TYSON HAS LONG BEEN IDENTIFED WITH THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR OBVIOUS REASONS.
Tyson Foods Faces Boycott After Firing 1,200 Americans, ‘Would Like to Employ’ 42,000 Migrants - AND BIDEN - MAYORKAS - SCHUMER HAVE USHERED OVER THE BORDER 15 MILLION TO PICK FROM.
And
it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as
Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as
Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant
ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER
The Rise of Wall Street Thievery
How corporations and their apologists blew up the New
Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
America
has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and
trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has
increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told
Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had
“very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the
highs registered during the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has happened to make us sour
on the American corporation. What was once a stable source of long-term employment and at
least a modicum of paternalistic benefits has become an unstable, predatory
engine of inequality. Exactly what went
wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an influential 1956
book on the corporate culture and management of that era. Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia
journalism professor (as well as a Washington
Monthly contributing editor), details the development of the
“Organization” style through the career of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued convincingly that despite most of the
nation’s capital being represented by the biggest 200 or so corporations, the
ostensible owners of these firms—that is, their shareholders—had little to no
influence on their daily operations. Control resided instead with corporate
managers and executives.
Transaction
Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle was
alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it
generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of
economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken
up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on
behalf of the citizenry.
Berle exerted
major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get his way
every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act,
an effort to directly control corporate prices and production, which mostly
flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR
adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that
opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures.
The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up
of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major
focus; on the other, corporations were expected to play a major role delivering
basic public goods like health insurance and pensions.
Lemann then
turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New
Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen
and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided major funding
for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman,
who famously wrote an article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is
to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named
Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared
the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and
his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that
only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis
of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly
destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal
regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the
greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They
were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they
supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this
“principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on
irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and
share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To
Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more active,
powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best
part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington policymaking
and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much to criticize
about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative blindness to
racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable
level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of
citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit
neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was
intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he
writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations
that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning
democratic political economy.
Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it
was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains
of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their
factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even
destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the
hundreds of thousands.
And it
all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann
points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt
had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a
staggering white-collar crime spree.
Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off
financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the
General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago
Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little
success. “What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had
been made by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up
naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the book, however, Lemann
starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in
the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control
over their companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging
their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out
to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the
Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last
few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the
journalism industry as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to
serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.
In his final
chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious
system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common good. It
refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather than
concentrates, economic and political power.”
This is a
peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which is
full to bursting with profoundly bad
people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions
for their own private profit. In his
day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people who “had begun to
consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own
affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also declared, “We know now
that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by
organized mob.”
If
concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a
poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the
social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill
and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace
on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the
entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And
even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out,
especially African Americans.
Lemann
writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress
welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation
among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went
much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do
considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political
polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings.
Conversely,
for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of
vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently
calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,”
which is how far families are below the poverty line before government
transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.)
Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though
it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist
social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are
typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still,
Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive
history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written
illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives
of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper is a national
correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the
New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from
2012 to 2014.
Michael Bloomberg Has Spent over $155 Million on Political Advertising
1:52
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg (D) spent over $155 million on political advertising in 2019 — millions more than billionaire rival Tom Steyer (D), according to data from Advertising Analytics.
New York City’s former mayor made waves last year after making a late entrance into the 2020 race and launching a multimillion-dollar ad blitz. According to Advertising Analytics data, Bloomberg, who is self-funding his campaign, has spent over $155 million on political advertising, the vast majority of which ($136.8 million) went toward “broadcast television time.” He spent $7.7 on cable advertising and another $10.8 million on digital ads, MSN reported.
No other candidate in the presidential field comes close, although Bloomberg and Steyer have spent over $200 million on political advertising combined.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who raised a massive $34.5 million in the fourth quarter, has reportedly spent $19.3 million on political advertising.
Despite millions spent, a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released in December showed that the majority of registered voters did not find Bloomberg’s ads convincing:
Bloomberg is taking a different approach than his political opponents, focusing on Super Tuesday states rather than the first four: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.
The current RealClearPolitics average shows the presidential hopeful in fifth place with 4.8 percent support nationally.