Re: [Marxism] C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution.

2019-08-21 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

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Louis Proyect wrote

NY Times, Aug. 21, 2019
C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution.
By Farhad Manjoo


This is the extent of what NYT views as the limits of a "revolution": 
"the [Business] Roundtable’s empty statement could be read as an effort 
to stave off structural economic reform rather than accelerate 
ittheir statement lacks any call for greater structural changes in 
the American economy — changes to how companies are taxed or regulated, 
or how executives are paid, or how they should be judged."


And the same day from Dahr Jamail comes this 
https://truthout.org/articles/living-in-two-worlds-capitalism-pretends-all-is-well-while-the-world-is-burning/: 



"Global capitalism demands we pretend all is well, while climate and 
political realities already reveal the end game we are living in. The 
U.S. government, along with many others in the western world, has 
lurched into overt authoritarianism, while climate chaos accelerates at 
a breakneck pace...Those of us who are lucky enough to be living 
somewhere in the world where there is enough food to eat, water to 
drink, and security for us and our loved ones, are living in a bubble... 
Fagre told me he didn’t expect there to be any more glaciers in Glacier 
National Park by 2030, and likely none anywhere in the lower 48 states 
by 2100...The pain of existing in this evaporating world intensifies 
against the backdrop of the rise of authoritarianism across much of the 
western world, the daily increasing wealth disparity between the 
grotesquely rich and the poverty-stricken, worsening racism, sexism, 
mass shootings, misogyny, xenophobia, and mounting pressure from the 
global refugee crisis...I find that remembering to find gratitude for 
even the smallest things helps: having clean water to drink, fresh air 
to breathe, food to eat when I am hungry, and my physical and mental 
health...He already knew of the climate crisis, yet asked me to fill in 
the details. Over the days of our time together in the backcountry, I 
walked him through my findings from the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon 
and Alaskan glaciers. I told him of my time in Utqiagvik (formerly 
Barrow) Alaska studying the thawing permafrost and venting methane, and 
of the rising seas in South Florida, and how even the sturdy giant 
Sequoia trees are under threat. I told him how much of a privilege it 
was for me to get to go see these places, and how I used the opportunity 
to say goodbye to many of them, which I expect will likely be gone 
within my lifetime, and certainly within his."


Back to my immediate reality: Monday we saw our adopted 19-year old 
daughter back off to college. She has fallen seriously in performing to 
her potential. She had crashed and burned in her second semester, 
unknown to us, even though she has an ACT score in the 99th percentile 
and is a gifted autistic phenomenon, in my judgment. She has been placed 
on academic probation. She may lose all her scholarship, tuition and 
stipend benefits. She tells me that she has no motivation. She has 
talked of suicide. She has read everything about what's happening to the 
climate and in our authoritarian-bound Trump world. She declares herself 
a socialist, but she feels all hope is lost. Over the summer we have 
tried everything to help with her motivation. We have connected her with 
a hands-on adviser and a mentor at her school, having last year joined 
her with what disability help and psychological counseling is available 
to autistically challenged students - to little or no avail. I have 
talked with her about never giving up, fighting the power, asking if it 
isn't arrogant and senseless to say that you in your vaunted 19-year 
experience have the judgment to declare that all is lost. I sent her an 
e-mail the other day about her favorite (despite my explanations about 
quadrennial lesser-evil illusions in the Democratic Party, not excluding 
the Bernie, and my many friends who 11 years ago were misty-eyed, 
literally, over the coming of Obama) Elizabeth Warren declaring that she 
is "capitalist to my bones" and reportedly standing and applauding when 
Trump in his 2019 SOTU address challenged Congress to never allow 
socialism in the US. Sam came to me crying. She is a dear, sweet, 
well-liked and well-intentioned person with a lot of the kind of promise 
it takes.


I had described to her how in order to change anything at all, certainly 
capitalism, you had to thoroughly understand it, and I had recommended 
as the obvious starting point reading Marx's 3 volumes of Capital, that 
I knew 

Re: [Marxism] C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution.

2019-08-21 Thread Gary MacLennan via Marxism
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Ellenah this article from the New York Times is not without interest. It is
fairly rubbishy of course but underneath it all there is a fear that the
way things cannot continue. I think these are all features of a saddle
time. Crisis and critique go hand in hand. The intellectuals comment in
response to the crisis and the crisis deepens. We are in the middle of it
and so it is hard to see an end. But of course all things end.

ae

Gary

On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 8:43 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>   POSTING RULES & NOTES  
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>
> NY Times, Aug. 21, 2019
> C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution.
> By Farhad Manjoo
>
> A recession looms, and the nation’s C.E.O.s are growing fearful.
>
> It isn’t the potential of downturn itself that has them alarmed —
> downturns come and downturns go, but whatever happens, chief executives,
> like cats, tend to land on their comfortably padded feet.
>
> Instead, the cause of their fear appears to be something more
> fundamental. As Alan Murray, the C.E.O. of Fortune, writes in a cover
> story chronicling the C-suite anxiety: “More and more C.E.O.s worry that
> public support for the system in which they’ve operated is in danger of
> disappearing.” They’re worried that when the next recession breaks,
> revolution might, too. This could be the hour that the ship comes in:
> The coming recession might finally prompt the masses to sharpen their
> pitchforks and demand a reckoning.
>
> Company executives are right to worry. A downturn will mark the end of a
> record period of uninterrupted economic expansion. The American economy
> has been growing for more than a decade, stock indexes recently hit new
> highs, and the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low.
>
> And yet the vast majority of Americans will not look back on the last
> decade as years of fat and plenty. This was a gilded expansion, a decade
> of creaking wage growth and profoundly unequal outcomes. The number of
> Americans receiving food stamps is 40 percent higher now than in 2008,
> yet we have twice as many billionaires as we did a decade ago.
>
> This was an expansion driven by outsized gains to a handful of
> “superstar” firms in “superstar” cities. Economic devastation reigned in
> rural areas alongside catastrophic success in urban ones — an expansion
> marked by housing crunches and infrastructure nightmares that every
> level of government seems incapable of addressing. Corporate profits
> grew as if there were no tomorrow, but they didn’t trickle down to
> everyone else. Instead, dividends and stock buybacks got bigger while
> C.E.O. pay went through the rose-gold roof. The rest of us got
> smartphones, money-losing conveniences — Uber, WeWork, Netflix and meal
> delivery apps — and mountains of student debt.
>
> And so, when recession comes, we’ll be right to ask: Was that it? Is
> this the best it gets? And if so, isn’t it time to go full Elizabeth
> Warren — to make some fundamental, radical changes to how the American
> economy works, so that we might prevent decades more of growth that
> disproportionally benefits the titans among us?
>
> But the C.E.O.s now have a plan to head off revolution. They want you to
> know: Actually, they really do care about the world. Like, a lot.
>
> This week, in a statement widely feted by well-meaning Davos types, the
> Business Roundtable — an association of chief executives of nearly 200
> companies, including Apple, Amazon, General Motors and Walmart —
> declared that the era of soulless corporatism was over. The Business
> Roundtable once held that a corporation’s “paramount duty” was to its
> shareholders. Now, the Roundtable is singing a new, more inclusive tune.
> A corporation, it says, should balance the interests of its shareholders
> with those of other “stakeholders,” including customers, employees,
> suppliers and local communities.
>
> In other words: no more Mr. Terrible Guy. Corporations are people, my
> friend, and it turns out that they’re really nice people, both
> interesting and interested, and we really must have them over for dinner
> sometime.
>
> I spent a tedious few minutes this week trying to come up with an
> analogy to convey how thoroughly empty I found the Roundtable’s gesture
> to be. I think I got one: Imagine a co-worker has been stealing your
> lunch from the office 

[Marxism] C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution.

2019-08-21 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times, Aug. 21, 2019
C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution.
By Farhad Manjoo

A recession looms, and the nation’s C.E.O.s are growing fearful.

It isn’t the potential of downturn itself that has them alarmed — 
downturns come and downturns go, but whatever happens, chief executives, 
like cats, tend to land on their comfortably padded feet.


Instead, the cause of their fear appears to be something more 
fundamental. As Alan Murray, the C.E.O. of Fortune, writes in a cover 
story chronicling the C-suite anxiety: “More and more C.E.O.s worry that 
public support for the system in which they’ve operated is in danger of 
disappearing.” They’re worried that when the next recession breaks, 
revolution might, too. This could be the hour that the ship comes in: 
The coming recession might finally prompt the masses to sharpen their 
pitchforks and demand a reckoning.


Company executives are right to worry. A downturn will mark the end of a 
record period of uninterrupted economic expansion. The American economy 
has been growing for more than a decade, stock indexes recently hit new 
highs, and the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low.


And yet the vast majority of Americans will not look back on the last 
decade as years of fat and plenty. This was a gilded expansion, a decade 
of creaking wage growth and profoundly unequal outcomes. The number of 
Americans receiving food stamps is 40 percent higher now than in 2008, 
yet we have twice as many billionaires as we did a decade ago.


This was an expansion driven by outsized gains to a handful of 
“superstar” firms in “superstar” cities. Economic devastation reigned in 
rural areas alongside catastrophic success in urban ones — an expansion 
marked by housing crunches and infrastructure nightmares that every 
level of government seems incapable of addressing. Corporate profits 
grew as if there were no tomorrow, but they didn’t trickle down to 
everyone else. Instead, dividends and stock buybacks got bigger while 
C.E.O. pay went through the rose-gold roof. The rest of us got 
smartphones, money-losing conveniences — Uber, WeWork, Netflix and meal 
delivery apps — and mountains of student debt.


And so, when recession comes, we’ll be right to ask: Was that it? Is 
this the best it gets? And if so, isn’t it time to go full Elizabeth 
Warren — to make some fundamental, radical changes to how the American 
economy works, so that we might prevent decades more of growth that 
disproportionally benefits the titans among us?


But the C.E.O.s now have a plan to head off revolution. They want you to 
know: Actually, they really do care about the world. Like, a lot.


This week, in a statement widely feted by well-meaning Davos types, the 
Business Roundtable — an association of chief executives of nearly 200 
companies, including Apple, Amazon, General Motors and Walmart — 
declared that the era of soulless corporatism was over. The Business 
Roundtable once held that a corporation’s “paramount duty” was to its 
shareholders. Now, the Roundtable is singing a new, more inclusive tune. 
A corporation, it says, should balance the interests of its shareholders 
with those of other “stakeholders,” including customers, employees, 
suppliers and local communities.


In other words: no more Mr. Terrible Guy. Corporations are people, my 
friend, and it turns out that they’re really nice people, both 
interesting and interested, and we really must have them over for dinner 
sometime.


I spent a tedious few minutes this week trying to come up with an 
analogy to convey how thoroughly empty I found the Roundtable’s gesture 
to be. I think I got one: Imagine a co-worker has been stealing your 
lunch from the office fridge for years. Then, one day, he strolls in 
with a big grin and grand announcement. Maybe he unfolds a scroll and 
blows a trumpet. He has realized that “lunch maximization” might not 
have been the best approach after all, and he will now try to be aware 
of the wider consequences of some of his actions. Yes, he still really 
wants your lunch. Yes, he will probably still fight any efforts to 
prevent him from taking your lunch. But you should know that he also 
feels a tinge bad about how it’s all worked out. So, no hard feelings?


I mean: Yay? It’s nice that C.E.O.s have vowed to turn over a new leaf. 
But their statement lacks any call for greater structural changes in the 
American economy — changes to how companies are taxed or regulated, or 
how executives are paid, or how they should be judged.


And because a public corporation’s most direct incentives — including 
the C.E.O.’s pay — remain tied to stock performance,