadow, the dependence on jobs defined solely by the marketplace, the depletion of natural resources, and the addiction to material gratification and personal glory out of sync with spiritual, community, and personal growth.
Yet, for all these dark prophecies, they are still within the imagination to address. There is ample evidence of the power of human collaboration combined with science and social purpose to tackle even the most difficult social issues. The darkest prophecy that Marx left us was not about economic concentration, ecological destruction, or the effects of inequality. It was about ourselves. It was about human polarization, the nature of privilege, and feelings of revenge – things Marx understood deeply in his bones.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
His prophecy of successive business crises, continual warfare between nations, depletion of the earth’s resources, and mounting cynicism among the middle and lower classes was all predicated on the belief that government would do nothing about it. He believed that government would be a protector of the dominant classes — even as the dominant classes battled each other — or at best impotent, paralyzed to do anything significant about the crises that would unfold in waves.
Government officials railed Marx, in tones similar to a tormented Dr. Seuss, could not, would not stand up to the monied interests that supported their rise to political power and punished these same politicians if they deviated too sharply from the social narrative of economic growth. And that narrative was synonymous, questionable as it was, with progress, social good, and most critically the belief that money should never lie fallow but grow through investment, resulting in individual wealth accumulation. The hero’s journey, in capitalist mythology, overcame hardship in order to gain material wealth. And in gaining wealth gained wisdom and character. If only it was true.
Marx, often unkind, jealous, suspicious, even wrathful, staked his entire claim on the inability of individuals and social groups to see the predicament they were in. There could be no genuine conversation about altering the rules of capitalism in any significant way. Was he correct?
There is a final irony in all this. Capitalists and workers alike would follow the psychological script Marx laid out while believing they opposed his ideas. As groups on the right and left organized to battle the perceived dangerous actions of the other, they were fulfilling Marx’s prophecy. As unions became more organized, aggressive, and even violent in the early 20th century, they were following exactly Marx’s claim that capitalism would spawn its own detractors as workers learned to leverage their power. As certain capitalists fought against living wages for workers, initiated offshore production to increase their surplus value, and battled regulations for protecting the safety of workers as well as the environment, they were fulfilling Marx’s interpretation of how a ruling class would operate. As governments swung from welfare programs to austerity policies, their basic incompetence or incapacity to act was revealed.
Marx’s assumption was that individuals were not free to think beyond the shackles of their immediate self-interest. Given the structure of profit making, Marx asserted that individuals would choose to maximize their gain at the expense of others, regardless of the consequences. This makes nearly everyone operating within the capitalist system Marxist — at least in behavior. If there was an exception to his declaration about the lack of human agency, it was himself. Confounding his followers, he declared a few years before his death, “I am not a Marxist.”
by Alan Briskin | Collective Folly, Collective Wisdom, Conscious Capitalism, Politics, Spirituality
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Fifteen
Moving from Factions to the Whole:
Paying Attention in New Ways
Part 1: Psycho-Spiritual Perspectives
Time Range: 1787-1789, Current Times
FLASH POINTS
“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”
— James Madison, Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
“I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men … where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789 (source)
The Founding Fathers of the United States, like Madison and Jefferson, were deeply concerned with the tendency of groups to congeal into political factions and dictate solutions from their own factional viewpoint. With only a touch of irony, Jefferson’s statement, that he would decline an invitation to heaven if it meant going with a political party, should give us pause as we look out on our current landscape of political activity. However, it was not conflict they were avoiding, nor were they looking for simple forms of compromise among multiple distorted views. They were, in an uncompromising fashion, looking for productive angles by which the union could be preserved and intelligence awakened in the collective body. They were seeking to unravel a paradoxical riddle: How could creation of a central government be complementary with individual moral agency?
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”
We have never resolved that riddle, but a key element for these Founders was education of a kind in which individuals grew in their capacity for values such as personal reflection, respectful debate, and shared understanding. Similarly, in the research that led to our book, The Power of Collective Wisdom: And the Trap of Collective Folly, we discovered similar values and approaches that created the conditions for collective wisdom to arise. We called these ways of knowing psychological stances indicating attitudes and commitments that fostered reflective consciousness and discernment. Some of these stances included deep listening, suspending personal certainty, seeking diverse perspectives, and welcoming the unexpected.
Beyond any single stance, however, was encouragement to be curious, to ask questions, and to trust in the wisdom of the body, both personal and collective. We also pointed out that collective wisdom’s opposing tendency was false dualities created by forced agreements within a group or extreme polarization between groups. In other words, the same kinds of extreme factions that many of the Founding Fathers were so alarmed about and that still exist today.
Why? What is it about factions that creates such jeopardy for the collective body? Conversely, what is it about wholeness and viewing ourselves as part of a collective body that is so valuable? I offer three overlapping perspectives—psycho-spiritual, physiological, and social—that may shed light on these questions.
Psycho-spiritual perspective.
By their nature, factions, separated from the concerns of the whole, take on radical self-interest. This self-interest is inherently a reductionist view of a larger reality. Psychologically, the limited perspective is captured in the mind for easy retrieval by a symbol, phrase, or fantasized ideal state. Over time, the symbol or ideal gains greater and greater power, further reducing the legitimacy of other viewpoints and limiting consideration of the complexity and ambiguity of actual circumstances. In other words, an obsession of sorts is constellated in the mind and in the group. This thought form, once constructed, can be highly contagious in groups because it offers structure and a reduction of complexity. Law and order is a perfect example of this kind of reductionist label, but so are ideas like liberty, freedom, and even human rights. These concepts all begin with some original meaning or orientation but devolve rapidly into factional interpretations.
If we are to truly consider what it means to move toward wholeness, we must grasp the psychological and spiritual nature of possession. Ideas can take us over, literally. Although our heads may not spin around on our shoulders like in the movie The Exorcist, the effect is somewhat similar when debating each other. We would rather die than give up on our opinion. Rather than dialogue moving us toward something in common, we only exacerbate the polarities among us. Idealized thought patterns become obsessive, mental activity becomes agitated under the cloak of reason, and reason becomes a tool to prove that one is right. Superficial compromise only covers over the rigidity and single-mindedness of the possession.
The neuroscientist Robert Burton calls it the feeling of knowing and wonders if we are creating a reward system for the brain that values being correct and feeling certain over “acquiring a thoughtful awareness of ambiguities, inconsistencies, and underlying paradoxes” (Robert Burton, M.D., On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not).
The sobering news about factions is that moving toward wholeness cannot be accomplished through good intention, reason, or compromise—at least not initially. There are times when in polarized situations we must confront the limitations of the other point of view and address directly the potential or reality of dangerous consequences. This takes courage.
Conflict-resolution strategies, as valuable as they are, should not be mistaken for trying to find a false middle ground or become justification for avoiding conflict. Some degree of polarization and conflict is needed to flush out underlying causes, especially the strong psychological forces that underlie genuine conflict. By engaging consciously with the dualities that possess us, we use the very tension of the opposites to bring forth new awareness. We should not imagine, however, that engaging the conflict is the same as convincing the other side that they are wrong or winning them over to our solutions. This is not about personal confrontation or victory in debate. The spiritual focus is very clear in this regard. Resolving conflict cannot be about individual ego. Rather, we are seeking to bring forward a memory of wholeness, a memory that already exists in each of us.
The way to transcend the possessions that claim us is to engage the imagination and the heart as well as the mind. We are seeking to notice more, to arouse a yearning within us to move from a lesser perspective to a greater one. This is altogether different than simply selecting positions or choosing sides. How we do this is unique to each situation. In some cases, it may be through humor or through the innocence of a genuine question or by reminding others of the human consequences of certain actions. It may be by bringing forward the true complexity of a situation or the moral ambiguity of almost any charged circumstance. It may be by standing firm. It is often by listening and demonstrating to the other side that they are being heard.
However it is accomplished, the hope is that reason and moral agency can be awakened in both the individual and the collective group. We may not be able to sway those most strongly identified with a factional viewpoint, but the appeal is to the larger whole.
The call to something greater can be understood as a spiritual mandate, change necessary to bring balance to a human system gone awry. I use “spiritual” here to express the best of the human spirit, qualities such as kindness, intelligence, compassion, discernment, and justice. These qualities arise from a regard for wholeness, linked linguistically with the words healing and holy through the Old English word haelan. The movement from faction to whole is a journey of healing, reawakening what is best in us and putting a salve on old wounds.
Many years ago, in a personal correspondence, Peter Vaill, the pioneering theorist on organizational change, wrote to me about the relationship between spirit and large-scale change: “Several years ago when I was first trying to think systematically about spirituality, I realized that spiritual ideas hold promise for healing some of the deep divisions among people; and conversely, if we try to heal deep divisions while leaving soul and spirit out of this process, we will probably fail. Any agreement will be temporary and expedient only.” In Peter’s words, we see again that change is not solely on the outside or inside, but at the intersection of the two.
A spiritual mandate for change is not a new form of obsession, though it could be, but rather a re-acquaintance with our inherent connectedness with others. Sometimes this can create discomfort or even heighten differences, but as Martin Luther King demonstrated regarding civil rights or Mahatma Gandhi showed us when fighting for India’s independence, the spiritual context is not about the domination of others. It is about creating the conditions for our interconnectedness to be revealed and our old wounds healed. To do this requires not only intellectual insight or even emotional warmth, but the wisdom of the body.
NEXT WEEK: Moving from Factions to the Whole, PART II
The movement from factions to wholeness includes the wisdom of the body. It may seem a leap, but being aware of our body is a direct experience of the movement from part to whole. By attending to breath, we slow down and cultivate presence. By being aware of our physical body, we bring into consciousness the wisdom of the throat, heart, and gut. The body does not lie.
by Alan Briskin | Conscious Capitalism, Politics
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Thirteen, Part One
My Own Little Tea Party
Talking About the Concentration of Wealth
Time Range: Present Times
If I had 400 people come over my house for tea and they happened to be the wealthiest 400 people in the United States, their accumulated wealth would be equal to the wealth of the bottom half of the entire US population, or approximately 150 million people. This would be true with or without my personal financial assets included. How did so few come to have so much, and conversely, how did so many come to have so little? Disparity in wealth has grown rapidly in the United States over the past half-century. What are some of the factors? Wouldn’t it be fun for my guests to discuss this?
From 1940 through 1970, the ratio of CEOs’ pay to their workers’ average hourly wages held steady. However, during approximately the next 30 years, wages for workers slowed to a halt, and the earnings for the top 5 to 10% of senior executives went through the roof. From the 1970s to the 1980s, the compensation gap between incomes of CEOs and hourly wage earners escalated from 11:1 to 42:1. From the 1980s to the 1990s, it climbed further to 85:1. In 2000, the gap was 531:1.*
To put this in perspective, if an average worker made about $20,000 a year, the chief executive would make about $11 million a year, or more than $45,000 a day. As difficult as this is to comprehend, the numbers seem in line with those in a study done of the average compensation among CEOs of 367 US firms in 2004. The average compensation for CEOs was $11.8 million. Among the top 100 firms, the figure is even higher.
The surplus value of labor was being shared with senior executives and top-end professionals but no further. The Christian injunction to never envy another’s wages if it does not affect the wages you have agreed upon for yourself was now being put to the stress test. The wealth disparity was even more evident in pension funding.
As journalist Ellen Schultz documented in The Retirement Heist, legal maneuvers have allowed retirement savings for modest-income individuals to be shifted to senior executives. In one of many examples, she noted how GE addressed corporate profitability as being adversely affected by out-of-control factors such as a large number of retirees, poor stock market returns, and foreign competition for cheap labor. GE argued that adjustments in new employee medical benefits and retirement plans were necessitated by such market forces. What they neglected to say was a $4.4 billion obligation was dedicated to senior executive pensions. Some things just don’t seem worth mentioning.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
What about the stock market? Certainly this appears a more participatory institution involving tens of millions of people directly or through such things as annuities and retirement plans. This is true to a degree, but 90% of the nation’s financial assets, including stocks and pension fund holdings, are owned by the wealthiest 10% of American households. The top 1%, including the 400 individuals I invited for tea, own 38%. So, for example, when the market goes up in value by $1.46 trillion, as it did in the fourth quarter of 2011, $1.3 trillion goes to the 10%. And the 1% would make out with $554.8 billion. With that kind of money, what is a few million here and there to promote political agendas and politicians who share your passion for liberty and freedom? Meanwhile, most Americans, whose financial assets are mostly in their homes, realized a loss in value.
Of course, not everyone at my tea party agrees with each other. At this gathering of the very wealthy, Warren Buffett is seen as somewhat suspect, at least when he is not being asked for stock tips. Why? Buffett went around his office and asked approximately 20 people—secretaries, clerks, and assistants—what they paid in taxes.
He found that he paid a lower tax rate than any of them. And he didn’t think this made a lot of sense. “I have never had it so good,” he said on national television, sitting next to his secretary, who pays double the percentage of taxes that he does. “What has happened in recent years,” he noted, is that “we were told a rising tide would lift all boats, but the rising tide has lifted all yachts.”(source) Recalling those lines, some at the tea party grumbled about how much he actually paid his secretary (quite a bit), and others thought it was poor judgment to be seen sitting next to her. Many shared with each other the belief that if he wanted to write a check to the government, he was free to do so.
FLASH POINT
Buffett Rule Vote: Tax Measure Fails in Senate
“WASHINGTON — Democrats’ attempt to pass a Buffett Rule tax on the super wealthy failed Monday in the Senate, as Republicans blocked the measure in a sharply partisan debate.
Democrats cast it as a bid for fairness that would end the circumstance in which billionaires like Warren Buffett pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than their secretaries.
Republicans cast it as a political gimmick and an attempt by President Barack Obama to give more Americans a ‘free ride.’”
~ Huffington Post, April 16, 2012
Next Week: Chapter Thirteen: My Own Little Tea Party, Part Two
The issue of taxes appears to be quite a touchy subject. The people at my party feel they have good reason to be concerned. They made extraordinary gains regarding cutting their tax burdens over the past half-century.
by Alan Briskin | Community, Conflict, Conscious Capitalism, Photography, Politics
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Twelve
Occupy Wall Street
Time Range: September 17, 2011
FLASH POINTS
“[T]he American working class had accumulated a level of debt that was unsustainable. People could not make payments. They were exhausted: exhausted financially, exhausted physically by all the work, and exhausted psychologically because the family had been torn apart by everyone working.”
~ Richard Wolff, interview in The Sun, February 2012
“I have a feeling that right now, this human experiment on planet Earth is hitting the wall!”
~ Kalle Lasn, Estonian-born former adman lamenting the environmental and psychological costs of modern capitalism. He suggested in his magazine, Adbusters, that a September 17 occupation of Wall Street might be a good idea.
Some ideas just seem to catch on. The Occupy Wall Street movement began more as a sentiment than a plan, but that didn’t inhibit the national media from holding its collective breath waiting for demands. Somehow income inequality, the increasing concentration of wealth, and the effects of problematic externalities fostered by corporate persons never rose to the threshold of news. Certainly an annual piece on rising CEO pay or some poor neighborhood protesting corporate pollution might appear in newspapers, but these things were isolated from any larger context. Suddenly, and with just a slight reframing, Occupy Wall Street was rebranding our economic institutions as unjust, especially financial and insurance companies seemingly impervious to the havoc they helped wreak.
I imagine some of the financial analysts and brokers heading to work on September 17th wondered who these troublemakers were. Couldn’t this protest just be a new bunch of whiners and complainers, as if the ghosts of the Red Lion Pub had decided to go outside for a picnic? Yet the movement’s slogan, “We are the 99%” had a certain ring to it.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
FDR spoke of not being content if “one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth — is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.” Fifty years prior, the journalist Jacob Riis illustrated with photographs “how the other half lives”; and some 20 years after FDR’s warning, Michael Harrington pointed out that poverty constituted an “other half” that was becoming increasingly invisible. Obviously, one-tenth, one fifth, one-third, or even one-half is not a tipping point.
Academics, economists, and politicians all missed an obvious marketing point of view. If being identified with the “other half” is unpleasant and to be avoided, who really wants to be associated with it, other than the poor, who don’t have a choice, or philanthropists, humanitarians, or social/political climbers who make it their business. Everyone else wants to be identified with the middle class or the well off.
The language of 99% cleverly shifted the perception of two halves and brought together a majority theoretically inclusive of nearly everyone. Occupy Wall Street was a counter-movement to its sociological twin, the Tea Party, which championed reducing the nation’s deficit and getting government out of the picture almost entirely. Occupy Wall Street championed addressing wealth distribution and the undue influence of corporations.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, which included spontaneous activities and protests in hundreds of cities around the world, accomplished something rarely seen after fruitless decades of discussing poverty, welfare, and safety nets. The taboo against talking about wealth distribution and capitalism had, for a brief moment, been lifted.
FLASH POINT
How American Corporations Transformed from Producers to Predators
“In 2010, the top 500 U.S. corporations — the Fortune 500 — generated $10.7 trillion in sales, reaped a whopping $702 billion in profits, and employed 24.9 million people around the globe. Historically, when these corporations have invested in the productive capabilities of their American employees, we’ve had lots of well-paid and stable jobs.
That was the case a half century ago.
Unfortunately, it’s not the case today. For the past three decades, top executives have been rewarding themselves with mega-million-dollar compensation packages while American workers have suffered an unrelenting disappearance of middle-class jobs. Since the 1990s, this hollowing out of the middle class has even affected people with lots of education and work experience. As the Occupy Wall Street movement has recognized, concentration of income and wealth of the top ‘1 percent’ leaves the rest of us high and dry.”
~ William Lazonick, The Huffington Post, April 3, 2012
Next Week: Chapter Thirteen: My Own Little Tea Party
If I had 400 people come over my house for tea and they happened to be the wealthiest 400 people in the United States, their accumulated wealth would be equal to the wealth of the bottom half of the entire US population, or approximately 150 million people. This would be true with or without my personal financial assets included. How did so few come to have so much, and conversely, how did so many come to have so little? Disparity in wealth has grown rapidly in the United States over the past half-century. What are some of the factors? Wouldn’t it be fun for my guests to discuss this?
by Alan Briskin | Collective Folly, Conscious Capitalism, Photography, Politics
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Eleven
Booms and Busts
Time Range: 1985-Present
The bull market of the 1980s saw greater numbers of people investing and realizing larger returns. A whole new financial investing industry was growing up alongside corporate growth. Workers were working longer hours and taking on second jobs, but day traders could get rich in an instant. As we headed into the ’90s, the political focus was on the economy, stupid. A new president argued that government could smooth out the economy’s rough edges, and by playing by the rules and working hard, we might finally see an end to capitalism’s wild gyrations.
Dot-Com Crash, Silicon Valley, March 2000
On March 20, 2000, the NASDAQ Composite index, tracking stocks heavily weighted with technology companies, peaked at 5,132.53. On average, stock prices for these companies had more than doubled from a year earlier. Venture capital investment provided companies with high levels of cash, giving birth to what became known as “burn rates.” Stock analysts saw no limit to profits soaring, and MBA programs were hotbeds of “flipping” business ideas into cash and then getting out.
Over the next 18 months, however, the market value of these technology companies dropped by $5 trillion. In the fallout, which included several bankruptcies, unethical practices and wild excesses were made public at companies such as WorldCom, NorthPoint Communications, and Global Crossing. Americans were shocked and alarmed by stories of greed and excess. However, the notion arose that a few rotten apples shouldn’t upset the whole apple cart.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
Many rushed in to affirm the capitalist system itself was a good one, only those who acted illegally should be punished. Some, such as Henry Blodget, argued that excesses are built into the system due to human nature and busts are simply the price we pay for the vitality of capitalism. REALLY? Capitalism’s roots lay in a belief that human destiny was malleable, yet the belief that human nature is unchanging persists.
How human it is to live too comfortably with our contradictions.
FLASH POINTS
Housing Bubble Popped, December 2008
“Well, we did it again. Only eight years after the last big financial boom ended in disaster, we’re now in the migraine hangover of an even bigger one — a global housing and debt bubble whose bursting has wiped out tens of trillions of dollars of wealth and brought the world to the edge of a second Great Depression…
“Predatory lenders did bamboozle some people into loans and houses they couldn’t afford. The SEC and other regulators did miss opportunities to curb some of the more egregious behavior. Alan Greenspan did keep interest rates too low for too long (and if you’re looking for the single biggest cause of the housing bubble, this is it). Some short-sellers did spread negative rumors. And, Lord knows, many of us got greedy, checked our brains at the door, and heard what we wanted to hear.
“But most bubbles are the product of more than just bad faith, or incompetence, or rank stupidity; the interaction of human psychology with a market economy practically ensures that they will form. In this sense, bubbles are perfectly rational — or at least they’re a rational and unavoidable by-product of capitalism (which, as Winston Churchill might have said, is the worst economic system on the planet except for all the others). Technology and circumstances change, but the human animal doesn’t. And markets are ultimately about people.”
~ Henry Blodget, “Why Wall Street Always Blows It,” Atlantic Monthly
Henry Blodget was the tech-stock analyst at Merrill Lynch vilified for his role in the dot-com crash. His comments in the Atlantic Monthly article suggested that bubbles in free-market capitalism were a natural consequence of human nature functioning with competing economic incentives. He pointed out that immediate economic self-interest naturally generated individual decisions removed and often at odds with collective consequences. Due to human nature, he seemed to suggest, be warned, but on the other hand, get used to it.
Next Week:
Chapter Twelve: Occupy Wall Street
“I have a feeling that right now, this human experiment
on planet Earth is hitting the wall!” ~ Kalle Lasn, Estonian-born former adman lamenting the
environmental and psychological costs of modern capitalism. He suggested in his
magazine, Adbusters, that a September
17 occupation of Wall Street might be a good idea.
by Alan Briskin | Collective Folly, Conscious Capitalism, Photography, Politics
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Ten
Corporate Persons
What Does Not Serve Me Shall Not Be My Concern
Time Range: 1985-Present
Who even knew that corporations had legal rights as if they were actual persons? In a strange twist of legal gymnastics, the originating idea of a corporation being birthed and legitimized by a government grant had been transformed into a corporate body beholden to no one but its owners.
Economic self-interest was the law of the land, and the corporate persons cultivated in such an environment could be as sweet as your dear auntie or as self-serving and weird as the guy down the block wearing just a raincoat. However, both would be legally obligated to prioritize their shareholder economic interests over other concerns such as the corporation’s effect on human beings or the earth’s resources. Economists even have language for this. Externality is the effect on others, positive or negative, by corporate action that is not calculated into the cost of the goods or services.
“An externality,” wrote the economist Milton Friedman, “is the effect of a transaction … on a third party who has not consented to or played any role in the carrying out of that transaction.” He offers a relatively benign example of a man who must clean his shirt more often due to smoke emissions from a local power plant. He tends to minimize the effects by calling them “neighborhood effects” or “spillovers.” In a free market, positive and negative externalities theoretically cancel each other out or are eventually internalized by the corporation. However, a less cheerful view might look something like this: persons who dissociate their actions from their effects on others are called sociopaths.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
Sociopathic corporate persons would not hesitate to market cigarettes or foods high in toxic chemicals, trans fats, sugar, and salt. They would simply point to positive externalities such as jobs being created or the social benefits of smoking and snack foods. They would feel unjustly picked on, pointing out that government intervention is a slippery slope leading to arbitrary interventions. What next, they would ask, bread with too many carbohydrates? The same logic would be offered as a defense of corporations generating air and water pollution, battling safety regulations, depleting fish stocks, wiping out forests, or underfunding pension funds. Why pick on us?
Marx’s warning that capitalism would spawn a consciousness of immediate economic self-interest takes on darker shading when extrapolated through corporate externalities influencing climate change, epidemic rates of diabetes and obesity, international instability, and increasing numbers of retirees without adequate access to basic needs of food, housing, and health care. The point is not that these things are easily fixed or that government will always get the balancing act right, but that corporate sociopaths, with society’s legal approval, have a built-in incentive to muddy the water.
FLASH POINTS
Big
Tobacco says that smoking is about freedom and choices. But a battalion of
experts at Emory is showing that better choices can be made—and that not much
about tobacco is free…
“Industries like gambling, alcohol, and tobacco are ‘societal cancers,’ says [Ray] Gangarosa, that cause ‘exceptional social harm, including death, disability, addiction, and secondhand injury, on the scale of a commercial holocaust . . . (and have) escaped society’s usual controls by shifting blame for harmful commerce to their consumers, and then shifting associated downstream costs onto society. We must hold these harmful industries accountable for their costs.’
Gangarosa, who is working toward a PhD in epidemiology at RSPH [Rollins School of Public Health], was disappointed in the Master Settlement Agreement, in which he feels ‘some terrible compromises were made.’ But he acknowledges the complexity of the issue. ‘The tobacco industry doesn’t make enough money to pay for the social harm that they do. We would bankrupt them,’ says Gangarosa. ‘But if we don’t ask them to pay the social cost, then they are effectively being subsidized.’”
~ Public Health, Spring 2002
“After getting called out by an environmental group, General Motors has pulled support from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit well-known for attacking the science behind global warming and climate change.
The automaker told the Heartland Institute last week that it won’t be making further donations, spokesman Greg Martin said. At a speech earlier this month, GM CEO Dan Akerson said his company is running its business under the assumption that climate change is real.”
~ Huffington Post, March 30, 2012
“Corporations Are Not People”
“Can grassroots victory in Green Mountain state spark national movement?
“With some results still yet to come in, reports confirm that at least 55 towns in Vermont approved municipal resolutions calling for an end to big money’s dominance in US politics and calling for a Constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court’s ‘Citizens United’ decision that has opened the floodgates for secretive, unlimited campaign spending in US elections.
“The initiatives called on the Vermont Legislature and the state’s congressional delegation to support a constitutional amendment that clarifies that ‘money is not speech and corporations are not people.’”
~ Common Dreams, March 7, 2012
Next Week:
Chapter Eleven: Booms and Busts
The bull market of the 1980s saw greater numbers of people investing and realizing larger returns. A whole new financial investing industry was growing up alongside corporate growth. Workers were working longer hours and taking on second jobs, but day traders could get rich in an instant. As we headed into the ’90s, the political focus was on the economy, stupid. A new president argued that government could smooth out the economy’s rough edges, and by playing by the rules and working hard, we might finally see an end to capitalism’s wild gyrations.
