January 21, 2012 06:23 PM UTC

The Wrong Question

• 0 Comments
• by: JO

Thanks, and hats off, to OWS for bringing “concentration of wealth” front and center in time for the 2012 elections.

But, this seems to me to be the wrong question to be addressing. More to the point is the governance of corporations.

For well over a century, since the explosion of the second stage of the Industrial Revolution after the Civil War, corporations have grown up alongside government to become an alternative form of governance. Their influence affects not just their direct employees, but the many people who depend on the earnings of their employees–store owners and clerks alike,  tellers at the local bank, anyone dependent on advertising … the list is virtually endless.

Towns, counties, states compete for their favors, offering tax exemptions, state funds to build roads and schools for their employees, whatever it takes to persuade corporate governors to locate a new plant here pretty please, so that citizens can earn a living.

For at least a generation, decisions by corporate managers have changed the American economic landscape. In the 1980s GM’s management made cost-cutting decisions that opened a yawning niche to high-quality, well engineered products from Japan. Corporate clothing manufacturers have successively moved manufacturing from New England to the American South to Latin America or Southeast Asia, all in the name of cutting costs and improving profits. Other manufacturers have introduced automation that greatly improves efficiency and requires fewer people to manufacture at the same rate. (It’s a myth that American manufacturing has all moved to Asia; the value of American manufacturing today is higher than ever, but modern plants use robotics in lieu of people, especially for lower level, repetitive work.) The point here, and it cannot be repeated often enough, is that businesses take decisions to benefit their owners, not their society, not citizens of the geographically-constrained entities like towns, states, or nations, not their employees responsible for their success. Their owners and only their owners. And that is why business expertise or experience is not a qualification for public office; au contraire.

Apologists for the system argue that efficiency is good, but good for whom? For owners of corporate shares, the 1%, sure. But the path to more comfortable lives, to the Middle Class (RIP), is increasingly shut off. We know exactly who is responsible for this shift, their names are regularly published in lists of corporate CEOs. But we the people have no vote in the boardrooms where decisions that affect thousands, or tens of thousands, of citizens are debated, analyzed, and made every day. For many, those decisions have a far more meaningful impact on their lives than anything the city council or state legislature could possibly do.

This year, we are witnessing a frontal assault on the only other source of real influence that isn’t beholden to corporations — the federal government. (Of course, I concede without argument that it’s debatable how much “independent” decison-making the federales still exercise, but it’s apparently too much to suit the tastes of hard-core Republicans, so I’ll take their campaign propaganda as proof that there’s at least some remaining influence subject to popular vote.) The conflict isn’t new, by any means, but Mitt Romney in particular represents the most naked, undisguised representative of corporate power against democratic government power in our lifetime.

The decisions not to hire workers, or to loan money to small business, are not made in the White House. Those decisions are made in corporate boardrooms dominated by overpaid executives who maneuvered to appoint friendly faces to join them on the board of directors. Superinflated CEO salaries notwithstanding, much of the “wealth” resides in the country club, where the stockholders are glad they don’t have to interrupt their string of martinis in order to exercise business judgment; that’s what they pay the CEO to do, and if it’s expensive, well, as long as the dividends keep coming, that’s okay. Witness Mitt Romney, who has admitted that his income derives from investments made long ago, thereby enabling him to spend years and years running for another office after governor of Massachusetts, and to tell voters that he, too, is “unemployed.”

It is this unrestrained power in the hands of a relatively tiny number of corporate fuhrers that should be at the center of the election, before their victory is complete.