COMMENTS: AT FIRST GLANCE
Hausknecht, Murray
A specter is haunting American capitalism—the specter of unrestrained greed. So it appears from a story by Anne Crittenden in the New York Times (August 19, 1984). She reports the fears...
...She reports the fears expressed by many academic and business luminaries ranging from Nobel Prize economist James Tobin to Felix Rohatyn, the literary lion of Wall Street...
...But he had guarded against this contingency by arranging to be paid $4 million when he departed...
...Reaganism, the 20th-century echo of Guizot's cry, enrichissez-vous, represents their triumph, at least for the moment, over the restraints of the reality principle...
...Like all businessmen who achieve a dominant voice in policy decisions, they have become "abusive," and in the past this has led to political reactions and legal reforms...
...Nice work, if you can get it...
...The deep-seated, powerful energies of the economic pleasure principle are not easily repressed...
...q at the bottom of Felix Rohatyn's anxieties...
...it is the threat of legal sanctions that regulates behavior in the marketplace...
...Skeptics also will remember that the godfathers of (Continued on p. 4) 2 AT FIRST GLANCE (continued from p. 2) organized crime are noted for their emotional involvement with their families' enterprises...
...The deal "angered" his successor and federal officials, but there was little they could do since the money had speedily been deposited in a Swiss account (New York Times, September 18, 1984...
...At its last meeting, the Editorial Board of Dissent added and welcomed these members: MITCHELL COHEN, who teaches political science at Baruch College, CUNY, is the outgoing editor of Jewish Frontier...
...America's corporate chiefs are losing sight of moral standards in the new frenzy to get rich quick...
...The article's subhead reads...
...The current spasm of breast-beating has been triggered by a recent wave of mergers and takeovers involving— says an anonymous speculator Crittenden talked to—"a whole class of instigators and parasites [who play] a very destructive role in the economy...
...On the other hand, the biblical injunction, to those that have shall be given, seemed uppermost in the minds of Ford's directors when they awarded their chairman a bonus of $7 million in a year when thousands of auto workers were laid off and wage concessions were extracted from those who remained...
...Not all capitalists succumb to their baser natures...
...If we don't put some curbs on this we're going to see a tremendous backlash...
...CAROL O'CLEIREACAIN is associate director of Research and Negotiations at District Council 37, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), in New York...
...Reaganism as ideology and practice is a paean to the unregulated market and a naked attempt to return to a mythical state that exists only in the minds of ideologues...
...Meanwhile, that Hand is busy—grabbing...
...THE BEHAVIOR OF BUSINESSMEN has rarely been controlled by inner restraints...
...But the divine hand turned out to be palsied...
...the anticipated advantages of self-interest could only be realized when its excesses were curbed by governments that forced a wider distribution of material benefits...
...THIS METAPHORICAL DRAMA within the business psyche exposes what, from another perspective, may be called the ironies or "inner contradictions" of American capitalism...
...This view is shared by the public at large...
...last year less than a third of all Americans "rated corporate executives 'excellent or good' in ethical practices...
...More recently, another injudicious banker, in California this time, "was granted a $2 million severance payment before he agreed . .. to leave...
...And consequently, according to Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Ford administration, "the covers [are removed) from the more unsavory types of people...
...He teaches history at Cooper Union...
...After Saul Steinberg showed up at Walt Disney Productions waving 11 percent of its stock and threatening to blow its doors down, the nervous management bought the stock back at a price that left the wolf with a tidy little profit of $60 million...
...The complaint has been heard before...
...Charles Brown, head of AT&T, asserts, as Crittenden writes, that "hundreds and hundreds" of executives "are emotionally involved in the companies they are running...
...The public's attention has been caught less by the economic consequences of greed than by the sheer brazenness of it all...
...When the Reaganites, whatever their intentions, try to dismantle the welfare state, they are striking at the roots of modern capitalism, for only the welfare state can compensate for the shortcomings of the Invisible Hand...
...the dominant political forces learn to mediate between the demands of self-interest and the requirements for social tranquillity...
...All's fair in love and war...
...There are, for example, the golden parachutes that careful managers devise to protect themselves when a battle turns against them...
...Skeptics are more apt to believe that businessmen who pray together at breakfast will also prey together the rest of the day...
...But today Reaganism encourages, in Tobin's words, "the undiluted pursuit of self-gain...
...Sometimes an executive is pushed by colleagues who remain solicitous of his welfare...
...The consequences of the "blow-up" are clearly WELCOME ABOARD...
...FRED SIEGEL is the author of Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan...
...Providence would ultimately insure that all would benefit from each entrepreneur's self-interested action...
...In this battle, incidentally, Martin Marietta publicized a juicy tidbit about Agee and Mary Cunningham, a Bendix vicepresident, which until then had been savored only in corporate offices and country-club locker rooms...
...Rohatyn and others who deplore such excesses can do little except wait in trepidation for their worst fears to be realized...
...They believe the government has no legitimate role to play in the economy and do not work with it or through it...
...Even the Heritage Foundation, bastion of right-wing intellectuals, thought this action "unseemly...
...The chairman of a Chicago bank whose investment policies eventually forced a federal bail-out "left the bank under a cloud . . . but with a hefty six-figure annual pension in hand plus a cash payment worth $280,000 and his club dues taken care of for a year...
...It will be a large and distinguished cast of characters...
...But those with a firmer knowledge of history than the new rich from Texas and California know that capitalism survives only where there is a regulated market and where private enterprise submits to at least some public guidance and control...
...once a week for breakfast and prayers...
...A mature, flourishing capitalism, then, is ruled by a reality principle...
...NICOLAUS MILLS's books include The New Journalism, American and English Fiction in the Nineteenth Century, and Busing USA...
...Rohatyn too expects a recession that will set off an enormous "hue and cry . .. You'll have congressional hearings, the works...
...He believes that the present takeover battles are "wilder than in the '60s—business is killing the goose that laid the golden egg...
...they are too damned greedy...
...Adam Smith was another moralist with a low opinion of business ethics who posited self-interest as the energy powering capitalism...
...Rupert Murdoch, whose New York Post tirelessly extolls the virtues of free enterprise, profited from a similar maneuver in a challenge to Warner Communications...
...There also are the raiders who make their profits from greenmail...
...Herbert Hoover said, "The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists...
...When William Agee of Bendix attempted to take over Martin Marietta and was taken over by them instead, he resigned...
...He justified, metaphorically speaking, the pleasure principle in economic behavior...
...Today "the oil barons and California guys" are the vanguard of the latest eruption of those ruled by the pleasure principle...
...He is at work on a study of the Mississippi Summer of 1964...
...Crittenden also reports that "one of the most successful investment managers in the postwar period is heartened by such phenomena as the Full Gospel Business Fellowship of 72,000 businessmen who meet...
...They have a simpler ideology, based on a desire to dismantle the welfare state...
...The same thing will happen now, says Professor Herman, but not "until we have a huge blow-up...
...Edward Herman, a Wharton School professor, told Crittenden that the 1970s saw the rise of "a lot of new rich . . . the oil barons and the new California guys around Reagan...
...periodically they overcome the forces of prudence...
Vol. 32 • January 1985 • No. 1
