I often rant about about the wholesale greed and theft that seems to permeate every board room and executive committee in the US, about how this endemic perversion of capitalist enterprise is so readily accepted, justified, and defended by so many. I was a bit stunned when I witnessed the Board of my former employer, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America, raise their CEO’s salary from about $100,000 in 1998 to $500,000 by 2003/4 or thereabout. The top executives in that organization were soon taking home a couple of million per year extra, an amount unfathomable to the 4 billion or so in the world who make less than $5 dollars a day. Frankly, I thought it was criminal. What’s worse, the LLS is a charity, and the newly inflated salaries are peanuts compared to executive compensation in most public companies.

What monster could have eaten up the brains of those in charge of our society so that they think theft on such a scale is justifiable? And now, the house of cards that was, to use William Grieder’s term, “the casino economy,” appears to be tumbling down. I think Noam Chomsky, as quoted in yesterday’s BBC News, has offered the best analysis I’ve seen, pointing as he did to the institutional, structural flaws that have made all of this imaginable:

The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialise cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice.

I think that it is also useful to keep in mind that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act happened during, and with the encouragement of, the Clinton administration — so before we are too quick to run off and blame our favorite partisan punching bag, it is best to recall that both the aggressive militarism of the US as well as its irresponsible fiscal and economic policies of the past few decades have been very much a product of the two institutional ruling parties.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 12:48 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.