Americans questioning US capitalism?

Americans are finally beginning to question a system that values 
wealth and yet ignores integrity 

Madeleine Bunting
Monday March 3, 2003
The Guardian 

The preoccupation with the Iraq crisis has dragged on since the 
summer, proliferating over pages of newsprint, gobbling up 
television news night after night. It is stretching the inventiveness 
of editors as they recycle those UN flagpoles, images of dusty 
weapons in Iraq, and soldiers amassing in the Kuwaiti desert. It is 
one of the (many) depressing features of this crisis that it is 
sucking in all the oxygen in public life. The debate over progressive 
politics in this country is suspended, mid-sentence, waiting for this 
crisis to reach its culmination. So a whole raft of pressing issues 
has sunk, barely visible below the media radar. Tony Blair's major 
speech on sustainable development slips downpage to details of just 
how far the al-Samoud 2 missiles can reach; given the immediacy of 
war, all else appears irredeemably irrelevant. It seems a tragic 
squandering of political energies; fiddling while Rome burns.
 
Take just one theme being played out in influential parts of the 
American business press: a profound self-questioning about the 
ethics and characteristics of capitalism has taken grip, and 
challenges the most cherished of national beliefs, the American 
dream, suggesting it is no more than myth for millions. Scooped 
into this wide-ranging debate is everything from the nature of 
greed to the ethics of inequality, the meaning of life and just 
what exactly is the purpose of business. American capitalism is in 
the full throes of an existential crisis. 

It is a belated triumph for the anti-corporate campaigners of the 
late 1990s (although arguable whether they can claim the credit). 
Their agenda of tackling corporate greed, corruption and inequality 
is recruiting unexpected allies - from the very heart of the beast. 
It is the disillusioned corporate man, the stock analyst, the 
entrepreneur - in short, the wealthy - who are asking: "What is it 
all for?" It recasts old questions of social justice into issues of 
personal ethics. Just what made Andrew Fastow of Enron quite so 
greedy? asks the lead article in the current issue of Harvard 
Business Review (HBR). It goes on to quote the judgment of Alan 
Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, to Congress, that 
"infectious greed" had contaminated US business. What makes it such 
an important development to track is that it will have some impact - 
who knows how much or when - on the political will to tackle what 
will be the most striking characteristic of developed economies in 
this century: sharply accelerating inequality. This weekend will be 
a key moment, when the fledgling Responsible Wealth campaign co-
founded by Bill Gates Snr, holds its annual convention in Seattle - 
on a platform of opposing the repeal of inheritance tax proposed by 
George Bush, and pledging to pay living wages to its employees. 
This campaign turns political assumptions upside down; its membership 
is exclusively drawn from the top 5% wealthiest Americans. Such is 
their embarrassment of riches they want to pay more tax not less, 
and they want a more egalitarian America.* 

The reference that crops up repeatedly is to an earlier Gilded Age - 
that of a previous fin de siècle excess when the Vanderbilts built 
their opulent mansions and strikes ended in bloody violence. Was the 
1990s as bad, the only difference the pitiful, hopeless apathy of 
America's working poor? Is it right that a chief executive now earns 
419 times as much as his workers, compared with a multiple of 42 
only 20 years ago? There's a distinct odour of self- revulsion; how 
could we have been so blinded by our rising stock valuations to laud 
the chief executives of companies such as Enron and overlook their 
corruption? HBR's remarkable mea culpa last month asks: "With a deep, 
almost reflexive trust in the free market, are Americans somehow 
greedier than other peoples?" and concludes that in the Gilded Age 
only the wealthy were greedy, whereas "the 1990s saw the 
democratisation of greed". 

What lies behind this change of heart is no mystery: it is the hangover 
from the 1990s boom. With the stock market in freefall and the dot.com 
bubble burst, America is emerging, dazed. Huge scandals such as Enron 
have cast a long shadow over the structure of American capitalism - 
its auditing, its valuations on Wall Street. "People's trust in 
business and those who lead it, is today cracking," wrote Charles 
Handy, one of America's favourite UK imports, and he pointed out that 
the top 100 Nasdaq companies overstated actual audited profits in the 
first nine months of 2001 by a staggering $100 billion. He quotes a 
Gallup poll which found that 90% of Americans felt that people running 
corporations could not be trusted to look after their employees. 

Surely the most astonishing apogee of this mood of self-doubt is the 
cover story of this month's Fast Company, the magazine that defined 
the breathless and lucrative excitement of the dot.com era. Now it 
is asking the age-old question: does money make you happy? It picks 
up on the fact that exhaustive statistical international research 
indicates that, in the last decades of the 20th century, there was 
a sharp drop in the number of Americans reporting themselves as 
"very happy". The toll of American wealth has not just been exacted 
on the environment, but on the quality of American lives. It goes 
on to ponder "the sound of a nation questioning the meaning of 
success and the value of money" and calls for a redefinition of 
success to include such old-fashioned ingredients as strong 
relationships and personal integrity. 

This rich seam of guilt, self-doubt and feeling duped is a totally 
different American story from the one we are most familiar with - 
the aggressive self-assertion of Bush and his cronies for global 
hegemony - but perhaps the two feed off each other. Insecurity, of 
course, is a well known trigger for aggression, and in America it 
has been cast primarily in terms of terrorist attack. 

But perhaps we are overlooking insecurities in the American psyche - 
about what it values, what is success both for individuals and for 
the nation? What does morality amount to in a nation where a quarter 
of all children live below the poverty line? Or for a host of 
national heroes who have proved to have feet of clay, such as Kenneth 
Lay of Enron and Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski (who famously blew a 
million of his company's dollars on his wife's birthday party)? 

The reach for empire sharpens these questions uncomfortably for a 
nation of believers whose patriotism is bound up with a sense of 
divine mission - how can you talk of a benign imperium, if that 
imperium is rotting at its core? 

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* Responsible Wealth UK is launched by the Citizens Organising 
  Foundation next Monday.