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CounterPunch
September
21, 2002
American
Journal
An Entire Class
of Thieves
Was
it all the fault of Ayn Rand, of Carter and Kennedy, of the Chicago
School, of Hollywood, of God's Demise?
by
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
When the young basketball star Len Bias died of
a cocaine overdose back in 1986 Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan
raced each other to show the world who could punish the poor
quickest and hardest. The White House urged the DEA to take ABC
News along to raids on crack houses in South Central LA. O'Neill
drove through the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, with its twenty-nine new
mandatory-minimum sentences, and the 100-to-1 disparity in sentencing
for crack/powder cocaine dealers. We were on our way to lockup
time for the poor, mostly young blacks and Hispanics. At present
rates, the chances of a black man being behind bars sometime
in his life are one in four.
All through the 1980s and '90s professorial
mountebanks like James Q. Wilson, John DiIulio and Charles Murray
grew sleek from bestsellers about the criminal, probably innate
propensities of the "underclass," about the pathology
of poverty, the teen predators, the collapse of morals, the irresponsibility
of teen moms.
Now, there was indeed a vast criminal
class coming to full vicious potential in the 1990s: a group
utterly vacant of the most elementary instincts of social propriety,
devoid of moral fiber, selfish to an almost unfathomable degree.
The class comes in the form of our corporate elite.
Given a green light in the late 1970s
by the deregulatory binge urged by corporate-funded think tanks
and launched legislatively by Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, by
the 1990s America's corporate leadership had evolved a simple
strategy for criminal self-enrichment.
Step one: lie about your performance,
in a manner calculated to deceive investors. This was engineered
by the production of a "pro forma" balance sheet freighted
with accounting chicanery of every stripe and hue, willingly
supplied by Arthur Andersen and others. Losses were labeled "capital
expenditures"; losing assets were "sold" to co-conspirators
in the large banks for the relevant accounting period. Later,
using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, slightly more
realistic balance sheets would be presented to the SEC and the
IRS.
Flaunting the "pro forma" numbers,
corporations would issue more stock, borrow more money from some
co-conspiratorial bank, buy back the stock for the chief executives,
who would further inflate its value by dint of bogus accountancy,
sell the stock to the chumps and bail out with their millions
before the roof fell in, leaving pension funds like CalPERS holding
the bag. The fortunes amassed by President Bush and Vice President
Cheney are vivid illustrations of the technique.
The scale of looting? Prodigious. This
orgy of thievery, without parallel in the history of capitalism,
was condoned and abetted year after year by the archbishop of
our economy, Alan Greenspan, a man with a finely honed sense
of distinction between the scale of reproof merited by the very
rich and those less powerful. When Ron Carey led the Teamsters
to victory in 1997, Greenspan rushed to denounce the "inflationary"
potential of modestly improved wage packets. Even though declared
innocent by a jury of his peers, Carey was forbidden ever to
run in a union election again.
Where are the sermons from Greenspan
about the inflationary potential of stock-option fortunes lofted
on the hot air of crooked accountancy and kindred conspiracies?
Let someone die in gangbanger crossfire
on a slum corner, and William Bennett indicts an entire generation,
an entire race. Where are the sermons from Bennett, Murray and
the Sunday Show moralists about the CEOs scuttling off with their
swag, leaving their employees to founder amid wrecked pensions
and destroyed prospects? A street kid in South Central is in
the computer by the time he's 10. No "criminal propensity"
profiles for grads of the Wharton or Harvard business schools.
You have to go back to Marx and Balzac
to get a truly vivid sense of the rich as a criminal elite. But
these giants did bequeath a tradition of joyful dissection of
the morals and ethics of the rich, carried on by Veblen, Moody,
Wright Mills, Domhoff, Lundberg and others. But by the mid-1960s
disruptive political science was not a paying proposition if
you were aiming for tenure. A student studying Mills would be
working nights at the soda fountain while the kid flourishing
Robert Dahl and writing rubbish about pluralism would get the
grad fellowship.
Back in the 1950s we were reading stuff
about the moral vacuum in affluent suburbia by people like Vance
Packard and David Riesman. I guess inner loneliness soon became
inner joy. There was nothing wrong about putting one's boot on
a colleague's neck and cashing in. Where are the books now about
these forcing grounds for the great corporate criminal cohort
of the 1990s, coming of age in the Reagan years?
In fact, it's nearly impossible to locate
books that examine the class of corporate executives through
the lens of cool, scientific contempt. As Charles Derber, professor
of sociology at Boston College, explains to our colleague William
Johnson, much of the current writing on CEO culture is published
in magazines like Fortune or BusinessWeek. And though there are
a few authors-like Robert Monks-who focus their attention on
executive culture, nowhere will you find empirical studies on
the sociobiological roots of the criminal tendencies of the executive
class.
Why? The rich bought out the opposition.
Back in the mists of antiquity, you had communists and socialists
and populists who'd read Marx and who had a pretty fair notion
of what the rich were up to. Even Democrats had a grasp of the
true situation. Then came the witch hunts and the buyouts, hand
in hand. Result, an Enron exec could come to maturity without
ever once hearing an admonitory word about it being wrong to
lie, cheat and steal, sell out your co-workers, defraud your
customers.
The finest schools in America produced
a criminal elite that stole the store in less than a decade.
Was it all the fault of Ayn Rand, of Carter and Kennedy, of the
Chicago School, of Hollywood, of God's demise? You'd think there's
at least a Time cover in it.
Today's Features
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- Hunting Commie Perverts:
The Scarlet Professor
- DC's Best Political
Mind; DC's Most Dangerous Man;
- Dershowitz the Torturer:
Guess Why He Wants Clean Needles;
- Lese Majeste: That's
Against the Law Too;
- The Greatest Endorsement
AAA Will Ever Get;
- Merle Haggard on Civil
Liberties;
- Dullness Hailed: The Press on the Defeat of McKinney,
Traficant and Barr;
- National Review Puffs
into Town.
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September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun
of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
September
17, 2002
Adam Federman
All
That Matters is Oil
Linda S.
Heard
Paranoid
Americans
Hussein Ibish
The Incident
at Shoney's
Francis Boyle
Is Bush's
War Illegal?
Let Us Count the Ways
Heidi Lypps
Bush's
Crackdown on
Medical Marijuana
Riad Z. Abdelkarim,
MD
Why
Do They Hate Us?
September
16, 2002
Wayne Madsen
The Shoney's
Snoop
America's Horst Wessel
Tariq Ali
Debating
Daniel Pipes
on Bush's Wars
Ahmad Faruqui
American
Primacy at Bay
Kurt Leege
Voices
for Peace
M. Shahid
Alam
A New Theology
of Power
Robert Fisk
Bush's War
Dossier:
Blindness, Hypocrisy & Lies
Dave Randall
Mad, Mad World:
J. Edgar Hoover's Obsession with Mad Magazine
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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By
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
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Read
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
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Whiteout:
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Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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