|
July 16, 2002
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al-Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti-Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
Cuba
Ralph Nader
The Secret
World of Banking
Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
July 12, 2002
Sean Donahue
The Other
Harken Energy Scandal: Oil, Death Squads
and Colombia
Walt Brasch
Sin Tax
Scam
"Psst. Cigarettes. A Buck Each."
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
July 10, 2002
CounterPunch Wire
Third Party
Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
July
16, 2002
Faith-based
Capitalism's Plunge
into the Market Abyss
by Pierre Tristam
Five years ago Bill Clinton announced that he
was ending welfare as we knew it. Last week George W. Bush could
have commemorated the occasion in his Wall Street speech by proposing
to end capitalism as we know it the brand of capitalism that's
wrecking more lives and families than welfare ever did, the brand
whose cheats have been more obscene, more numerous and more criminal
than "welfare queens" ever were, the brand that turned
corporate directors into crooked dealers and shareholders into
their willing addicts so long as the fix was in.
But the presidency is itself one of those
brands, and George W. Bush only its most recent logo. Bush did
not go to Wall Street to end anything. He went there to profess
his "faith" in the system, faith generally being this
president's solution to anything challenging when B-52s won't
do. But faith-based capitalism is what got us into this circle
of hell in the first place.
At some point in the late 1980s the market
stopped being a bet and became a religion. The crash of 1987
probably did it, when that single-day 22 percent drop of the
Dow, which should have screamed recession, turned instead into
a sling shot to another bull market. Big investors realized they
could do on Wall Street what Wal Mart does on Main Street: Muscle
in, use deep pockets to ride out losses, then clean up when the
little guys are wiped out. Losses become the necessary seed for
fatter shareholder profits.
Building companies was OK. "Creating
wealth" was better. Computers and SUVs aside, the American
economy of the 1990s made nothing new. But it commodified the
notion of wealth by turning stocks into a product with its own
value-added wonders. There's a difference between the trading
price of a share and its inherent value, of course. In the 1980s,
the two began to diverge, slowly at first, exuberantly by the
late 1990s, inflated by the NASDAQ's tech stocks. Those were
the so-called dot-coms, which took the equation of the valueless
product to its logical conclusion: There was no need for a product
to back up the stock anymore. The concept was the stock. And
the Initial Public Offering craze was to the 1990s what junk
bonds were to the 1980s helium to a stock bubble as ephemeral
as cyberspace.
But everyone played to the shareholder,
dot-com or not. Superstar CEOs like General Electric's Jack Welch
became the new deities, because they knew how to dismantle their
companies while making their share price glow. By the early 1990s,
as journalist Doug Henwood put it in a speech deconstructing
the so-called New Economy, "it was clear that the quickest
way to add 5 points to your stock price was to lay off 50,000
workers." By the late 1990s there wasn't much left to lay
off, but the stock price had to keep going up. Enron and WorldCom
showed the way by inventing profits and calling it accounting.
It was brilliant, and for a few years it worked very well. On
faith.
Faith, that is, in the infallibility
of the market no matter how self-fulfilling its promises. The
infallibility doctrine is nothing new. Like all such doctrines,
its validity is somewhere between superstition and quackery,
which is why we have regulations to temper it. Or used to. The
Reagan administration spent the 1980s eviscerating the market
of the checks and balances put in place during the New Deal.
What Reagan couldn't do because of a Democratic Congress, the
Republican Congress of the mid-1990s finished up. GOP Rep. Ron
Paul, a market faithful, summed up his party's view of government
regulators: "These little men filled with envy are capable
of producing nothing and are motivated by their own inadequacies
and desires to wield authority against men of talent."
It turns out the CEOs were the little
men producing nothing.
On Wall Street last week, CEO Bush made
it seem as if a few bad companies were ruining the image of American
business, but that the machine itself was sound. In a sense,
he's right. The soundness of the economy as a whole is not yet
at stake. The slide may trigger a recession and deepen federal
and state budget deficits because of a huge dip in capital gains
tax receipts. But it is essentially a massive correction of those
invented excesses demanded by the shareholder ethic of the 1990s.
The losses seem overwhelming only because the gains had been.
Newspapers are featuring sob stories about millionaire retirees
whose portfolios are tanking. But don't sob too much. In large
part those were the gamblers of the 1990s, converts to Wall Street's
no-fault religion.
True, the proportion of Americans owning
stock grew beyond 50 percent, creating the illusion of a democratized
market. But the opposite happened. Just as a $70,000 home with
two mortgages isn't the same as a mansion in Bel Air, investing
6 percent of one's $35,000 salary in a 401k isn't the same as
sitting on a cruise liner's worth of stock options. Wall Street's
jocks have confused the two to make market populism more believable
to keep the small-timers' money coming, and to shade the fact
that, as economist Lester Thurow points out, 86 percent of the
market's surge from 1996 to 2000 profited the wealthiest 10 percent
of the population. Populist fancies aside, Wall Street has always
been of, by and for corporations.
Where Bush has it wrong is in assuming
that the evildoers (to use a favorite phrase of the president's)
are the WorldComs and the Enrons and their accountants, rather
than the culture that created them, and that the damage is contained,
like a mole on a wholesome body that can be snipped off and forgotten.
But it goes deeper. It may (it should) be hard to sympathize
for gamblers of the 1990s watching their portfolios shrivel.
But where was the sympathy for the millions of workers who got
"downsized" in the name of shareholder value along
the way? Where has the sympathy been for the tens of millions
of workers cobbling together subsistence jobs to make ends meet
while their very own blue chip companies distill gold from their
labor? Where will the sympathy be when the mucked up economy
and the government's newfound deficits justify further negligence
of 40 million uninsured and the stingiest social safety net of
any Western democracy?
Where Bush had it most wrong was in assuming
that the mechanics of American capitalism remain as sound as
its current model. Yet that's the assumption undergirding most
analyses of the downturn. "The basis of our market system
is that, by maximizing profits, firms also maximize the collective
good," reads a July 10 editorial in the Washington Post.
It is the same old fib that corporations have been repackaging
as creed ("what's good for GM is good for America")
since Alexander Hamilton mistook business for the third branch
of government. It may very well have been so before the invention
of the words "conglomerate" and "lobbyist."
It isn't so now.
When corporations gang up to defeat initiatives
to improve health care, child care, dirty air and poisoned rivers,
when they litigate their way out of workers' safety, workers'
compensation and family leave, when they bust up unions, plunder
public lands, decimate small-time competitors and innovators
and monopolize public discourse about it all, then turnaround
and loophole their way to a billion tax breaks, worm any remaining
taxable profits to off-shore accounts and lock in a slew of subsidies
when corporations manage all that and still find time to complain
about being overtaxed, over-regulated and besieged, then no,
the bit about maximizing the collective good just doesn't hold
up.
Nor does Bush's bit about faith. FDR's
New Deal capitalism actually worked for that collective good.
Wall Street's Big Deal capitalism has become nasty, brutish and
short-sighted. It isn't a system to have faith in. It's a system
to rein in and balance with a conscience. The market has none.
Government's conscience may be corrupt. But better that than
corporate dervishes unbound.
Pierre Tristam
is an editorial writer at the Dayton Beach News-Journal.
He can be reached via e-mail at ptristam@att.net
Today's Features
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al-Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti-Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|