8. Corporations Just Can’t Help Themselves
A giant suckering sound can be heard in the land. It’s more dangerous than the giant sucking sound Ross Perot heard in 1992. It’s the sound of us being suckered into collaborating in an economy that’s not run “for the people,” and that sucks for most “of the people.” Sadly, we’re seeing the sound spirit of enterprise being replaced by the unsound spirit of exploitation.
Politicians and pundits eagerly examine economic data to determine if we’re heading for recovery, or recession or depression. But America no longer has an economy that is well described by a single set of aggregate statistics, and a key question is recession or recovery for whom? A substantial majority of the American people, the slumpen masses, have been, in effect, in recession, or at least stagnation, for decades, even as the aggregate statistics have shown growth. Ours is now a tale of two economies. The wages of 80% of workers have not increased in real terms in 20 years. In the same period, worker productivity has essentially doubled.
This new profit un-sharing economy has been the work of psychopaths. Though most of us have never met a psychopath, the majority of us work for them. I don't mean that most bosses or CEOs are psychopaths but that, as William Deresiewicz pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, if corporations are people, it’s a legitimate question to ask what kind of people they are. The “answer,” Deresiewicz wrote, “was precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.” For the sake of convenience, let’s call such organizations psycho-corps.
Unbridled psycho-corps work in global-scale system that drives many decent people into the business of banal badness. Hannah Arendt coined the expression “the banality of evil” to describe how millions of ordinary, not intentionally evil Germans did the bidding of their Nazi bosses, mostly motivated by the need to feed their families and to secure their pensions. Similar pressures are at work in under-regulated capitalism (though psycho-corps, unlike the Nazis, now make fewer pension promises). With the ever present excuse of responsibility to shareholders and a duty to maximize profits, corporations get decent people to do the work of psychopaths: for example, by paying bonuses to someone in your management chain to figure out how not to share profits with you, or to figure out how to avoid bearing the costs of pollution; or by figuring out how to get a free ride by avoiding corporate taxes; or to lobby for subsidies that deplete the public purse for private profit.
American capitalism used to be run more inclusively. Now, most if not all of the benefits of productivity gains go to the “job creators” and not the job doers. We’re told that this is just the way global capitalism works now. But modern Germany again can provide a useful example, and in this case a happier one. Somehow, the universal laws of globalization work differently there. Somehow, their economy has been managed to avoid creating similar inequalities, they don’t have the same slumpen masses, or the same gargantuan gap growing between workers and the roaring away rampant uber-rich elite (the German ratio of CEO to worker pay is 11 to 1, compared to over 200 to 1 in the U.S.). Seems the laws of economic globalization are not like the laws of gravity, which are the same in Germany.
The final triumph of the psycho-corps is to turn government into business by other means: to get political leaders, who used to govern jurisdictions “for the people,” whose job it was to regulate and define market limits, to instead compete against other jurisdictions to create an ever more “business-friendly” environment. One that’s usually less friendly to every other part of society, especially the “public good” the Founders’ fought to enable and protect. “Business-friendly” often isn’t even friendly to the infrastructure businesses themselves need.
The adage that “it’s the economy, stupid” has to be modified. It’s not just the economy, it’s what you use the economy for. And we are stupid if we don’t corral the economy and its powerful players into serving the public good. They aren’t likely to volunteer from the goodness of their hearts. Especially as those hearts, good or bad, are enmeshed in a machinery that pressgangs them into psychopathic exploitation. Unrelenting pressure to maximize profits can push many markets into a winner-is-the-sinner race to the bottom. And most of us are collaborators in this global no-one’s-to-blame game.
Politicians and pundits eagerly examine economic data to determine if we’re heading for recovery, or recession or depression. But America no longer has an economy that is well described by a single set of aggregate statistics, and a key question is recession or recovery for whom? A substantial majority of the American people, the slumpen masses, have been, in effect, in recession, or at least stagnation, for decades, even as the aggregate statistics have shown growth. Ours is now a tale of two economies. The wages of 80% of workers have not increased in real terms in 20 years. In the same period, worker productivity has essentially doubled.
This new profit un-sharing economy has been the work of psychopaths. Though most of us have never met a psychopath, the majority of us work for them. I don't mean that most bosses or CEOs are psychopaths but that, as William Deresiewicz pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, if corporations are people, it’s a legitimate question to ask what kind of people they are. The “answer,” Deresiewicz wrote, “was precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.” For the sake of convenience, let’s call such organizations psycho-corps.
Unbridled psycho-corps work in global-scale system that drives many decent people into the business of banal badness. Hannah Arendt coined the expression “the banality of evil” to describe how millions of ordinary, not intentionally evil Germans did the bidding of their Nazi bosses, mostly motivated by the need to feed their families and to secure their pensions. Similar pressures are at work in under-regulated capitalism (though psycho-corps, unlike the Nazis, now make fewer pension promises). With the ever present excuse of responsibility to shareholders and a duty to maximize profits, corporations get decent people to do the work of psychopaths: for example, by paying bonuses to someone in your management chain to figure out how not to share profits with you, or to figure out how to avoid bearing the costs of pollution; or by figuring out how to get a free ride by avoiding corporate taxes; or to lobby for subsidies that deplete the public purse for private profit.
American capitalism used to be run more inclusively. Now, most if not all of the benefits of productivity gains go to the “job creators” and not the job doers. We’re told that this is just the way global capitalism works now. But modern Germany again can provide a useful example, and in this case a happier one. Somehow, the universal laws of globalization work differently there. Somehow, their economy has been managed to avoid creating similar inequalities, they don’t have the same slumpen masses, or the same gargantuan gap growing between workers and the roaring away rampant uber-rich elite (the German ratio of CEO to worker pay is 11 to 1, compared to over 200 to 1 in the U.S.). Seems the laws of economic globalization are not like the laws of gravity, which are the same in Germany.
The final triumph of the psycho-corps is to turn government into business by other means: to get political leaders, who used to govern jurisdictions “for the people,” whose job it was to regulate and define market limits, to instead compete against other jurisdictions to create an ever more “business-friendly” environment. One that’s usually less friendly to every other part of society, especially the “public good” the Founders’ fought to enable and protect. “Business-friendly” often isn’t even friendly to the infrastructure businesses themselves need.
The adage that “it’s the economy, stupid” has to be modified. It’s not just the economy, it’s what you use the economy for. And we are stupid if we don’t corral the economy and its powerful players into serving the public good. They aren’t likely to volunteer from the goodness of their hearts. Especially as those hearts, good or bad, are enmeshed in a machinery that pressgangs them into psychopathic exploitation. Unrelenting pressure to maximize profits can push many markets into a winner-is-the-sinner race to the bottom. And most of us are collaborators in this global no-one’s-to-blame game.