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