From: cryofan@mylinuxisp.com
Date: Wed Jul 17 2002 - 17:56:53 MDT
Some excerpts:
Five years ago Bill Clinton announced that he was ending welfare as we knew
it. Last week George W. Bush could have commemorated the occasion in his Wall
Street speech by proposing to end capitalism as we know it the brand of
capitalism that's wrecking more lives and families than welfare ever did, the
brand whose cheats have been more obscene, more numerous and more criminal
than "welfare queens" ever were, the brand that turned corporate directors
into crooked dealers and shareholders into their willing addicts so long as
the fix was in.
But the presidency is itself one of those brands, and George W. Bush only its
most recent logo. Bush did not go to Wall Street to end anything. He went
there to profess his "faith" in the system, faith generally being this
president's solution to anything challenging when B-52s won't do. But faith-
based capitalism is what got us into this circle of hell in the first place.
At some point in the late 1980s the market stopped being a bet and became a
religion. The crash of 1987 probably did it, when that single-day 22 percent
drop of the Dow, which should have screamed recession, turned instead into a
sling shot to another bull market. Big investors realized they could do on
Wall Street what Wal Mart does on Main Street: Muscle in, use deep pockets to
ride out losses, then clean up when the little guys are wiped out. Losses
become the necessary seed for fatter shareholder profits.
...
Faith, that is, in the infallibility of the market no matter how self-
fulfilling its promises. The infallibility doctrine is nothing new. Like all
such doctrines, its validity is somewhere between superstition and quackery,
which is why we have regulations to temper it. Or used to. The Reagan
administration spent the 1980s eviscerating the market of the checks and
balances put in place during the New Deal. What Reagan couldn't do because of
a Democratic Congress, the Republican Congress of the mid-1990s finished up.
GOP Rep. Ron Paul, a market faithful, summed up his party's view of
government regulators: "These little men filled with envy are capable of
producing nothing and are motivated by their own inadequacies and desires to
wield authority against men of talent."
It turns out the CEOs were the little men producing nothing.
On Wall Street last week, CEO Bush made it seem as if a few bad companies
were ruining the image of American business, but that the machine itself was
sound. In a sense, he's right. The soundness of the economy as a whole is not
yet at stake. The slide may trigger a recession and deepen federal and state
budget deficits because of a huge dip in capital gains tax receipts. But it
is essentially a massive correction of those invented excesses demanded by
the shareholder ethic of the 1990s. The losses seem overwhelming only because
the gains had been. Newspapers are featuring sob stories about millionaire
retirees whose portfolios are tanking. But don't sob too much. In large part
those were the gamblers of the 1990s, converts to Wall Street's no-fault
religion.
[Now we get to the good stuff:]True, the proportion of Americans owning stock
grew beyond 50 percent, creating the illusion of a democratized market. But
the opposite happened. Just as a $70,000 home with two mortgages isn't the
same as a mansion in Bel Air, investing 6 percent of one's $35,000 salary in
a 401k isn't the same as sitting on a cruise liner's worth of stock options.
Wall Street's jocks have confused the two to make market populism more
believable to keep the small-timers' money coming, and to shade the fact
that, as economist Lester Thurow points out, 86 percent of the market's surge
from 1996 to 2000 profited the wealthiest 10 percent of the population.
Populist fancies aside, Wall Street has always been of, by and for
corporations.
Where Bush has it wrong is in assuming that the evildoers (to use a favorite
phrase of the president's) are the WorldComs and the Enrons and their
accountants, rather than the culture that created them, and that the damage
is contained, like a mole on a wholesome body that can be snipped off and
forgotten. But it goes deeper. It may (it should) be hard to sympathize for
gamblers of the 1990s watching their portfolios shrivel. But where was the
sympathy for the millions of workers who got "downsized" in the name of
shareholder value along the way? Where has the sympathy been for the tens of
millions of workers cobbling together subsistence jobs to make ends meet
while their very own blue chip companies distill gold from their labor?
[Exactly!]
Where will the sympathy be when the mucked up economy and the government's
newfound deficits justify further negligence of 40 million uninsured and the
stingiest social safety net of any Western democracy? [Exactly1]
...
When corporations gang up to defeat initiatives to improve health care, child
care, dirty air and poisoned rivers, when they litigate their way out of
workers' safety, workers' compensation and family leave, when they bust up
unions, plunder public lands, decimate small-time competitors and innovators
and monopolize public discourse about it all, then turnaround and loophole
their way to a billion tax breaks, worm any remaining taxable profits to off-
shore accounts and lock in a slew of subsidies when corporations manage all
that and still find time to complain about being overtaxed, over-regulated
and besieged, then no, the bit about maximizing the collective good just
doesn't hold up.
Nor does Bush's bit about faith. FDR's New Deal capitalism actually worked
for that collective good. Wall Street's Big Deal capitalism has become nasty,
brutish and short-sighted. It isn't a system to have faith in. It's a system
to rein in and balance with a conscience. The market has none. Government's
conscience may be corrupt. But better that than corporate dervishes unbound.
[read 'em and weep...]
Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. He can be reached via e-mail at
ptristam@att.net.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:31 MST