Random Thoughts Sechs: Eeeeehhhh...

[Synobun]

I don't see why it has to be one or the other.

 

[Lexicus]

I don't see why it has to be one or the other.

The rule of capital is mutually exclusive with the rule of the people. I would prefer to formulate it: given the choice between socialism and barbarism, liberals choose the latter, every time

 

[Traitorfish]

I don't see why it has to be one or the other.

Capitalists seem pretty convinced, though, and who am I to question their professional experience?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Capitalism lost its way in 1976 with the publication and adoption by corporate America of "The Theory of the Firm" by Michael Jensen. It argued for shareholders to push management into managing for improved share price rather than social benefit. It was a sea change in corporate culture. Corporate finance departments rose in power and Congress was lobbied to allow leveraged buyouts, stock options for managers, and increased M&A activities. Then Reagan became president and made it all happen. We had the 80s. Pensions went away, companies moved overseas, Investment bankers got rich buying, selling and dismantling companies without regard for employees. It was all about the "deal".

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Wasn't Reagan also the person behind the whole "welfare queen" thing?

 

[Lexicus]

Capitalism lost its way in 1976 with the publication and adoption by corporate America of "The Theory of the Firm" by Michael Jensen. It argued for shareholders to push management into managing for improved share price rather than social benefit. It was a sea change in corporate culture. Corporate finance departments rose in power and Congress was lobbied to allow leveraged buyouts, stock options for managers, and increased M&A activities. Then Reagan became president and made it all happen. We had the 80s. Pensions went away, companies moved overseas, Investment bankers got rich buying, selling and dismantling companies without regard for employees. It was all about the "deal".

Yes, I mean, before that it was all a Utopian idyll with happy children chained to factory machines and sent into the mines and garment workers locked up in their factories so they could be trapped by fires

 

[Birdjaguar]

Wasn't Reagan also the person behind the whole "welfare queen" thing?

The term was coined in 1974, either by George Bliss of the Chicago Tribune in his articles about Linda Taylor, or by Jet magazine.[6] Neither publication credits the other in their "Welfare Queen" stories of that year. Taylor was ultimately charged with committing $8,000 in fraud and having four aliases.[7] She was convicted in 1977 of illegally obtaining 23 welfare checks using two aliases and was sentenced to two to six years in prison.[8][9] During the same decade, Taylor was investigated for alleged kidnapping and baby trafficking, and is suspected of multiple murders, but was never charged.[10]

Accounts of her activities were used by Ronald Reagan, beginning with his 1976 presidential campaign, although he never mentioned her by name.[11] Used to illustrate his criticisms of social programs in the United States.[12] Reagan employed the trope of the "Welfare Queen" in order to rally support for reform of the welfare system. During his initial bid for the Republican nomination in 1976, and again in 1980, Reagan constantly made reference to the "Welfare Queen" at his campaign rallies.[4] Some of these stories, and some that followed into the 1990s, focused on female welfare recipients engaged in behavior counter-productive to eventual financial independence such as having children out of wedlock, using AFDC money to buy drugs, or showing little desire to work. These women were understood to be social parasites, draining society of valuable resources while engaging in self damaging behavior.[5] Despite these early appearances of the "Welfare Queen" icon, stories about able-bodied men collecting welfare continued to dominate discourse until the 1970s, at which point women became the main focus of welfare fraud stories.

 

[Snerk]

You know there is a way to make capitalism work for the society and at same time meeting the needs of the population. You just gotta know when to apply market forces and when to absolutely not apply it. I'll take one mixed economy please.

edit: capitalism's constructive role in a green economy is much more unclear though. So there's that.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Yes, I mean, before that it was all a Utopian idyll with happy children chained to factory machines and sent into the mines and garment workers locked up in their factories so they could be trapped by fires

After WW2 and prior to the late 70s, Corporate America was pretty committed to working with unions, and offering pensions for worker loyalty to white working men. That system was brittle because the exclusion of women and non whites. The rising aspirations of women and blacks in the 70s created forces for change. Jensen gave the corporations a new model that allowed management to discard the old.

 

[Traitorfish]

Capitalism lost its way in 1976 with the publication and adoption by corporate America of "The Theory of the Firm" by Michael Jensen. It argued for shareholders to push management into managing for improved share price rather than social benefit. It was a sea change in corporate culture. Corporate finance departments rose in power and Congress was lobbied to allow leveraged buyouts, stock options for managers, and increased M&A activities. Then Reagan became president and made it all happen. We had the 80s. Pensions went away, companies moved overseas, Investment bankers got rich buying, selling and dismantling companies without regard for employees. It was all about the "deal".

I'm not sure we can attribute world-historical turning points to changing fashions in American corporate culture.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I'm not sure we can attribute world-historical turning points to changing fashions in American corporate culture.

Lots of, at the time, small things, change the world significantly. Edward Deming in Japan in the late 1940s is another example.

The end of the "equal time" rule for radio and TV in the late 80s, allowed for talk radio and Fox News.

 

[Lexicus]

After WW2 and prior to the late 70s, Corporate America was pretty committed to working with unions, and offering pensions for worker loyalty to white working men. That system was brittle because the exclusion of women and non whites. The rising aspirations of women and blacks in the 70s created forces for change. Jensen gave the corporations a new model that allowed management to discard the old.

I will give you that this is very skilled agitprop: the intentional conflation of the dictatorship of capital with a more inclusive society for women and non-whites is the tried-and-true method for sanitizing capitalism in the era of #wokeness. Portraying the destruction of unions and bottoming-out of wages and working conditions as a consequence of the "rising aspirations of women and blacks" is brilliant.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I will give you that this is very skilled agitprop: the intentional conflation of the dictatorship of capital with a more inclusive society for women and non-whites is the tried-and-true method for sanitizing capitalism in the era of #wokeness. Portraying the destruction of unions and bottoming-out of wages and working conditions as a consequence of the "rising aspirations of women and blacks" is brilliant.

It is not a question of one causing the other. The existing business paradigm of rewarding loyal workers (mostly white men) with pensions if they stick with the company was not meeting the new demands of women and blacks in the 70s. Corporate management was unwilling/unable to include them in that model. The demands of the new non white/non male workforce was creating problems for traditional ways of doing business. Then Jensen proposed his new model of management. His model was designed to shift management efforts away from partnerships with labor to partnerships with stockholders. As the shift took place and its Libertarian approach took hold, The old ways of doing things quickly vanished and securing wealth took hold as a leading goal. The change in the workforce did not cause Jensen to write his paper or corporate America to adopt it. The cultural changes had started in the late 60s; Jensen's paper was an academic one for B school audiences. Reagan provided the business environment for the seed to flourish. The process took place over a decade or more. You are the one incorrectly conflating the rising demands from labor with the change in business practices of the 80s.

 

[Zkribbler]

Wasn't Reagan also the person behind the whole "welfare queen" thing?

Yes. He campaigned against welfare queens living in mansions and driving Cadillacs.
No one ever found one.

This is why you'll see me, from time to time, quip, "The GOP-- saving the country from non-existent problems since 1980."

Whether it's Saddam Hussein's alliance with bin Ladin, imminent hyperinflation under Obama, a pending invasion by the US of Texas, a child sex slave ring in the non-existent basement of a D.C. pizzeria, or bankrupted Social Security, the GOP keeps churning out imagined dangers.

 

[Takhisis]

Let's not blame Reagan for more than his share. He was a useful face to put on things, but scum like Dick Cheney (who reportedly likes to hurt people and be hated, which, were he not in politics, would see him under healthful psychiatric treatment) were already in power before him and stayed on after him.

 

[Ajidica]

Capitalism lost its way in 1976 with the publication and adoption by corporate America of "The Theory of the Firm" by Michael Jensen. It argued for shareholders to push management into managing for improved share price rather than social benefit. It was a sea change in corporate culture. Corporate finance departments rose in power and Congress was lobbied to allow leveraged buyouts, stock options for managers, and increased M&A activities. Then Reagan became president and made it all happen. We had the 80s. Pensions went away, companies moved overseas, Investment bankers got rich buying, selling and dismantling companies without regard for employees. It was all about the "deal".

Out of curiosity, have you ever read Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco? It covers a lot of what you are talking about, such as how corporations lost their sense of being a 'member of the community' with a sort of paternalistic / noblesse oblige view toward their employees and toward the 'Profit Uber Alles" Quarterly Report entities.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Out of curiosity, have you ever read Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco? It covers a lot of what you are talking about, such as how corporations lost their sense of being a 'member of the community' with a sort of paternalistic / noblesse oblige view toward their employees and toward the 'Profit Uber Alles" Quarterly Report entities.

No, but i do know the story. The 80s in a nutshell. The 80s redefined Corporate America and made it so terrible.

 

[Ajidica]

The 80s redefined Corporate America and made it so terrible.

Let's not act like corporations pre-80s were halcyon days of good relations. We got the Love Canal disaster, Ford basically maintained a private secret police force, and both sexual harassment and racism was not just prevalent but often part of company policy.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Let's not act like corporations pre-80s were halcyon days of good relations. We got the Love Canal disaster, Ford basically maintained a private secret police force, and both sexual harassment and racism was not just prevalent but often part of company policy.

I'm not, the environmental record of corporate America is pretty dismal and companies certainly were not perfect. The 80s + did little to improve them and made their attitude towards workers worse. Those years laid the foundation for our income inequity situation today. I guess the "moral" of the story is that economic and social issues are very dynamic and change comes from unexpected sources and has unintended consequences. Be prepared to be flexible and keep in mind that "All Things Must Pass".

 

[Takhisis]

I'd argue that that the late '80s (starting, or at least building up to it, really, in the late '70s) was the moment at which they felt safe enough to think they'd reached a tipping point and actually say ‘Greed is good’ - coupled with the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union, that view solidified into ‘end of history’-type statements evidencing utter selfishness and imbecility.

But how many decades earlier was it that tobacco products were proven to cause cancer and other incurable -and massively financially costly- diseases? When was it that certain private companies were allowed to acquire and dismantle public transportation networks? When was it that electric engines were demonstrated to be more efficient, cleaner and less noisy than combustion-based engines and promptly run out of business?

The edifice had already crumbled a long time earlier, it's just that in the 1980s and '90s they got careless and shameless because their ‘values’ had been stealthily propagated into the electorate, enough so that ‘let's lower taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor’ was suddenly a vote-winning proposition because being filthily -in all senses imaginable- rich -in the material sense only- was now something to aspire to.