Dana Milbank has a column that is getting a lot of play on the intertrons this weekend, it’s about lack of shame within corporate culture. He concludes:
Government should push back against a corporate culture that has lost its sense of shame.
I’m not sure I agree with the use of the word “lost” which implies that corporate culture once did have a sense of shame. What has changed, instead, is that the government no longer has the wherewithal to push back against corporate shamelessness. Tom Schaller had an interesting take on how the Reagan revolution never ended:
What’s remarkable is how we still hear the same, core arguments about the role and functions of government–and how the policy-specific debates over matters like offshore drilling persist as well. And yet here we are, 30 years later, and the tax burden is at its lowest since 1950, the regulatory state has been cowed if not captured by the industries it is supposed to oversee, and America stands as the world’s lone remaining superpower. The antipathy toward government Reagan popularized has, even if indirectly and merely in spirit, contributed to a governing approach that has led to everything from coal mine disasters to the BP oil spill.
It’s not just antipathy towards the government, though, it’s also reverence for corporate leaders. Establishment media now invariably celebrates captains of industry as Galtian geniuses who “create jobs”. Pulitzer prizer winners criticize reporters who dare to cross corporate leaders. Mockery of any sort is left now to Taiwanese animators and amateur bloggers.
It’s fun to wax nostalgiac about an imaginary past where corporate American had more of a sense of responsibility; it’s the same past where every teen-ager respected his elders, every American helped out his neighbors, and no one needed to lock the door. If people are tired of corporate misconduct, they need to vote for a government that will rein it in, not shed a tear for the end of the good old days.
El Cid
I think this attitude matches The Onion piece about how all of culture has gone downhill ever since you — whoever the reader is — were 11 years old.
They’re just pretty sure it was better back then.
And having become politically aware in the Reagan years, particularly the S&L anti-regulatory collapse and the all-out slaughter of innocent civilians in Central America and Southern Africa in order to block governments that seemed too independent of US aims, I just don’t have any nostalgia.
Rick Massimo
I can think of one way in which corporate America had a sense of shame: Laying people off used to be the sign of a failing business, a business in trouble, something that actually reflected badly on the corporation’s leaders.
I’m old; I know. But it really was like that. Then businesses’ stock prices started going up when they announced layoffs. And it became cool. You were “The Terminator,” “The Hatchet Man,” whatever, because you made the “tough decision” to put more money in your pocket by throwing people out of jobs.
And yeah, when I hear the term “job creators,” it really is all I can do to stop from throwing punches.
TJ
Dude, before the rise of the MBAs corporations like that actually existed. I’m talking the sixties and seventies, of course. Worked for one myself. My particular director was an ex-engineer who actually involved the company in communities where we built plants.
As I said, the rise of the multinationals and the ascendance of MBAs killed that culture dead. But it did exist at one point.
WereBear
Oh, the good old days.
Like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and Love Canal.
Libby
Please forgive the bleg but this is sort of relative to this post. Billy Kennedy is a great grass roots candidate running against Virginia Foxx. He’s not a Blue Dog and he believes in holding corporations accountable. The national Dems won’t help because he’s not part of the machine.
Winning this DFA contest would be a big help to him. He would get 30K and volunteer hours. This is important because it’s a very red district and a poor district so collecting small donations is difficult. This is the final round and it ends at midnight tonight. He’s in the top three right now and I’m hoping the kindness and the power of the Balloon Juice community can help him get over the top.
Please vote for Billy Kennedy if you can. You don’t have to live in his district to show support for him. TIA.
Cat Lady
The past that actually was consisted of tainted food, slave labor, child labor, sweatshops, poisoned water, phony securities, dangerous drugs, and monopolies. You know, the opposite of the nostalgic past, and the current GOP platform.
WereBear
@TJ: True. One of the factors we’re dealing with is that smaller companies no longer have a choice about being gobbled up.
Ben & Jerry’s got a lot of flak for selling out (and now their ice cream sucks) but Unilever was going to buy up their shelf space and drive them under. They sold to save their employees’ jobs.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Stop! A sense of reality is not conducive to the health of The Narrative. Thou shalt not question The Narrative.
WereBear
@Libby: You gots it.
Amir_Khalid
@Dougj: A wee quibble over usage: “reign it in” should be “rein it in”.
General Stuck
This is absolutely true. The “good ole days” of corporate responsibility certainly never included acceptance of industry for government regulation, particularly the environmental kind. But I think in the wake of ww2, there was more of a sense of fairness and an attitude of we’re all in this together between the public and industry.
And specifically with the news media, there was more responsibility with bringing the public serious news without all the competitive sound byte culture we now have. Though that had mostly to do with the new teevee media use of public airwaves pact with the government. And teevee coming of age with the beginning of the Cold War and a sense of collective danger. Real and imagined.
Now it’s corporate profit above all else, and with digital communication, much much more competition for that shrinking profit, well beyond 3 or 4 networks to share.
But mostly our current dilemma stems from the countries embrace of conservatism and conservative ideology concerning our capitalist market economic system. Conservative economic ideology wrapped in Orwellian double speak about evil liberalism, and marketed with a variety of social wedge issues playing on fear and prejudice to distract the country into voting GOP, while wingnuts made off with the loot. And amazingly, after all of the economic problems of the recent past, voters seem willing to repeat their mistake, to keep the godless libtard soshulists from drinking their precious bodily fluids.
We will deserve all the bad shit that will come our way if they actually do put these flammers back into power.
WereBear
It has been the hammering of the propaganda machine which have brought us to this point. Once, they had to say, “Yes, we make money, but we take care of our employees and we give to children and cute animals.”
Now it’s just, “We make money. Sucker.”
Mnemosyne
@Rick Massimo:
I think that’s true, and I think that’s one of the reasons people aren’t screaming for more government regulation of businesses. At this point, they have a gun to our heads and we know it: “Let us do what we want or we’ll close the factory/office and move jobs to where they’re cheaper.” So the public now has to treat corporations as essentially armed robbers — don’t make them angry or they’re going to hurt us all.
MattF
A remarkable thing about Milbank’s essay is that it omits any mention of Massey’s union-busting policies. Why is that, do you think?
Davis X. Machina
For corpotations, the only legitimate role of the State is, and always has been, to provide a police escort for their getaway car.
DougJ
@Amir_Khalid:
Thanks
matoko_chan
It is the death of the White Patriarchy Social Cohesion model. When blacks and women got the vote it was doomed.
When america was homogeneously white christian nuclear families, the masters of the universe had to answer to god, their conscious, and their neighbor every Sunday.
The new social cohesion model evolving is social justice democracy.
death rocks and evolution rolls.
SiubhanDuinne
@Libby #5: Just cast my vote for Billy Kennedy. I think Foxx is one of the most appalling members of Congress and am happy to support anyone who challenges her. Good luck to Billy! (He’s currently at No 6 according to the robo-reply I just got.)
Pangloss
The difference between then and now is the regulatory, funding and merger climate has been shifted to not only allow but encourage no-holds-barred capitalism.
Take media, for instance. Deregulation in the 1980s and 90s allowed for Clear Channel to own over 1000 radio stations. Stations that had previously been subject to rules governing ownership began buying and selling stations like commodities when ownership rules were no longer governed by the principle of “the public interest” and subject to the fairness doctrine. Now there are relatively small groups of medium market radio stations that are traded on the NYSE rather than held by families or a small group of owners as there was in the past.
Utilities, airlines, railroads, and energy companies went through the same process. When the object shifted from sustaining the business over time to building the purchase value to make a quick buck, the idea of maintaining some fig leaf of corporate responsibility went out the window, and rather quickly.
Comrade Jake
We are about to see this all over again with the natural gas exploration that is currently underway.
Be sure to watch this trailer for Gasland as well, and watch it to the end. Seeing someone light their tapwater on fire is not something you’ll forget anytime soon.
CanadaGoose
Read “The Way We Never Were” by Stephanie Coontz.
The good old days were good for the same people who have it good today.
kay
It doesn’t sound like Dana Millbank.
It’s earnest and angry and fact-filled, with none of his usual jaded and knowing sophisticate persona.
When he got to “it’s easy to paint Blankenship as a villain” I just assumed we were then going to soften the blows in the previous paragraphs with an even-steven attack on captured MMS regulators.
Instead he went after the Chamber of Commerce.
Maybe Millbank met a coal miner.
Adam Collyer
Corporate culture certainly has gone through an intense transformation over the years. I don’t know that corporate executive management hasn’t always been like this.
My father is 70 years old. He worked for AT&T for nearly 30 years before leaving to work for a start-up wireless company in the mid-1990s. He always tells me how different working was compared to what we do now. The job that I will start in September was offered with a contractual obligation for 3 years of employment. To me, a 26-year old in this generation, that seemed like forever. Who knows what opportunities could arise within these 3 years? Did I really want to be locked into living in the same place for 3 years with no hope of leaving?
When my dad went to work for AT&T, he essentially went to work there for life. He knew it and they knew it. There was something of a social contract involved in the deal. That’s changed so much to the point where people who are my age can barely imagine staying in the same office for several years. Onward (and maybe upward, but mostly onward) is all the rage these days.
So I wonder if, as corporate employee culture changed, corporate management culture has changed with it. Or has corporate management culture always been so driven that they lacked a “sense of responsibility?”
Daddy-O
It’s not just the government that has lost its wherewithal to attack or shame a shameless corporate culture…it’s the American people, too.
They’ve been brainwashed, starting with Reagan and his voodoo economics. Taxes are bad. Profits aren’t everything, they’re the ONLY thing. When we’re rich enough, we’ll see about getting you Little People those jobs we promised.
The fucking country has gone insane, and that’s no exaggeration.
Lolis
Looks like MoDo’s new column is about how the Obama administration isn’t black enough. No joke.
Mnemosyne
@Adam Collyer:
Actually, it was the other way around: once corporate management made it clear that your job was contingent on that quarter’s profits and you could be laid off at any time, employees lost any sense of being at a job for the long term and decided to do the smart thing by looking out for themselves and their own careers. Once management decided that employees were expendable and fungible, it was only a matter of time before employees decided that loyalty to a company that would lay you off at the drop of a hat was pointless.
It changed on the management side first. The employees changed out of self-defense.
cmorenc
There IS shame in corporate culture, but it’s over fear of being held responsible for repeated failure to have profitable quarters, or the “beat” market expectations enough to keep share price rising. Or, fear of having one’s career sidetracked permanently into the layers of middle management vulnerable to cost-saving layoffs to make the balance sheet look better for upper-management job security and bonuses, and shy of the level where dismissal from position is buffered by golden parachutes, instead of severance packages whose value is measured in weeks or months of salary, rather than stock options and vested pensions.
That’s the best bottom-line explanation for the BP disaster BTW. The handful of people in charge of the rig wanted to minimize vulnerability to corporate bean-counters when the balance sheet on the operation got analyzed.
kay
@Lolis:
It’s weird that Maureen Dowd didn’t mention Michelle Obama, as a person in the White House who meets her “authentically American black” criteria.
Particularly because the New York Times traced Michelle Obama’s family back to slavery, independently researching and presenting just that idea, in a long article maybe a year ago.
I don’t think Maureen Dowd reads that newspaper.
Adam Collyer
@Mnemosyne:
Makes complete sense.
I have a complex relationship with how I feel about corporations. We certainly need better regulation and tougher standards for management to be judged against. It’s hard for me to blame the management of these companies for doing what they can to increase profits short term – that’s what they’ve been hired to do. It’s up to us to incentivize long term stability in favor of short term spikes, and I think we’ve done a poor job of that.
But on a personal and more emotional level, my father was an executive in AT&T and various other corporations for the better part of his life. He wore a suit every day, went to work in an office, and did a fine job. Those corporations he worked for paid him well, and he used that to take care of my family and put my sisters and I through college. I think it’s necessary for us to make sure that while we criticize the Boards of Directors, we don’t forget that there are good people who do good work in those environments every day.
Emma
Mnemosyne: This. I am always amused to hear some (usually upper management) boffin moan and bitch about “loyalty.” They have none, why should the workers? And it has by now entered the culture in many levels, not only corporate.
I can tell you exactly when it happened. The moment “the personnel department” became “human resources” we were screwed. Because “personnel” invokes “person”, while “human resources” invokes a cold room full of interchangeable cogs for the machine.
jrg
The gulf coast states that consistently vote for Republicans and less regulation deserve to be F’ed in the A.
Sorry, but stupidity has a cost. I wish the spill never happened, and It sucks that the toll is so high, but at least some of the states who helped create the environment for this sort of thing are the ones actually paying the price for a change.
We shelter “conservative” states from their idiocy far too much (in large part by borrowing and spending, rather than cutting the pork and programs they depend on). The only way these people are ever going to learn is if we leave the hot stove on. They may be idiots, but they’ll learn after a while… And if they don’t, maybe their kids will.
Bobbo
What the helll happened to Dana Milbank? Is he suddenly feeling guilty about what a less then useless douchebag he has been for so long?
Geeno
@TJ: There used to be a need for companies to be seen to be good corporate citizens. They built parks, did all kinds of stuff in the communities. You see an echo of that now, but it’s just in commercials.
GregB
Here in NH we pine for the good old days when smallpox sufferers were tossed into pest houses to die an untreated death and where 10 year old children were sucked in the gears of industrial machinery at the massive mill complexes in Manchester.
I get weepy when I think of these wonderful, halcyon days of yore.
Adam Collyer
@Mnemosyne:
Coincidentally, the Reading (Pa.) Eagle has its annual interview with Penn State football coach Joe Paterno today. Paterno’s been at PSU for 50+ years as both an assistant and head coach, and he’s the winningest football coach in Division IA history. In response to a question about the number of coaches making job changes this year, he replies…
gnomedad
@Adam Collyer:
Without contradicting anyone else’s point, the pace of technological change is part of this. They built phones to last for 40 years in the good old days. If you made the Dalai Lama CEO he couldn’t guarantee lifetime employment. That’s why we need regulation and the social safety net more than ever.
mclaren
This would be the same government that’s still torturing people in the second secret prison at Bagram where the Red Cross is not allowed to enter?
This government is supposed to push back against a corporate culture that lacks shame, the government whose leaders send more troops to a doomed lost war while mouthing patriotic platitudes yet at the same time making sure that virtually none of the children of any of America’s upper classes ever serves in the army and gets sent to Iraq or Afghanistan?
This government that continues to send DEA agents to raid marijuana dispensaries right now, today, after promising not to? The government that still handcuffs dying cancer patients who buy weed to quell the nausea from their cancer chemotherapy, this is the government that needs to “push back” against a culture of shamelessness?
The American government that lectures foreign leaders on how intolerable their human rights abuses are, while we persist in kidnapping American citizens without charges and without trial and holding them in torture chambers without numbers as prisoners without names? That’s the government that stands up against “shamelessness”?
This is the same government that orders the assassination of American citizens without a trial and without even producing any evidence of a crime having been committed…and we dare call corporations “shameless”?
I got news for ya, buddy, all corporations do is rob people and dump poisons into their water and their food. The U.S. government kidnaps people. The U.S. government tortures people. The U.S. government now orders the assassination of its own citizens without charges or a trial. The U.S. government, under Obama, knowingly continues to imprison people in Guantanamo even though we admit and fully recognize that those people are innocent of any crime.
Corporations are run by shameless amoral thieves, but they look like boy scouts compared the shamelessly sociopathic torturers and mass murderers running our government who mouth platitudes about justice and the constitution and peace while ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent children and women with drones and unleashing U.S. military bombardments of civilians in cities like Fallujah that result in worse cancer rates than Nagasaki or Hiroshima.
wilfred
The defining feature of postmodernism. It helps ease the anxieties of the present day.
Sheila
Fine points, Doug. I also believe we should do what we can personally by avoiding giving any business to the large corporations, though I know is is very difficult to sidestep them altogether, especially in a country where the purported “caregiving” industry, the medical profession, is shamelessly for-profit in all its segments and most people’s pensions, if they are lucky enough to have one, are tied up in the circle jerk we call the financial sector.
MoeLarryAndJesus
Some days I think our corporation-run future will resemble the world as portrayed in “Rollerball.”
Other days I lean towards “Robocop.”
America, fuck yeah.
Just wait until President Kardashian is in charge.
bemused
Dana wrote a sensible column without the usual snotty nonsense about lefties. Contrasting that with Dana’s smoking jacket videos made my head spin.
Libby
@WereBear: Thanks so much for the help. Really appreciate it.
Libby
@SiubhanDuinne: Thank you so much. Didn’t realize he had dropped so far. This community is the best. I’m annoying people everywhere today with this bleg, so maybe we can still pull it off.
Libby
@kay: Milbank has written at least a couple of reality based columns lately. Don’t know what happened to him, but hope it keeps happening.
BR
A great reminder is that it’s always been this way is The Grapes of Wrath.
The banksters and others have been doing this forever.
Aredubya
Industry had a conscience? Does Dana Milbank not remember that little thing called Superfund? While it came about in 1980, it was legislated to repair dump sites that the stewards of industry quietly constructed in the earlier 20th century, ignored til people were sickened and died early. They knew full well it was death they were sowing, and hid it well til they were retired and the go-go 50’s were a fond memory.
Progress has a cost. It always has and always will. Those that confront those costs early are sneered at by sociopathic market forces. Those that ignore them for later get rich and rest on their laurels, buying their way out of prison when necessary.
rootless_e
We need the old corporate responsibility culture of the Ludlow Massacre and Bhopal – or not.
Anyways corporate ideology is changing.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/7/24/887154/-The-end-of-neoliberalism-from-General-Electric
BR
@Aredubya:
I am with you on all of that. Except I’m beginning to wonder if we should really call it progress.
Most of the planet’s life support systems are breaking down, from the oceans to the climate to the arctic to the rainforests. In the name of…progress.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kay #28: Yes, that’s exactly what struck me about the MoDo column. Not a mention of Michelle, or for that matter of Marion Robinson who’s a generation older and that much closer to the slavery period, and who would have personal memories of the institutionalized Jim Crow era.
Dowd is the template for coming up with a cute theory and then selectively assembling whatever supports that theory and allows her to indulge in clever wordplay and interminable parallel constructions.
Corner Stone
@Aredubya:
Progress can be made without societal cost/damage.
BR
Oh, and I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the Cuyahoga River:
I’m sure all of that pollution had nothing to do with industry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River
Corner Stone
@MoeLarryAndJesus:
At least then there will be enough booty to go around.
rootless_e
@BR:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3608
debbie
@ Rick Massimo:
For me, it’s “right-sizing.” Talk about post-justification.
someguy
It’s good corporations don’t have a sense of shame. Shame is based in morality, and morality is based in religion, which is just an a device that attempts to attain hegemony over society. Might as well say corporations “don’t mind being evil” or “they violate the ten commandments” if you’re going to buy into that framework.
I think rejecting the framework of traditional morality frees us to think about the important question here which is whether society is being benefitted by corporations or not. Unlike shame, good, or evil, you can actually measure how much a corporation – or at least do so better than you can gauge its moral rectitude. Plus it has the added advantage of not implicitly assuming the validity of a corrupt system of organized religion, the purpose of which is to oppress.
mcd410x
Nostalgia? Seems like a good excuse for this Mad Men clip
Magnifique
matoko_chan
@someguy:
merde.
organized religion is not bad. religion is a fitness enhancer that evolved in the EEA to extend consanguious kinship benefits to a wider memetic tribe. Evangelism is bad…the idea that a single religion owns the truth and is mandated to impose that particular truth on the unwilling.
roshan
Chalk it up to entropy (disorder within a system). It increases with time. It’s a thermodynamic property of a system.
When I think about nostalgia for the past, entropy always comes to my mind.This is how I visualize it.
For example the corporate system of 50’s and 60’s. Select a few variables to define the corporate system like management, manufacturing, information system, regulations, international trade, environment and politics.
Let’s consider the 50-60s era:
1. Management – Simpler hierarchical structure – board, ceo, managers and workers. Very few departments and few stockholders.
2. Manufacturing – Mostly domestic, easier to manage.
3. Information system – Any business or organization has a finite information about it’s workings, technical expertise and trade secrets etc. depending upon the time it has been around.
4. Regulations – This category I am not too sure about. Let’s go with a finite amount of regulations.
5. International trade – Only a small part of most businesses was devoted to international markets.
6. Environment – This category was probably non existent back then, and didn’t have much effect on the kind of business you ran.
7. Politics – Not sure how to quantify this.
Now let’s consider the 21st century era.
1. Management – Upper management still the same, i.e board and ceo, lower management has widened scope based on expertise, added more worker categories based on expertise, many departments, and wide base of stockholders.
2. Manufacturing – A large portion of manufacturing has been off-shored increasing interaction with foreign gov’ts and dependence on politics of said country.
3. Information system – Information has grown manifolds and introduction of digital systems has increased the type of data available of any given business.
4. Regulation – Again, not so sure of this category. Most likely have grown more complex depending upon business activity.
5. International trade – Foreign markets have become a necessity for most products.
6. Environment – Much more is known about the effects of any business activity on the environment than previously. Cradle to grave life cycle comes to mind.
7. Politics – Again, not sure how to quantify this.
So when I look at the 50s-60s era and back to the current, it seems to me (not sure everyone sees it this way) the complexity and the disorder within a system has increased. Sure, the information age has simplified a lot of things, but it also has introduced a lot variables of it’s own that increase the disorder within a large business. I am not even sure where corporate shame fits into the above.
On a side note, one thing I have noted about myself (might be true of others) is that I like order and moderate complexity in any environment. The stress level goes up as order deteriorates and complexity increases. It makes me think about the times when things were “simpler” or in other words had more order and less complexity w.r.t to the current environment.
The above is a purely mind exercise, you are encouraged to poke holes into it.
kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
Exactly. Her judgment on Obama from the outset has been that he’s not American enough.
She’s basically a wordy and mainstream-acceptable Birther.
Any event that occurs, oil spill, Sherrod, leads her right back to the birth certificate.
demimondian
I always love it when people on blogs whine about the change of job security, blaming “globalization” or “owners” or whatever. It’s always somebody else! You want to know who to blame? Look in the mirror, baby! The villains here aren’t the Republicans, but rather the folks who populate blog comments sections, educated and gifted with the spare time necessary to write literate and clever comments. We are their enablers, and pretending that we aren’t is self-serving and hypocritical.
If you work in the any of the “information industries”, then you *are in the business of eliminating jobs*. You reduce the number of workers necessary to produce the same widget. You increase the value of capitalization, thus leading to increased concentration of wealth. You make production itself fungible by making it easier to retool factories. You make it easier to eliminate human expertise and replace it with computational beef.
Yes, *your* job isn’t at risk yet, but the more the details can be handled by a machine, the less there is a need for people to do things. When that situation persists, the result is inevitable: a Gilded Age, in which those who can concentrate capital can earn ever greater wealth.
mclaren
Superfund?
Crap almighty, people, try a hundred years before Superfund.
Here are a couple of fact-based movies you may want to check out for a glimpse of the wonderful “corporate responsibility” of America:
The Molly Maguires (1970). Company agents infiltrated striking mine workers who sabotaged the mines in order to force better conditions and decent pay, informed on ’em, got ’em hanged. That was 1878.
Matewan (1987) Back in the 1920s, the West Virginia coal minig conglomerates hired Pinkerton Detective Agency thugs to murder striking miners.
Oklahoma Crude (1973) Oil companies hired mercenaries to murder independent oilmen and steal their oil rigs. Sabotage, mysterious fires in the middle of the night, snipers, attacks with rifle brigades and grenades, all standard operating procedure for American oil companies faced with independent oil wildcatters in the 1870s.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
This. Most people want some stability in their lives, since it makes it easier to do things like raise families, make friends, get involved in their communities, and generally have lives outside of work. Employers are only interested in profit, so any kind of stability that interferes with their ability to fire people whenever they want is anathema to them.
I think a good sign of the way that the employment relationship has changed is the change in the connotation of “layoff”. There used to be a distinction between being laid off and being let go. A layoff was originally used to mean that the company was furloughing workers because of a temporary lull, with the intention of putting them back to work once business picked up again. It was more like an unplanned and unpaid (except for unemployment insurance) vacation than a permanent break between company and employee. Somewhere along the line, though, companies stopped doing that; when they shed jobs it’s assumed to be permanent, and the formerly temporary layoff began to be used for a permanent rather than temporary job loss.
jake the snake
@Davis X. Machina:
Jennifer
Yeah yeah, the good ol’ days, they were horrible.
But I do think there used to at least be a feeling of pride in the corporate owners and managers that their workers were able to provide for a family, buy a home, etc with their wages. Of course, that may have just been PR due to the need to get along with the unions.
I think the point we need to be making here about the right, is that their modern vision of economics and government involvement in/oversight of policy, regulation, and the economy, relies on a complete lack of limits, and in reality, nothing functions without them. I mean, there are limits to everything – there are a limited number of resources, of water, of oxygen molecules – you name it. The world is not limitless; therefore nothing based upon its sustenance is limitless, which includes profits, growth, and wealth accumulation. So it’s foolish to support ideas or policies based upon some imaginary limitless world; worse than that, it’s disastrous to do so. When things reach their limits, they crash. It’s much better for everyone involved to delineate some limits and work within them so the crash point is never reached. Current Republican policy prescriptions merely encourage reaching the limits more quickly.
Stillwater
@matoko_chan: Evangelism is bad…the idea that a single religion owns the truth and is mandated to impose that particular truth on the unwilling.
And yet you evangelize a ‘truth’ about ‘religion [as] a fitness enhancer that evolved in the EEA to extend consanguious kinship benefits to a wider memetic tribe’. One problem here (there are others) is your implicit (incorrect) assumption that providing a purely descriptive account of how an institution or practice emerged can lead to the normative conclusion that ‘religion is not bad’.
gnomedad
@demimondian:
Fixed. The problem, and it’s a tough one, is to fairly share the benefits of increased productivity, to say nothing of capturing the costs of cleaning up after ourselves. Who’s going to impose and police productivity limits? Not gonna happen.
DougJ
@demimondian:
I don’t buy this at all. You are suggesting that increases in productivity inevitably lead to new Gilded Ages. In fact, productivity increased at a health clip from 1945-1970 or so and was accompanied by healthy increases in wages. Right now (and for the past 20 years or so), productivity has increased without corresponding increases in wages.
I don’t see how productivity is the villain here, the problem is failure to translate productivity increase into standard of living increases.
AhabTRuler
@DougJ: Did the Black Ops community eated your next post?
Jennifer
BTW, I meant to pimp The Corporation in my comment (trailer here).
I’m thrilled to see you can now watch the whole film on hulu, here.
roshan
@Jennifer:
Thanks for the suggestion and link. Hulu doesn’t distribute in my region (Asia), might have to look somewhere else.
EDIT: It’s on youtube too.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FA50FBC214A6CE87
Bill H
I’m not sure this is totally on topic, but I recall a news release where IBM had this “new and revolutionary idea” which consisted of having the manufacturing team sit in on the design process so that the cost of manufacturing actually became part of the design parameters.
They gave as an example a panel on a printer which had seven different fasteners and required five different tools to assemble. The assembler had to lay down and pick up tools no fewer than five times for each panel and, “Oh wow, that wastes time.”
Manufacturing pointed out that all of the fasteners could actually be the same item. There was no downside to that whatever, it saved inventory and purchasing cost, and the assembler used only one tool which stayed in his hand for eight solid hours all day. It reduced the assembly cost by 80% or something like that.
I was not impressed by the “new idea” but was more impressed by the utter stupiditity of the old idea. Rather than thinking what a good idea it was to include manufacturing in the design process I was wondering why the fuck it was ever left out of the design process to begin with. How did a panel ever get to the manufacturing line with seven different fasteners and five tools required?
PeakVT
“I’m not sure I agree with the use of the word “lost” which implies that corporate culture once did have a sense of shame.”
When senior managers were taxed at up to 91%, a rate at which the Laffer curve is in effect, they had to express their status via their company and their contribution to society. Now compensation serves directly as the status indicator, and senior managers compete by running up the score.
Davis X. Machina
Or necessary to forestall having their throats cut while they slept.
DougJ
@AhabTRuler:
I was writing a draft and something strange happened and startled me and I hit “publish” by accident.
Shelton Lankford
A corporate sense of shame results from a process in which history catches up with and exposes the cumulative insults of a record of externalizing costs and internalizing profits and shows that it is done knowingly and out of greed. That process has been broken since the Reagan ascendency, primarily due to the creation and perpetuation of myth by media. By falsifying the narrative, as Dana and his ilk are wont to do, accountability for everything from accumulating poisons in our water and air and to the creation of a food industry that is at once cruel and inhumane and at the same time unhealthy for consumers, is disappeared down the memory hole. A book comes out occasionally that tells the whole sordid story, but the myth remains dominent and the dominent lie coexists happily with the tiny spark of truth that flashes once and winds up on the remainder table.
It is not necessary that the truth be buried completely, only that it be delayed until it is a few years old and few people have the energy or resources to go dig it up.
We are victims of our myths. The killing of our President in 1963 received the full myth-creation treatment in the Warren Commission and a cottage industry of books by the likes of Posner and Bugliosi, despite the official findings of the Congressional Select Committee on Assassination finding that there was indeed a conspiracy, but burying the evidence for another 50 years. It turns out that the Warren Commission evidence file shows ample evidence of a conspiracy and deep involvement of intelligence agencies and government that did not make it into the predetermined “lone gunman” explanation that became the shameful report.
The attacks of 9/11 are receiving the same treatment – myth creation at the hands of a person – Phillip Zelikow – who specialized in myth creation in his post-graduate studies and went on to shepherd the 9/11 Commission, writing the outline of the findings before deliberations began. Reams of evidence to the contrary are stonewalled in the mainstream media, relegating any alternative explanations to the “conspiracy theory” file, which is the way the media deals with any narrative that strays outside the bounds of government-endorsed stories. Free press my ass!
We retain those and the less dramatic consequences of believing the “markets create wise choices” at our peril. I am not optimistic. I would like to believe that the recent Dana Milbank represents a trend that will see the emergence of a mainstream media movement in the other direction, but more likely, if it continues, it will simply see Dana Milbank fall out of the mainstream category.
WaterGirl
@Libby: voted!
gnomedad
@PeakVT:
That’s an excellent point; I’d love to see a formal study of this idea.
demimondian
@DougJ: You’re confusing overall worker productivity (which did, in fact, increase) with worker-replacing technologies. That’s a common error — @gnomedad makes it in the comment immediately above yours. The period during the Second World War was dominated by production increases — as well as job increases.
Libby
@WaterGirl: Thank you! I’m so grateful you Balloon Juicers are helping.
DougJ
@demimondian:
You wrote
How is that not an increase in productivity?
matoko_chan
@DougJ: biology is always the First Cause. The Third Culture weighs in.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@PeakVT:
This strikes me as a solid idea, but I’m wondering: what can we do about this without stuffing the globalization genie back into the bottle? This question is as good an excuse as any to throw out a link to Dani Rodrik’s idea of the globalization-sovereignty-democracy trilemma:
I have an “impossibility theorem” for the global economy that is like that. It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.
[ETA – the paragraph above should be a blockquote. FYWP]
…an idea whose implications were unpacked in the specific context of Greece and the EU by Yves Smith earlier this year, but which seems highly applicable to the US as well.
demimondian
@DougJ: There are two ways that a car can require fewer *total* workers to build — the factory can increase productivity because they scale up production while employing the same basic production process, or the factory can produce the same number of cars using fewer workers. Both changes increase productivity, but only the latter does so at the expense of the workers at the factory.
Greg
@demimondian Oh you are so, so right. I used to work in the travel industry, loved my job, made good money, had moved up high enough that I had some great perks. And then information technology eliminated not just my job but my industry. If you were a programmer for Expedia or Orbitz or any one of of the hundreds of online ways to bypass your local travel agency, you literally helped to put millions of people world-wide out of work. So this is why I agree with demimondian. If you are helping to create any sort of online product, you are also probably helping to put someone, somewhere out of work.
gnomedad
@demimondian:
No fundamental difference. Post WWII demand on US production skyrocketed. Absent demand increase, increased productivity means few jobs or shorter workweeks.
I’m no labor economist, but it’s a commonplace that IT workers lucky enough to have jobs are overworked. This can’t be good for productivity, so I’ve long believed there are perverse incentives against distributing the workload. This is one way in which I hope universal health insurance will help, by reducing the overhead on hiring.
So what’s your message, anyway, do you proposed to ban IT? I’m convinced we have no chance without it of providing a decent living to the Earth’s population with our declining resources.
gnomedad
@demimondian:
Only if the demand is there.
sunsin
@Shelton Lankford: These conspiracy theories are thick with conceit. Surely an American president couldn’t have been killed by a lone loser with a mail-order rifle! Surely a bunch of ragtag Ay-rabs couldn’t have put together a spectacularly successful terrorist attack! Sorry, my child. Try some explanation that isn’t so intellectually lazy.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@demimondian:
There is a rather shocking chart of total durable goods manufacturing employment in the post which Hale Steward put up recently at 538, showing that the number of workers has been in stair step decline since about 1980, especially so during the post Cold War recessions and jobless recoveries, and as a result we are now employing the same total number of people as we last did a half century ago in the wake of the 1948 recession. Per the other charts in the same article, the manufacturing sector is doing just fine thank you very much and has been steadily growing, it’s just that thanks to 30+ years of productivity gains our industrial sector doesn’t need puny humans to make stuff anymore, at least not in large numbers like we used to.
To tie this theme into the DougJ post (which briefly appeared and then vanished) about the intelligence community and the Priest article: this raises the rather burning question, what are the surplus population going to do with themselves anyway? Some sort of service sector jobs are needed, and the FIRE sector is temporarily (?) in the shop for repairs. What sort of make-work jobs can we come up with in the meantime, that are the 21st cen equivalent of digging a hole with one shovel, and filling it back in with another? Aside from cleaning up oil spills, that is. And the answer is: spying jobs, that’s what!
What’s good for General Panopticon, is good for America.
Corner Stone
@DougJ: I just assumed They didn’t want me to read it.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
We’re all agreed that a corporation exists for the sole purpose of making money for the shareholders, while remaining unconcerned about relationships or the environment in which it operates.
We’re all agreed that the USSC created “corporate” personhood.
A person focused exclusively on self aggrandizement, without any regard for others, is essentially a sociopath.
A corporation is a sociopath with very deep pockets.
demimondian
@gnomedad: I have argued that there *is* a fundamental difference. If you want to change the subject and talk about the collapse of demand, that’s fine — I’m prepared to argue that point, too — but please start by conceding that IT and improved automation have greatly increased the power differential between management and labor, first.
PeakVT
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Rodrik’s trilemma is a good one. However, I wouldn’t attribute the US’s low top marginal tax rate to globalization. Most other industrialized countries have higher marginal rates, but I haven’t seen a mad rush of CEOs relocating from Sweden to the US. (Sometimes people relocate from France to the UK, but probably that has more to do with the wealth tax than a higher marginal rate.)
gnomedad
@demimondian:
We seem to be fighting over labels. Are you saying that the magnitude of IT productivity increase makes it a qualitatively different animal? If you like. I don’t see how that gives us any new insight into alleviating the problems. I think IT is a inevitable step in the human drive to understand the world and develop tools to manipulate it, not some conspiracy developed to shaft workers. I don’t see how we can dispense with it, and, as I’ve argued, it would be suicidal to do so. So denouncing it in toto (as opposed to regulating its use) is a waste of time. We have to find a way to live with it, if we can.
To remake a point, if we double productivity, then, absent a demand increase, we can get rid of half the workforce. They have been replaced by technology. Doesn’t have to be IT. Unskilled labor has been declining in value for a long time. The big difference these days is that the required skills can change radically over the course of a working lifetime.
Now, if, as the singularitarians fear (or celebrate), we reach a point where no humans are required, we will have ourselves a situation.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@PeakVT:
If there is a connection between globalization and US tax policy, I’m guessing that US economic elites are simply not very nationalistic, so they don’t give a fig about the fiscal health of the US govt. As far as they are concerned the US can go to perdition in a pushcart so long as they can still get, as Davis X. Machina so aptly puts it: a police escort for their getaway car. And I think globalization might have something to do with that, not so much in an economic sense as in a cultural sense. The people who are ruling us aren’t really Americans anymore, not culturally at least. They are a bunch of fucking Davosistas.
ETA: and if what I’ve said above is true, then in that sense the American Revolution has come full circle. We are a colony again.
Corner Stone
@gnomedad:
I agree with you, and of course it is. IT is only the latest misnomer for advancement.
Or should we still be starting fires chipping away at a flint rock onto a dry straw bed?
Corner Stone
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Yes. They only loosely “live” here because it’s the center of attention, with a relative level of security that allows mobility.
demimondian
@gnomedad: No, we are *not* arguing over labels. I suggest that information technology is a qualitative change in the nature of production, which permits a dramatic change in corporate hierarchies and production patterns. It eliminates line workers. It eliminates middle managers. It eliminates *expenses*.
chrome agnomen
when i was a child i caught a fleeting glimpse
out of the corner of my eye
i turned to look but it was gone
i cannot put my finger on it now
the child is grown
the dream is gone
and i have become comfortably numb.
the reality has never changed. but the dream has gone. the poor need the dream; the reality is always with them.
Mnemosyne
@demimondian:
The technology revolution was probably as influential on the relationship between workers and employers as the original industrial revolution was. Unfortunately, right now, many people are in the same position that the loom weavers of Britain were in the early 19th century, and it will probably take a while to shake out like it did then. There’s a reason the Luddites are now mocked for trying to prevent industrialization.
demimondian
@Mnemosyne: I agree.
The fact that it’s inevitable doesn’t mean we should pretend that we’re not a part of the harm. We are, and blaming others for changes we ourselves have created is hypocritical.
wilfred
@demimondian:
I think this is spot on, although I’d use the term ‘mode of production’ instead of nature of production. If the premise is true we’d also expect corresponding changes in superstructure. We’re living this right now.
Capitalism is dead. Corporate ‘reform’s are not going to bring back the manufacturing base that once allowed factory workers a decent life in this country.
Mnemosyne
@someguy:
Sorry, but that makes no sense. If there is no such thing as good or bad, then why does a corporation have any responsibility to benefit society? Corporations exist to benefit themselves and that’s all they need. The rest of society has no place to demand they do anything different since any harm the corporation does isn’t quantifiable as “good” or “bad,” just “good for the corporation” or “bad for the corporation.”
Ecks
@mclaren:
Well, gotta say that THIS is how you criticize Obama from the left. For that demonstration, well done :)
Mnemosyne
@Ecks:
Actually, she posted that because the leftier-than-thou mclaren can’t bear to see anyone criticize corporations, so she has to try and distract us from the topic at hand by telling us that, sure, it was bad for Union Carbide to kill 15,000 people at Bhopal, but the government is worse, so look over there instead!
mclaren loooooves corporations and wants the big bad government off their backs.
Wile E. Quixote
@Shelton Lankford:
Oh joy, some old fart wanking about Kennedy being assassinated. Here’s a news flash Shelton, the best thing that JFK ever did for civil rights was to go on a limousine ride in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Kennedy didn’t give a fuck about civil rights, at best it was a second tier issue for him, it was LBJ who did all of the heavy lifting on civil rights and got Titles II, IV and V passed.
Oh, and do you think that Kennedy would have pushed for the Great Society? Well if you do then you’ve bought into a line of bullshit. Kennedy didn’t care about that issue either, that was LBJ’s baby. Kennedy was a dangerous, lying militarist. He lied about the missile gap in 1960 to win the election and it was his dangerous brinksmanship with the Soviet Union that almost started World War III in October of 1962.
Indeed, if Johnson had been smart enough to fire all of Kennedy’s idiot advisors, McNamara, Rusk and the rest of those fucks, and stay out of Vietnam he would have won a second term and would be regarded today as one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century.
If Kennedy hadn’t gone on that limousine ride in Dallas we still would have gotten involved in Vietnam, and we wouldn’t have had the Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have been watered down and emasculated just like the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Wile E. Quixote
@sunsin:
Don’t worry, I’m sure that Shelton will come back and tell us that the Jews are behind it all.
If anyone wants to read a good book about conspiracy theories and the psychology of the stupid and pathetic fucks like Shelton who buy into them I highly recommend David Aaronovich’s Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. The chapter on Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the DaVinci Code entitled “Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Holy Shit” is worth the price of the book, but the chapter on the 9/11 conspiracy theory as well as an acute dissection of the mindset of consipiracists such as Shelton are also excellent. Of course Shelton is going to come back and tell us that we’re either
easily duped sheeple who can’t handle the truth
or
agents of the conspiracy
for not drinking the tasty conpiracist Kool-Aid.
Ecks
@Mnemosyne: All of which may be so, but there was a debate the other day about “is it ok to criticize Obama”, with the (just about) consensus being that it was fine so long as it was based on lefty frames, not right ones.
This was a good solid left-framed bashing. Whether it was more than a fig leaf and an “oh look over there, its Elvis!” in the context of the present debate is a whole other issue :)
Mnemosyne
@Ecks:
Only if you think left-framed bashing should be couched as “the government’s not allowed to criticize corporations for doing bad things since they’re doing bad things, too!”
Read it again. mclaren uses lots of pretty catchphrases and impressive-looking links, but there’s really no there there.
Wile E. Quixote
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I can’t be the only person who wishes for a massive asteroid strike on Davos during the WEF. An iron asteroid, 100 meters in diameter and traveling at 17 kilometers per second would do the trick.
General Stuck
@Mnemosyne:
Mclaren?
[[[MCLARiiiiiiiiiiiiiN]]]!
Corner Stone
@Ecks:
Friend, you are wasting your time trying to tell Mnemosyne that such a thing even exists.
I hope you brought a chisel and a double jack because you’re going to need them.
General Stuck
@Ecks:
Facts have consequences.
bago
@Greg: Speaking as a former programmer at Expedia, that is literally true. As engineers and creators of tomorrow, our goal is to use our enslaved machines to liberate people from doing formulaic and repetitive work, by tasking it to a bunch of silicon running a billion times faster than you.
The takeaway lesson is to not try and compete with an algorithmic execution engine running at the speed of light. Be creative.
Office, Word, and Excel killed lots of middle management jobs. That was the point. Why spend 3 weeks on an analysis you can make in your office in 3 minutes?
Corner Stone
@bago:
In a larger context, we want to push the most tedious and repetitive work down to the lowest cost jurisdiction.
If that’s sending digital dictation to a word processing unit in the Phillipines (instead of having an American based secretary do it), or legal templates being created offshore and uploaded to a website, the purpose is to free the more skilled individual to handle complex work.
In the auto business that’s obviously a robotic solution for repetitive welds, etc.
The problem becomes when the more skilled individual doesn’t actually have any more complex work to do.
Ecks
Yeah, freeing us up from repetitive stuff is great, but at some point there’s a whole lot of people that need to get paid so they can put food on their table. And what we don’t seem to have thought through enough is that if we automate a lot of the stuff they WERE getting paid for, then what is their new job supposed to be. And don’t say “creative things” because how many creative jobs are out there? You might be able to record pretty good music, but probably not better than U2, so everyone will download their songs not yours. You might be able to write books, but better than Stephen King? You might be able to write some good code, but better than Google?
Repetitive might not have been fun, but at least it paid bills.
Aredubya
@mclaren: Absolutely agreed that corporate evils have been evil for centuries. I was simply pointing out that the concept that the recent past marked some corporate panacea is a bunch of bullshit. Corporations, by their nature, are founded to perform actions that a person or people would be scorned for doing. Some protections are certainly warranted (try an idea in the market and it doesn’t work out? that shouldn’t put you in the poorhouse automatically), but the heavy lobbying done by industries allow the biggest to be the baddest. That should be undone. Congress won’t undo it unless they no longer have to rely on corporate cash to run for office. Til then, we’re under their collective yoke.
Shelton Lankford
@sunsin:
And my statement was thick with conceit? Could you possibly cram any more ignorance into a single paragraph? Maybe with Wile E’s help.
You would learn more by examining the evidence than examining my mindset, but that is not the point, is it?
May I suggest James Douglas “JFK and the Unspeakable” , anything recent by David Ray Griffin, and Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, or do you really think steel-framed buildings fall down out of sympathy for their neighbors? Really?
Triassic Sands
@Rick Massimo:
I agree. Another thing that has changed is the meaning of “lay offs” and “laid off.” When I was a kid, I lived several miles from what was then (I think) the largest Ford assembly plant in the US. Lay offs were common, but they were always temporary, following the business cycle. Today, the expression “laid off” is used in cases where the accurate term is “terminated,” because the people who lose jobs aren’t simply waiting a few weeks or months for business to pick so they can return to the exact same position. Now, people get “laid off” and they have to find new jobs, often in a new field and only after retraining. Older workers may be looking at permanent unemployment and forced retirement.
@Corner Stone:
I agree with Ecks.
Don’t forget that there are also still many relatively unskilled workers who aren’t going to benefit from retraining who need to work in advanced economies. They don’t simply disappear or get college degrees because there is cheap labor in the Philippines and China. Advanced economies are morally obligated to either provide work for these people or offer them assistance without stigmatizing them as parasites. The alternatives for such people are bleak indeed. They can become homeless (the American solution) or resort to crime (also very American). Drug and alcohol abuse fit in nicely as well.
If a society denies its moral obligation, which is also a pragmatic obligation, then it should expect those who it ignores to do whatever is necessary to survive. That’s likely to be very bad for the society.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Mnemosyne is a sociopathic compulsive pathological liar, so of course she’s lying. As usual.
What we need to do is shut down a lot of corporations and nationalize most of the rest. Those corporations that the public permits to stay in business should be regulated strictly with death penalty punishment for corporate fraud and an excess profits tax.
Ooohhhh, sounds so-shul-ist, doesn’t it? Excess profits tax! Oooohhh! Communism! So-shul-ism!
In fact, the Eisenhower administration levied an excess profits tax on corporations. We need to go back to it. We also need to eliminate capital gains as a separate classification of income –make it plain income, and tax itat a top rate of 91%, the way Eisenhower did.
Moving on to more disproof of Mnemosyne’s lies, here are the corporations we need to eliminate. Shut ’em down. End them. Turn ’em into public corporations or crowdsource ’em or just ban ’em entirely by law:
[1] Bond rating agencies. Fuck ’em. Crowdsource bond ratings. Pay nothing. Let the general population rate bonds, use a reputation system like online forums use.
[2] Banks. Shut ’em all down and turn ’em into credit unions. End for-profit banking in America. Rip the profit out. Get rid of it. Credit unions only, no for-profit banks allowed in America.
[3] Health insurance companies and for-profit hospitals. Shut ’em all down, turn ’em into public option nationalized systems. No more profit. Rip profit out of the medical system.
[4] For profit private colleges. Zero profit, rip the profit out of these institutions. People who don’t like that can go pay a fortune to get educated in Switzerland or Germany, no more money-making colleges in America.
[5] CEOs. Get rid of ’em all. Crowdsource their work. Corporate returns will decline but we’ll get less corporate bankruptcies and a lot less fraud.
So much for Mnemosyne’s lies. As you can see, none of this involves a “love of corporations.” She’s lying, she always lies, everything out of her mouth is a lie.
As to her post above in which she blames the victim for impoverishing the middle class — once again Mnemosyne is lying when she says:
That’s retarded. It’s not just a lie, it’s a stupid and ignorant lie. Managment has always decided that employees are expendable and fungible. The perfect example? In the 1820s, American coal mine owners used 12-year-old girls to haul carts of coal out of mines until the girls dropped dead from exhaustion.
Horses cost money, but 12-year-old girls could be paid a pittance –and when they died of overwork, the mine owners just hired another 12-year-old girl to haul coal out of the mines. Much cheaper than buying a horse.
Mnemosyne will now scream that I’m defending coal mine owners in the 1820s, and she’ll be lying, as usual, because that’s what she does — she lies all the time, every time, lie after lie after lie after lie. Her mentor Karl Rove taught her well. Unfortunately, lying is all she knows how to do.
The proof that Mnemosyne is lying is atrocities like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Managers have always treated American workers as expendable pieces of human garbage.
That changed when American workers started to occupy factories and shut down whole businesses. In the 1930s when American workers fought “the battle where the bulls ran” and occupied a Ford plant and shot model A hinges with slingshots and knocked down cops who tried to take back the factory, that got the attention of management.
The reason why workers could unionize in the 1930s and 1940s is the U.S. government stopped fighting unions…for a few years. Then Reagan came in and ramped up the government attacks on unions, starting when he fired the PATCO workers.
If the U.S. government enforced laws prohibited anti-union activity, as for example by fining Wal*Mart, say, a billion dollars each time Wal*Mart shuts down a store when it tries to unionize, you’d see a goddamn huge resurgence in unionization and a huge increase in the wages of the U.S. middle class.
Mnemosyne is telling the lie that managers somehow became evil starting in the 1980s, and we need better slaveowners, slaveowners who will treat their slaves nicely and be kind and gentle with ’em. That’s a lie. Corporate managers were always evil, starting in the late 1700s. The problem is that starting in the 1980s corporations stopped passing on the profits from increased productivity to American workers.
You end that by a combination of worker direct action and the U.S. government stopping fighting unions and stopping doing everything it can to make unionization illegal. U.S. tax policy, including a huge excess profits tax on corporations and confiscatory taxes on CEOs who make more than say a million or two per year, will also help.
We now return to Mnemosyne’s regularly scheduled lies about how I allegedly “love corporations.”
Corner Stone
@mclaren:
I confess I’m usually baffled how Mnemosyne constructs her ridiculously misguided and pedantic posts but even I didn’t know where she was pulling the “mclaren loves corporations and wants to protect them” maneuver came from.
mclaren
Ecks and Corner Stone are making excellent point, but the problem here is not just that
That’s an excellent point and totally true —most people in America do not go to college. Only 40% of the U.S. population ever goes to college at all, and only 25% of the adult population ever graduates with a full 4-year degree. The other 15% either drop out after a couple of years, or they get a 2-year A.A. or A.S. degree.
Moreover, many people in America are not temperamentally or intellectually suited to college. By this I don’t mean that “many Americans are stupid,” I mean that there are 7 different kinds of intelligence, as Martin Gardner has pointed out — physical intelligence, verbal intelligence, mathematical intelligence, emotional intelligence, and so on. Some people learn very well by watching abstract diagrams on a chalkboard and listening to a professor drone on using words. But many people can only learn something by hands-on experience, and many other people need to work with someone else in an apprenticeship-type relationship to learn something, while yet other people only learn well from pure math, and so on.
College completely flushes out the people who don’t learn well using only abstract verbal modes. College wastes vasts amounts of our intellectual resources by sieving students according to his ridiculously narrow criterion of “only people who excel at digesting diagrams and equations and vomiting out words and equations will graduate.” Moreover, the people who excel at college courses and get stellar grades tend not to be the people who succeed in the real world. Craig Venter, the guy who sequenced the human genome, was terrible in college but she shone in the lab. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, Woz and Steve Jobs never went into college. People who excel at real-world tasks are often horribly bad at doing the kinds of abstract verbal things college professors reward and glorify.
As a result, often the people who get the best grades in college turn out to be clueless and inept in the real world. Paul Wolfowitz had a PhD but he was a fucking moron. Condoleeza Rice blew the top out of the academic curve but she couldn’t find her butt with both hands in a hall of mirrors. Time and time again, you see people with incredible GPAs and academic honors who blunder and fumble and fail completely at real world tasks — as for instance the Nobel laureate economists Merton and Scholes, who screwed the pooch so badly with their financial incompetence that they bankrupted Long Term Capital Management hudge fund in 1997 and nearly took down the entire world economy. (1997 was a warm-up for the global financial meltdown of 2008.)
So my point here is that most of the U.S. population is not suited for college, never has been, never will be, and not because of intelligence. Historically, society has recognized this and made available decent jobs at a living wage for the vast majority of people who choose not to go to college.
Right now, the attitude seems to be among the elite that “only college grads should be able to earn a living wage.” That model of society isn’t sustainable, because then you get Mexico with a tiny sliver of the superwealthy on top and everyone else mired in grinding poverty. This hurts everyone. A society like that won’t be able to fund great colleges or first-rate science — ask yourself: how many Jobs & Wozniaks does Mexico have? How much world-class science does Mexico do? How many great tech companies get started in garages in Mexico?
Without new tech, productivity collapses. But you need a vibrant middle class to create the kind of technology and science that leads to new economic breakthroughs. Most of the hot tech in the last 40 years did notcome from colleges –it came from places like Steve Jobs’ garage.
So telling Americans “if you don’t go tocollege, you’re shite and you deserve to starve” is not only cruel, it’s stupid and leads to a collapsing society with no new tech. Because the people who created the great new tech over the last 40 years for the most part didn’t go to college, and created that tech in their garages. Get rid of the middle class and you get rid of that, and your society degenerates and collapses economically.
So this horseshit of “only the top 25% will be able to make a decent living because they went to college” is a recipe for total collapse and economic disaster in America.
But it’s even worse than that.
The internet and computers are now allowing American managers to outsource and offshore most of the white-collar knowledge work.
Think about it. Programmers, engineers, graphic designers, editors, proofreaders, molecular biologists, they’re all being massive offshored to Chinese PhDs and Indian PhDs. American white collar workers can’t compete with Chinese PhDs who are eager to work for $5 an hour.
So not only are the bottom 75% of American workers getting screwed, the top 25% are also getting screwed.
This is totally unsustainable. Increasingly, there’s no work at either end of the spectrum in America. The low-wage manufacturing jobs have gotten outsourced, but the high-wage knowledge work is also being outsourced.
So America has nothing left but the hands-on service work grunt jobs like dog grooming and grocery bagging.
Explain to me how America maintains a first-world standard of living when our entire population does nothing but dog grooming and grocery bagging.
LanceThruster
I remember the fake ad from either “Groove Tube” of “Kentucky Fried Movie” where the corporate announcer spoke about the despoiling of nature as they showed idyllic and pastoral scenes. Finally, at the end of the litany of all the things the company was doing to foul the environment, they said that in response they “spent 10 million dollars…to make this commercial.”
Corporations were largely dragged kicking and screaming to be good corporate neighbors (or appear to be), but pretend they’ve always been that way.