John,
This is a quick follow-up commentary to you excellent thoughts about the structural job destruction spiral we are caught in by indifferent, giant quasi-monopolistic enterprises. On the positive side, there are some emerging signs of a promising sea change of more local communities choosing for nurturing independent businesses and locally produced goods as an Escape from Big Corporate uniformity and concentrated power ... as a better way to self-control and stimulate worker happiness and job growth. People's priorities and attitudes, for example, appear to be slowly shifting to food co-operatives, to neighborhood green grocers and local hardware stores, to opening their own drug stores rather working for a chain for minimum wages and neglible benefits.
The 1950s uprising of the extraordinarily successful Spanish Mondragon Cooperative Movement is now arriving to America's shores. This new grass roots economy movement -- tied to community and small-scale businesses under a disciplined policy of mutual employer-employee loyalty and shared ownership -- offers a truly exciting countervailing power against the privileges of global conglomerates. Decades of softening anti-monopoly enforcement has exploded corporate bigness and a business culture of concentrating power, evaporating local businesses and jobs for the sole benefit of management bonuses and shareholder returns ... ultimately undermining our democracy with big corporate money influence on community elected representatives.
The conservative right consistently forgets that Americans have always had a gut suspicion and deep dislike of corporate economic concentration. Even Thomas Jefferson proposed making "freedom from monopolies in commerce" an article in the Bill of Rights. He did not succeed. But over the past 200 years courts have given the corporate form enormous powers such as the rights of citizens, unlimited liability, and unlimited life. (Ed. note: See recent Supreme Court decision on Citizens United which gives corporations even more power.) The result? A handful of global corporations, mega-retailers, giant insurance and financial institutions dominate all sectors of society. They suck out all the breathing air of local businesses, eradicating smaller competition, local suppliers, and jobs. They systematically destroy the relationships that tie small businesses and a community together. We end up erecting a singly-driven monoculture and economy with the goal to Export wealth and jobs, thereby relegating more and more of the working community to an insecure minimum wage/benefit status. This curse of bigness is also fostering an increasingly unhappy and alienated populace throughout America ... people generally feeling more and more at the job, product/service choice and quality mercy of unresponsive, destructive corporate behavior.
As a nation, we should be encouraging aggressively a new economic mission of reconnecting capital with community and region. A new economic mission that recognizes that mega-banks, for example, that are TOO BIG TO FAIL are also TOO BIG TO EXIST, so well put by one writer. Huge financial instutions, exerting corrosively concentrated power, must be broken up into much smaller, more competitive units that (like the Mondragon co-operative banks and firms which are based on solidarity) respond better to unique regional conditions and needs. The new economic mission should be to encourage many more small locally owned businesses which are a catalyst for social-civic activities and engaging community/regional interactions ... in sharp contrast to communities saturated with boringly standard chain mega-stores/shopping malls/big box stores all designed to generate quick consumption, little conversation, and community cohesiveness. In this regard, I've read that my home state of Maine (somewhat like San Francisco, I believe) has a policy that prohibits large stores being built that do not meet rigid criteria of environmental and economic benefits including enlivening a citizenry sense of civic and community togetherness, of diverse architectural harmony, where local store owners know their customers who chat with acquaintances in stores and along sidewalks.
Much more money needs to be productively redirected to rebuilding local communities, to stimulate existing and startup businesses, to nurture local/regional enterprises like the neighborhood stores, locally owned food markets, independent restaurants, small-scale farms, a green industrial bank, etc. As one fellow Mainer remarked: " Money is a human invention and the rules that control its dynamic are also a human invention. The capital rules in place today favor mobility over community, speculation over productive investment in people and small enterprises, volatility over permanence, where the monopoly corporate aim is extraction of wealth rather than creation of wealth."
And where the concomitant goal of corporate bigness is to achieve this extraction of wealth with rock bottom wages and a minimum of workers who are trapped in a race to the bottom .... whereby lower-middle class wealth or what remains of it is diverted to ruling class elites.
Regards,
Frank Thomas
The Netherlands
P.S. : Constanze Woelfle, an American accountant based in the Netherlands, recently noted in a study the following ratios of U.S. CEO pay to that of average manufacturing and middle-class working employees:
471 to 1 in the U.S.
24:1 in the UK
15:1 in France
13:1 in Sweden
12:1 in the Netherlands
This warped U.S. income disparity and cynically greedy diversion of income from workers to upper management echelons and investors are symptomatic of and a contributing factor to our egregious culture of job destruction.Best,
Frank
