Serve the People

“The challenge was how to ensure that capitalism served the people. Some supposed answers came from Europe and Russia. One was state ownership of monopolies and the largest enterprises – socialism, as it was called. A more radical one was found in communism – common ownership of all ‘means of production’, in Karl Marx’s words. A third was to turn large corporations into extensions of government and to centralize government authority in one person; hence, fascism. All were tried. All ultimately failed.” — Robert B. Reich, Supercapitalism

The Paradox

“Yet the executives of Wal-Mart or any other large company are not brutally insensitive or ruthlessly greedy. They are doing what they’re supposed to do, according to the current rules of the game – giving their customers good deals and thereby maximizing the returns to their investors. Just like players in a game, they are doing whatever is necessary to win. But just as all games require rules to define fair play, the economy relies on government to set the economic ground rules. If the government wanted to do something about the means Wal-Mart employs, it could change the current rules. In theory, it could enact laws to make it easier for all employees to unionize, require all large companies to provide their employees with health insurance and pensions, enact zoning regulations to protect Main Street retailer from the predations of big-box retailers, and raise the minimum wage high enough to give all working people a true ‘living’ wage. All such measures would have the likely effect of causing Wal-Mart and other large companies across the board to raise their prices and reduce returns to investors.” — Robert B. Reich, Supercapitalism

Think Outside the Barrel

Cradle to Cradle

American Republic vs. American Empire

Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, 100th Anniversary of George Washington’s Birthday, 1832:

“Other misfortunes may be borne or their effects overcome. If disastrous war should sweep our commerce from the ocean, another generation may renew it. If it exhaust our Treasury, future industry may replenish it. If it desolate and lay waste our fields, still, under a new cultivation, they will grow green again and ripen to future harvests. It were but a trifle even if the walls of yonder Capital were to crumble, if its lofty pillars should fall, and its gorgeous decorations be all covered by the dust of the valley. All these might be rebuilt. But who shall reconstruct the fabric of demolished government? Who shall rear again the well-proportioned columns of constitutional liberty? Who shall frame together the skillful architecture which unites national sovereignty with State rights, individual security, and public prosperity? No. If these columns fall, they will be raised not again. Like the Colosseum and the Parthenon, they will be destined to a mournful, a melancholy immortality. Bitterer tears, however, will flow over them than were ever shed over the monuments of Roman or Grecian art. For they will be remnants of a more glorious edifice than Greece or Rome ever saw: the edifice of constitutional American liberty.”

Independent Press

John Swinton, Former Chief of Staff of New York Times, 1953:

“There is no such thing, at this date, of the world’s history, in America, as an independent press… The business of the journalist is to destroy truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks, they pull the string and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”