If you're contemplating this for the first time, you might be somewhat taken aback by the boldness of this approach; but please don't blink. If getting the executive class to board the same train into the future as the rest of us is what we're really after (which, I believe, it should be), we - the rest of the nation - need to get serious about what will have to be done to make that happen. It's clear, the magnificently paid aren't getting there on their own and crunch time is fast approaching for the demand side of the economy.
Keep in mind: as long as other Americans are doing their patriotic duty somewhere in the world on behalf of all of us, and showing that they care enough about the common good to risk losing all to protect it, some comparable reciprocal of a nobler nature is demanded of each of us, in whatever capacity we happen to find ourselves, as civilians. That particular quid pro quo pertains more specificly to those who would embody roles of responsibility and authority in society.
If you happen to be one of the above, at the very least, that means rendering faithful service to those who trust in you to protect the one thing most central to their day-to-day survival – their livelihoods. Given that fact, if that role of responsibility and authority happens to be as an executive in a corporation, the first in order under that mandate are your fellow workers serving under the aegis accorded you, even as they protect your interests in the faithful discharge of their own responsibilities. Notice: I did not say shareholders. Shareholders (yes, I am one such) take potluck because they're wagering, for better or worse, with what is essentially surplus to them (or should be) on the outcome of events in which they play no active role. They're essentially little more than economic hitchhikers going along for the gamble. There's nothing surplus about a working person's livelihood.
The growing quest to find a sustainable, sharable future for humans on planet Earth is a matter of life and death for billions who have yet to grow up. As such, it is the moral equivalent of the greatest war this nation has ever fought - World War Three, if you will. It's time to get with the program and quit making excuses.
Consumer demand - and the natural resources required to meet that demand - have finite limits. The gross domestic income that arises out of that equally finite process called the GDP must suffice for ALL the financial needs of the American populace. It may be a big pie, but it is not an infinitely expandable one. Other nations are clamoring for their own piece of it on the world stage, even as the non-renewable sources entrained in powering all of these economic systems grow more strained by the day. So, as far as the U.S. is concerned, that part of the pie that depends on offshore natural resources is gradually shrinking. Even the might of America's financial and military sectors cannot prevent that. The only alternative to intelligent apportionment and disciplined use is naked dispossession by force of arms - an option that Americans, to their credit, have repeatedly rejected as inherently alien to the nature of their deepest convictions about themselves.
Increasingly, it will become a co-trust between government, management and labor to see that whatever economic activity the nation can envision, initiate, supply and fuel suffices to keep all boats afloat, all beds sheltered and all stomachs adequately fed; and do so without helping to cave in Earth's faltering life-support systems, already shown to be falling short of replenishment against mankind's extraction rate by approximately 30% - a situation that is obviously unsustainable.
Keep in mind: as long as other Americans are doing their patriotic duty somewhere in the world on behalf of all of us, and showing that they care enough about the common good to risk losing all to protect it, some comparable reciprocal of a nobler nature is demanded of each of us, in whatever capacity we happen to find ourselves, as civilians. That particular quid pro quo pertains more specificly to those who would embody roles of responsibility and authority in society.
If you happen to be one of the above, at the very least, that means rendering faithful service to those who trust in you to protect the one thing most central to their day-to-day survival – their livelihoods. Given that fact, if that role of responsibility and authority happens to be as an executive in a corporation, the first in order under that mandate are your fellow workers serving under the aegis accorded you, even as they protect your interests in the faithful discharge of their own responsibilities. Notice: I did not say shareholders. Shareholders (yes, I am one such) take potluck because they're wagering, for better or worse, with what is essentially surplus to them (or should be) on the outcome of events in which they play no active role. They're essentially little more than economic hitchhikers going along for the gamble. There's nothing surplus about a working person's livelihood.
The growing quest to find a sustainable, sharable future for humans on planet Earth is a matter of life and death for billions who have yet to grow up. As such, it is the moral equivalent of the greatest war this nation has ever fought - World War Three, if you will. It's time to get with the program and quit making excuses.
Consumer demand - and the natural resources required to meet that demand - have finite limits. The gross domestic income that arises out of that equally finite process called the GDP must suffice for ALL the financial needs of the American populace. It may be a big pie, but it is not an infinitely expandable one. Other nations are clamoring for their own piece of it on the world stage, even as the non-renewable sources entrained in powering all of these economic systems grow more strained by the day. So, as far as the U.S. is concerned, that part of the pie that depends on offshore natural resources is gradually shrinking. Even the might of America's financial and military sectors cannot prevent that. The only alternative to intelligent apportionment and disciplined use is naked dispossession by force of arms - an option that Americans, to their credit, have repeatedly rejected as inherently alien to the nature of their deepest convictions about themselves.
Increasingly, it will become a co-trust between government, management and labor to see that whatever economic activity the nation can envision, initiate, supply and fuel suffices to keep all boats afloat, all beds sheltered and all stomachs adequately fed; and do so without helping to cave in Earth's faltering life-support systems, already shown to be falling short of replenishment against mankind's extraction rate by approximately 30% - a situation that is obviously unsustainable.
Some, without thinking, will characterize these proposals as punitive. Be assured, I'm not the slightest bit interested in punishing anything or anyone. That would be pointless and counterproductive.
Actually, these proposals are far more structure-providing - toward the goal of promoting fairness within a sustainable economy - than anything else. Their reason for being is to bring huge amounts of benefit to tens of millions of hard-working Americans. There's nothing punitive about that!
When given a structure to help support the best exercise of conscience, with no exemptions for favoritism's sake, people are remarkably ready to do what is right and good, regardless of where they happen to live. It's the government's job to show leadership in that regard, not just with a bunch of feel-good rhetoric or vague pointing in the general direction of what they'd like the private sector to fix, but by taking concrete steps to provide the structure required.
In building the justificational groundwork for this approach, an important point we need to keep in mind is that corporations aren't private in the same pure sense that sole proprietorships are. In the past, Congress saw fit to extend a blanket of protection under which people doing business could operate free of the shadow of full personal accountability hanging over the heads of their principal officers. Without such protections, companies of size also became sizeable liability risks to those who owned and managed them. One could lose everything. The prospect of such unlimited financial exposure was an impediment to the general growth of commerce and discouraging to the kind of company size that would allow the discharge of the very large contracts the country depended on to develop properly; like railways, big buildings, factories and large public contracts, for instance.
Accordingly, Congress legalized the framework for a type of business where the assets of company officers would be immune from what creditors could seize to remedy financial liabilities created by the miscalculations of said officers. Thus, the American corporation model was born. Sole proprietorships have simpler reporting requirements, greater operating freedom and greater private earning potential, but the downside for them is that their owners do not enjoy the immunities against financial setbacks extended to the chief officers of corporations (who often earn huge salaries even as the companies they manage run up huge losses).
Another aspect of corporate identity that makes corporations beholden to the society they're sheltered by derives from the fact that they readily avail themselves of various forms of assistance proferred by federal agencies sponsored by the American taxpayer.
The fact that most share-held corporations could not grow, or even effectively operate, without the constant protective partnership and background sponsorship of the public sector seems to have escaped the comprehension of many corporate compensation boards. They seem to take these special public protections for granted, as if the sponsors of such protections - we, the People of this country - owed as much to them and expected no conscionable quid pro quo from them in the planning of their payrolls.
Well, guess what? In most cases, even when you're owed, if you ask for nothing in return, nothing is exactly what you’ll get.
It's time for the People of the United States to stand up and demand their rightful due from the corporations their money protects and helps, namely, pay scales that are conducive to the establishment of the kind of social equity that Americans have fought for, died for and made lay-away payments on for the past two hundred and forty-two years!
It isn't absolute measures of pay that we're talking about here. Absolute measures of pay, by themselves, mean nothing. When it comes to preserving amity in the family of the American People, the only thing that counts is relative pay. When people see a large difference between what they're able to earn and what someone else no better at his job is bringing in (as in a whole lot more), they want to know that the difference can be justified without credulity being stretched. Too often, these days, there is no justification that can suffice.
While pay differences are necessary, without a clearly justifiable basis for such differences, overt disproportionality creates poisonous feelings between individuals - resentment, envy, outrage and even outright hatred. But the picture of lost felicity doesn't stop there.
There are also social impacts to consider – as in law and order. Any form of glaring disproportion in means between people who share any kind of connection - a family, a workplace, a neighborhood, a city, a state, a country or a planet - that is arguably unfair to the lesser paid parties, will, inevitably, fuel negative consequences of every shape and size and the combined drag of those consequences will leave that collective falling short of the security they might otherwise have enjoyed.
Just ask those who have lived in deeply dichotomized societies for any length of time. The countries in question may differ in language, culture and resources but, without exception, they all exhibit similar afflictions - economic backwardness, educational regression, disease, widespread deprivation-based suffering, official corruption, high levels of crime and environmental despoilation.
My own experience in this regard, as I mentioned, comes out of growing up in South Africa and living in South America. South Africa, currently considered by many to be one of the most crime-plagued industrialized nations in the world today, is a textbook case of what happens when social equity is ignored by government over a protracted period of time. Few Americans realize that the primary impetus behind the establishment of apartheid was not racial psychology but, rather, an attempt to protect the privileged economic status of whites just as increasing numbers of the country's Bantu and mixed-race people were finding ways to get the kind of education that would provide access to professional careers and more equitable measures of pay.
The blind hatred that resulted in the tragic and senseless death of American aid worker, Amy Biehl, was a direct result of apartheid closing the door to reducing the disparity between the prospects for whites versus those left open to non-whites. By the time she arrived to do social work in the townships of the Cape, that hatred was at a fever pitch. She wasn't killed for who she was, but for the systemic inequity her white skin represented and because she failed to fully comprehend that being American and noble-hearted alone would not indemnify her against that kind of unreasoning rage.
Ironically today, a different version of that same bad blood is being directed at black refugees from Zimbabwe and Congo by South African blacks. The newcomers are considered job stealers by natives whose relative lot is still inexcusably dire more than a decade after apartheid was abolished.
The lessons Americans need to learn from the example of South African apartheid are these: one, relative disparity is deeply destructive of everything people hold dear in civil society and two, once the damage has been done, the better part of society has to work very hard for a very long time before social improvement of any kind can be realized.
By continuing to be largely oblivious to the worsening wealth dichotomy in our own country, we are definitely pushing our luck toward a socio-economic tipping point, after which things go downhill fast.
So why hasn't improvement come earlier?
For one thing, up until now, no one has managed to come up with, and popularize, the necessary snappy syntax Americans tend to respond to best drive home why such disparities in personal circumstance are, in essence, demonstrably anti-American. There needs to be a buzz in the air before we can come together as one and act.
As a result, each of us in the struggling classes must rest content, feebly clinging to the outside chance that somehow, someday, one's ship will finally come in and all one's money-related troubles will go away, opening the door to living as one has always yearned to live - truly free and financially secure. Fat chance.
That's precisely the sort of never-never rationalization they - the controlling elite - want the working masses to subscribe to (and be complicit in reinforcing) so that more inclusive social policy never gathers enough steam to force its way into the domain of the entrenched privilege they’ve worked for two centuries to create, ever since Cornelius Vanderbilt laid the groundwork for it. Over the years, they've done a pretty good job of characterizing progress toward greater inclusiveness in such a way that it remains indefinitely tabled under the suspect banner of "socialism" (as if the principal agents protecting their state of material privilege - the armed forces, the U.S. Postal Service, the Social Security Administration, Medicaid, Medicare, primary education, the judicial system, the interstate system and any government department you care to name, including the Federal Trade Commission and The Securities and Exchange Commission, and now, the Federal Treasury itself - were not basically socialist in structure, financing and operation).
So far, that approach of pretending to deplore something while discreetly welcoming all the advantages it can provide, has proven to be a very useful, albeit disingenuous, strategy for America's wealthiest and most successful. On the other hand, the knee-jerk support of the would’ve-if-they-could’ve-been rich (once the political infantry of those opposed to all things socialistic in structure), can no longer be counted on in the wake of that contingent's gut-wrenching discovery that they’d shot themselves in the economic foot with their unquestioning sponsorship of neo-liberal economic policy. Too late, they realized they'd been duped by Wall Street. Worse, they were being ditched by the thousand by companies who no longer deemed their services essential to the making of a profit, now that IT had made automated service, robotization and off-shoring so accessible.
In addition, as other more socialistically organized countries have begun to outperform us in key areas of demographic importance, such as healthcare, the electorate has begun to tire of hearing "Wolf!" every time anything remotely collectivist in nature comes up for debate.
We, the public, may be a little slow in separating truth from hypocrisy but, in the end, our collective thinking process tends to cancel out the usual pitfalls of personal bias and show itself more astute than any panel of spinmeisters or policy wonks could ever hope to be. Therein lies the intent of democracy, after all.
For anyone who cares to see it, the writing is on the wall for the status quo of recent years. The younger and more burdened half of the population finally found its way to the polls and delivered a drubbing of historic proportions at the ballot box to those who gave us what we must now fix.
This spontaneous movement - the campaign to elect and support Barack Obama - owed its strength not as much to its apparent assets as it did to the outgoing opposition's proven flaws and spectacular high-handedness in the use of national assets when they had the helm of our ship of state. The public was not just dissatisfied; it was fuming. The state of the nation was deplorable and the public was itching for change representative of purposes it could be proud of paying taxes to support. We would hear it expressed firsthand several times a day - ordinary people, sick and tired of the same old political shenanigans and looking to the prospect of a new political order that would usher in a more benign and enlightened form of governance that could not be corrupted, intimidated or distracted from taking on the work of creating a more positive and inclusive substructure to the common life of our nation.
As a result of these powerful yearnings among citizens, the Obama campaign enjoyed the provisional ideological backing of a preponderance of Americans of independent mind and generous heart who had no declared party affiliation, as well as a good many of those once affiliated who had finally broken with past habit and refused to be told what to think by the party machinery of opinion grooming.
I say "provisional" because, as we have seen, these people could easily get a bad case of voter’s remorse if what they were getting wasn’t exactly what they had had in mind. The support of the independent voter constituency should not be considered in the bag but, rather, in a state of waiting to see how things play out.
Being able to advance a politically discomforting option over a foolish one with facile public appeal is the mark of the kind of leader the country needs right now. Leaders who have to wait for public opinion to show them where to lead before they'll go there are not actually leading; they're just managing. Right now, we’re going to need a lot more than simple management expertise.
Actually, these proposals are far more structure-providing - toward the goal of promoting fairness within a sustainable economy - than anything else. Their reason for being is to bring huge amounts of benefit to tens of millions of hard-working Americans. There's nothing punitive about that!
When given a structure to help support the best exercise of conscience, with no exemptions for favoritism's sake, people are remarkably ready to do what is right and good, regardless of where they happen to live. It's the government's job to show leadership in that regard, not just with a bunch of feel-good rhetoric or vague pointing in the general direction of what they'd like the private sector to fix, but by taking concrete steps to provide the structure required.
In building the justificational groundwork for this approach, an important point we need to keep in mind is that corporations aren't private in the same pure sense that sole proprietorships are. In the past, Congress saw fit to extend a blanket of protection under which people doing business could operate free of the shadow of full personal accountability hanging over the heads of their principal officers. Without such protections, companies of size also became sizeable liability risks to those who owned and managed them. One could lose everything. The prospect of such unlimited financial exposure was an impediment to the general growth of commerce and discouraging to the kind of company size that would allow the discharge of the very large contracts the country depended on to develop properly; like railways, big buildings, factories and large public contracts, for instance.
Accordingly, Congress legalized the framework for a type of business where the assets of company officers would be immune from what creditors could seize to remedy financial liabilities created by the miscalculations of said officers. Thus, the American corporation model was born. Sole proprietorships have simpler reporting requirements, greater operating freedom and greater private earning potential, but the downside for them is that their owners do not enjoy the immunities against financial setbacks extended to the chief officers of corporations (who often earn huge salaries even as the companies they manage run up huge losses).
Another aspect of corporate identity that makes corporations beholden to the society they're sheltered by derives from the fact that they readily avail themselves of various forms of assistance proferred by federal agencies sponsored by the American taxpayer.
The fact that most share-held corporations could not grow, or even effectively operate, without the constant protective partnership and background sponsorship of the public sector seems to have escaped the comprehension of many corporate compensation boards. They seem to take these special public protections for granted, as if the sponsors of such protections - we, the People of this country - owed as much to them and expected no conscionable quid pro quo from them in the planning of their payrolls.
Well, guess what? In most cases, even when you're owed, if you ask for nothing in return, nothing is exactly what you’ll get.
It's time for the People of the United States to stand up and demand their rightful due from the corporations their money protects and helps, namely, pay scales that are conducive to the establishment of the kind of social equity that Americans have fought for, died for and made lay-away payments on for the past two hundred and forty-two years!
It isn't absolute measures of pay that we're talking about here. Absolute measures of pay, by themselves, mean nothing. When it comes to preserving amity in the family of the American People, the only thing that counts is relative pay. When people see a large difference between what they're able to earn and what someone else no better at his job is bringing in (as in a whole lot more), they want to know that the difference can be justified without credulity being stretched. Too often, these days, there is no justification that can suffice.
While pay differences are necessary, without a clearly justifiable basis for such differences, overt disproportionality creates poisonous feelings between individuals - resentment, envy, outrage and even outright hatred. But the picture of lost felicity doesn't stop there.
There are also social impacts to consider – as in law and order. Any form of glaring disproportion in means between people who share any kind of connection - a family, a workplace, a neighborhood, a city, a state, a country or a planet - that is arguably unfair to the lesser paid parties, will, inevitably, fuel negative consequences of every shape and size and the combined drag of those consequences will leave that collective falling short of the security they might otherwise have enjoyed.
Just ask those who have lived in deeply dichotomized societies for any length of time. The countries in question may differ in language, culture and resources but, without exception, they all exhibit similar afflictions - economic backwardness, educational regression, disease, widespread deprivation-based suffering, official corruption, high levels of crime and environmental despoilation.
My own experience in this regard, as I mentioned, comes out of growing up in South Africa and living in South America. South Africa, currently considered by many to be one of the most crime-plagued industrialized nations in the world today, is a textbook case of what happens when social equity is ignored by government over a protracted period of time. Few Americans realize that the primary impetus behind the establishment of apartheid was not racial psychology but, rather, an attempt to protect the privileged economic status of whites just as increasing numbers of the country's Bantu and mixed-race people were finding ways to get the kind of education that would provide access to professional careers and more equitable measures of pay.
The blind hatred that resulted in the tragic and senseless death of American aid worker, Amy Biehl, was a direct result of apartheid closing the door to reducing the disparity between the prospects for whites versus those left open to non-whites. By the time she arrived to do social work in the townships of the Cape, that hatred was at a fever pitch. She wasn't killed for who she was, but for the systemic inequity her white skin represented and because she failed to fully comprehend that being American and noble-hearted alone would not indemnify her against that kind of unreasoning rage.
Ironically today, a different version of that same bad blood is being directed at black refugees from Zimbabwe and Congo by South African blacks. The newcomers are considered job stealers by natives whose relative lot is still inexcusably dire more than a decade after apartheid was abolished.
The lessons Americans need to learn from the example of South African apartheid are these: one, relative disparity is deeply destructive of everything people hold dear in civil society and two, once the damage has been done, the better part of society has to work very hard for a very long time before social improvement of any kind can be realized.
By continuing to be largely oblivious to the worsening wealth dichotomy in our own country, we are definitely pushing our luck toward a socio-economic tipping point, after which things go downhill fast.
So why hasn't improvement come earlier?
For one thing, up until now, no one has managed to come up with, and popularize, the necessary snappy syntax Americans tend to respond to best drive home why such disparities in personal circumstance are, in essence, demonstrably anti-American. There needs to be a buzz in the air before we can come together as one and act.
As a result, each of us in the struggling classes must rest content, feebly clinging to the outside chance that somehow, someday, one's ship will finally come in and all one's money-related troubles will go away, opening the door to living as one has always yearned to live - truly free and financially secure. Fat chance.
That's precisely the sort of never-never rationalization they - the controlling elite - want the working masses to subscribe to (and be complicit in reinforcing) so that more inclusive social policy never gathers enough steam to force its way into the domain of the entrenched privilege they’ve worked for two centuries to create, ever since Cornelius Vanderbilt laid the groundwork for it. Over the years, they've done a pretty good job of characterizing progress toward greater inclusiveness in such a way that it remains indefinitely tabled under the suspect banner of "socialism" (as if the principal agents protecting their state of material privilege - the armed forces, the U.S. Postal Service, the Social Security Administration, Medicaid, Medicare, primary education, the judicial system, the interstate system and any government department you care to name, including the Federal Trade Commission and The Securities and Exchange Commission, and now, the Federal Treasury itself - were not basically socialist in structure, financing and operation).
So far, that approach of pretending to deplore something while discreetly welcoming all the advantages it can provide, has proven to be a very useful, albeit disingenuous, strategy for America's wealthiest and most successful. On the other hand, the knee-jerk support of the would’ve-if-they-could’ve-been rich (once the political infantry of those opposed to all things socialistic in structure), can no longer be counted on in the wake of that contingent's gut-wrenching discovery that they’d shot themselves in the economic foot with their unquestioning sponsorship of neo-liberal economic policy. Too late, they realized they'd been duped by Wall Street. Worse, they were being ditched by the thousand by companies who no longer deemed their services essential to the making of a profit, now that IT had made automated service, robotization and off-shoring so accessible.
In addition, as other more socialistically organized countries have begun to outperform us in key areas of demographic importance, such as healthcare, the electorate has begun to tire of hearing "Wolf!" every time anything remotely collectivist in nature comes up for debate.
We, the public, may be a little slow in separating truth from hypocrisy but, in the end, our collective thinking process tends to cancel out the usual pitfalls of personal bias and show itself more astute than any panel of spinmeisters or policy wonks could ever hope to be. Therein lies the intent of democracy, after all.
For anyone who cares to see it, the writing is on the wall for the status quo of recent years. The younger and more burdened half of the population finally found its way to the polls and delivered a drubbing of historic proportions at the ballot box to those who gave us what we must now fix.
This spontaneous movement - the campaign to elect and support Barack Obama - owed its strength not as much to its apparent assets as it did to the outgoing opposition's proven flaws and spectacular high-handedness in the use of national assets when they had the helm of our ship of state. The public was not just dissatisfied; it was fuming. The state of the nation was deplorable and the public was itching for change representative of purposes it could be proud of paying taxes to support. We would hear it expressed firsthand several times a day - ordinary people, sick and tired of the same old political shenanigans and looking to the prospect of a new political order that would usher in a more benign and enlightened form of governance that could not be corrupted, intimidated or distracted from taking on the work of creating a more positive and inclusive substructure to the common life of our nation.
As a result of these powerful yearnings among citizens, the Obama campaign enjoyed the provisional ideological backing of a preponderance of Americans of independent mind and generous heart who had no declared party affiliation, as well as a good many of those once affiliated who had finally broken with past habit and refused to be told what to think by the party machinery of opinion grooming.
I say "provisional" because, as we have seen, these people could easily get a bad case of voter’s remorse if what they were getting wasn’t exactly what they had had in mind. The support of the independent voter constituency should not be considered in the bag but, rather, in a state of waiting to see how things play out.
Being able to advance a politically discomforting option over a foolish one with facile public appeal is the mark of the kind of leader the country needs right now. Leaders who have to wait for public opinion to show them where to lead before they'll go there are not actually leading; they're just managing. Right now, we’re going to need a lot more than simple management expertise.
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