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July 12, 2002
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
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Five
Days That
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Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
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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
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Reviews of Gore:
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July
12, 2002
The "Corporate
Ethics" Red Herring
by Matt Vidal
With the mounting of accounting scandals among
major US corporate giants, Appointed President Bush gave a speech
to Wall Street on July 9th arguing that "America's greatest
economic need is higher ethical standards." (Never mind
rampant poverty in the cities, the 40+ million Americans without
health insurance, and falling wages coupled with rising insecurity
in most segments of American labor markets.) Echoing the sentiments
of representatives from both major parties Bush has focused
attention on a few individuals, repeating the familiar and predictable
refrain: it's only a few bad apples.
This classic bourgeois response--an obsessive
focus on individuals and personal ethics--diverts attention
from more fundamental problems in the structure of the US economy.
The current scandals sweeping the business community reflect
tendencies and contradictions which are endemic to capitalism
generally but especially acute in its American version. Consider
the following structural analysis.
In his speech Bush called for the reaffirmation
of "the basic principles and rules that make capitalism
work: truthful books and honest people, and well--enforced laws
against fraud and corruption." However, as any economics
or business school professor will tell you, the first and most
fundamental principle of capitalism is to "maximize profits."
Actually, the market theory of neoclassical economics only says
that one should "maximize utility," which is a fancy
way of saying that you should be efficient in pursuing happiness
and that you should trade what you have and don't want for things
that you want and don't have. The important distinction is between
markets per se and capitalism, because while capitalists and
their apologists couch their arguments in the "free market"
of neoclassical economic theory, the capitalist markets of reality
work much differently than the free markets of the theory.
And it is in the incentives of capitalist
structures, and the actions, routines and relations that capitalist
culture legitimates, that we find the seeds of the current
"corporate abuses" and the current crisis. Before discussing
this causal logic in detail a further note on the distinction
between capitalism and the "free market" is necessary.
In economic theory what it means to have a "free market"
is that there is perfect competition, which means two fanciful
things. First, everyone has complete information about all of
their options and the outcomes of all potential courses of action.
Second, and more importantly for our purposes, it means that
there is no power in the <market--i.e>., there are no
monopolies or oligopolies but an infinite amount of small buyers
and sellers. Getting back to reality, we have capitalism, which
can be defined as a tendency toward monopoly in the market
(thus, in direct contrast to the concept of the "free"
market). Think of Exxon-Mobile, Wal-Mart, Ford, GM, GE, Disney,
AOL-Time Warner, etc. These corporations have massive market
power. Indeed, Exxon-Mobile, GM and Ford have revenues greater
than the national budgets of all but a few of the world's nearly
200 countries.
The capitalist firm did not even exist
in classical economic theory. Indeed, it wasn't until the 1970s
that economists began to seriously examine the firm. Now that
the firm has a solid place in (neoclassical) economic theory,
we have a second fundamental principle of capitalism, much more
fundamental to the workings of the system than "truthful
books and honesty," as Bush put it: when maximizing profit
everything, including workers, is a "factor of production."
In other words, as quickly as profit is elevated to sacrosanct
status, everything else--from product quality to the workforce
to responsibility itself--becomes a cost, to be reduced, displaced
or avoided if possible. Profits over people; profits over environment;
profits over community; (fake) profits, even, over shareholders.
It is a contradictory system indeed. Only a fool would believe
that a lecture in ethics would trump the incentives of profit
over everything else.
We are taught, of course, that competition
creates incentives for innovation and entrepreneurialism. Perhaps
there is some truth to this. But recall the reality of monolithic
multinational corporations. Their power in the market severely
distorts market incentives from those of the textbook free market.
And consider the property and patent laws--both massive governmental
interventions in the so-called free market--upon which capitalist
market economies are founded. While it is argued that patents
create incentives for innovation, as economist Dean Baker has
argued, "an enormous amount of innovative work takes place
by scientists employed in universities, foundations or the government,
where the hope of windfalls from patents would be close to zero."
Pharmaceutical companies, for example, charge prices on patented
drugs hundreds of times what they would otherwise be, arguing
that this is necessary to fund research for new drugs. Yet,
rather than researching new drugs for ailments without cures,
much of what takes place in R&D in the pharmaceutical industry
is copycat research: developing slightly different (so as to
bypass an existing patent) but functionally similar versions
of existing highly profitable drugs.
Patents in the pharmaceutical industry,
in Baker's words, lead to a "monopoly [which] in effect
transfers income from consumers to pharmaceutical companies."
The more general point is that the structures of the US capitalist
market economy--from those discussed above to labor law, industrial
relations, and American-style capitalist culture (especially
short-termism in financial markets)--generate specific types
of incentives that place profits not only over people but also
over ethics. The economy is structured in its very essence to
privilege wealthy individuals and corporate profits. Just as
the US economy systematically generates low-wage, dead-end jobs
(and hence poverty) so it structurally generates the corporate
leaders who will seek profits and personal rewards by any means,
whether by polluting rivers, busting unions, sweating teenage
girls in developing countries, or accounting tricks.
The organizations and institutions that
constitute the US economy shape it in particular ways that not
only transfer wealth from the poor to the rich but also encourage
and legitimate actions in which the only goal is profit (and
sometimes it just makes more sense to cook the books). Concern
yourself with the workforce or the environment, indeed, customers,
investors or ethics, only insofar as enforced and monitored
regulations make you (and note that most regulations on capital
have not been monitored or enforced since before the Reagan
years).
Bush tries to convince us that the problem
is that "Too many corporations seem disconnected from the
values of our country." For all the talk of honesty, fair
play or whatever else, the values inscribed in our economic
institutions are singular: profit. Contra Bush, the scary thing
is that the corporations are right on par with the core values
of capitalist America. Again, Bush tries to convince us otherwise:
"Our society rewards hard work and honest ambition."
He forgot to mention that the median weekly wage fell 12% in
real (inflation-adjusted) terms from 1973 to 2000. I leave it
to the millions of hard working and honestly ambitious American
workers at or below the median to assess Bush's assertion about
the relationship between hard work and rewards. In any case,
the current "corporate abuses" making headlines are
symptoms of much deeper, structural problems in the way we produce
goods and services.
Matt Vidal is
pursuing his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
He can be reached at: mvidal@ssc.wisc.edu
Today's
Features
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
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