「華人戴明學院」是戴明哲學的學習共同體 ,致力於淵博型智識系統的研究、推廣和運用。 The purpose of this blog is to advance the ideas and ideals of W. Edwards Deming.

2015年9月8日 星期二

Robert Reich 訪談:A Crisis of Public Morality. Paradox of Capitalism..."拯救資本主義"

多產作家Robert Reich 教授在八零年代的作品為Dr. Deming 的Out of the Crisis  (1986)引用:

第 101 頁
(From Robert B. Reich, "The next American frontier," Atlantic, March 1983, pp. 43-57.) Banks could help long-range planning, and thus protect funds ... 第 130 頁
(Private communication from Robert B. Reich.) Students in schools of business in America are taught that there is a profession of management ; that they are ...

2015.9, Robert Reich 的新書之一是"拯救資本主義" “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few,”
近2年來,我都可以從Facebook 讀到他的高論/影片。


People often ask me what nation we should emulate. I tell them: The United States, between 1946 and 1980. It wasn't perfect by any means -- but at least we were widening the circle of prosperity and improving our democracy: Huge investments in education and infrastructure, paid for by a top marginal tax rate that was never below 70 percent (now our investments are way down, and the top marginal rate is roughly half that); the regulation of Wall Street, that made banking boring (now, banks continue to treat the economy as a giant casino); over a third of American workers in the private sector unionized (now, fewer than 7 percent are); CEO pay that averaged 20 times the average worker (now it's nearly 300 times), and corporations that responded to the needs of their workers and communities as well as their shareholders (now it's barely shareholders).
Here's a short 2.5 minute clip from "Inequality for All" that illustrates where we used to be, and where we are now.
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A Crisis of Public Morality, Not Private Morality

At a time many Republican presidential candidates and state legislators are furiously focusing on private morality – what people do in their bedrooms, contraception, abortion, gay marriage – America is experiencing a far more significant crisis in public morality.
All this is in sharp contrast to the first three decades after World War II. … We had a shared sense of public morality because we knew we were all in it together. We had been through a Great Depression and a terrible war, and we understood our interdependence.
CEOs of large corporations now earn 300 times the wages of average workers. Insider trading is endemic on Wall Street, where hedge-fund and private-equity moguls are taking home hundreds of millions.
A handful of extraordinarily wealthy people are investing unprecedented sums in the upcoming election, seeking to rig the economy for their benefit even more than it’s already rigged.
Yet the wages of average working people continue to languish as jobs are off-shored or off-loaded onto “independent contractors.”
All this is in sharp contrast to the first three decades after World War II.
Then, the typical CEO earned no more than 40 times what the typical worker earned, and Wall Street was boring.
Then, the wealthy didn’t try to control elections.
And in that era, the wages of most Americans rose.
Profitable firms didn’t lay off their workers. They didn’t replace full-time employees with independent contractors, or bust unions. They gave their workers a significant share of the gains.
Consumers, workers and the community were considered stakeholders of almost equal entitlement.
We invested in education and highways and social services. We financed all of this with our taxes.
The marginal income tax on the highest income earners never fell below 70 percent. Even the effective rate, after all deductions and tax credits, was still well above 50 percent.
We had a shared sense of public morality because we knew we were all in it together. We had been through a Great Depression and a terrible war, and we understood our interdependence.
But over time, we forgot.
The change began when Wall Street convinced the Reagan Administration and subsequent administrations to repeal regulations put in place after the crash of 1929 to prevent a repeat of the excesses that had led to the Great Depression.
This, in turn, moved the American economy from stakeholder capitalism to shareholder capitalism, whose sole objective is to maximize shareholder returns.
Shareholder capitalism ushered in an era of excess. In the 1980s it brought junk bond scandals and insider trading.
In the 1990s it brought a speculative binge culminating in the bursting of the dotcom bubble. At the urging of Wall Street, Bill Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated investment from commercial banking.
In 2001 and 2002 it produced Enron and the corporate looting scandals, revealing not only the dark side of some of the most admired companies in America but also the complicity of Wall Street, many of whose traders were actively involved.
The Street’s subsequent gambling in derivatives and risky mortgages resulted in the crash of 2008, and a massive taxpayer-financed bailout.
The Dodd-Frank Act attempted to rein in the Street but Wall Street lobbyists have done everything possible to eviscerate it. Republicans haven’t even appropriated sufficient money to enforce it.
The final blow to public morality came when a majority of the Supreme Court decided corporations and wealthy individuals have a right under the First Amendment to spend whatever they wish on elections.
Public morality can’t be legislated but it can be encouraged.
Glass-Steagall must be resurrected. Big banks have to be broken up.
CEO pay must be bridled. Pay in excess of $1 million shouldn’t be deductible from corporate income taxes. Corporations with high ratios of executive pay to typical workers should face higher tax rates than those with lower ratios.
People earning tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year should pay the same 70 percent tax rate top earners paid before 1981.
And we must get big money out of politics – reversing those Supreme Court rulings, providing public financing of elections, and getting full disclosure of the sources of all campaign contributions.
None of this is possible without a broadly based citizen movement to rescue our democracy, take back our economy, and restore a minimal standard of public morality.
America’s problems have nothing to do with what happens bedrooms, or whether women are allowed to end their pregnancies.
Our problems have everything to do with what occurs in boardrooms, and whether corporations and wealthy individuals are allowed to undermine our democracy.
The views expressed in this post are the authors’ alone, and presented here to offer a variety of perspectives to our readers.
Watch Bill Moyers’s interview with Robert Reich on Inequality
Robert B. Reich is the chancellor’s professor of public policy at UC-Berkeley and former secretary of labor under the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the 20th century. He is also a founding editor of theAmerican Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. His new film, Inequality for All, was released in 2013. You can follow him on Twitter at @RBReich.





2:29/2:29

















2009
Paradox of Capitalism
by Edward H. Baker

2/17/09
Economist Robert Reich believes that the excesses of capitalism have produced a world order in which people feel good as consumers but suffer as citizens.

When Robert Reich published Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life in 2007, the U.S. economy was growing, the financial sector was intact, and the housing bubble had just begun to leak. Although that now seems like decades ago, the former Secretary of Labor’s core argument still has a decidedly clear ring of truth; indeed, perhaps now more than ever.

There’s a paradox at the center of every capitalist democracy, Reich believes. “Capitalism has become more responsive to what we want as individual purchasers of goods, but democracy has grown less responsive to what we want together as citizens,” he wrote. In other words, our individual power as consumers and investors has expanded in manifold ways — we can get virtually anything we desire, usually quickly, cheaply, and on credit if necessary — but our ability as citizens to influence the rules of how the economy should operate (which ultimately have a profound impact on our daily lives) has eroded measurably.

Reich, currently professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, recently sat down with strategy+business to update his thoughts from Supercapitalism in light of the bailout of the banking sector, the swirling economic crisis, and the Obama administration.
S+B: Do you view the ongoing multi-hundred billion dollar bailout of the financial sector as an inevitable result of the cozy relationships that have formed between Wall Street and Washington during the rise of “supercapitalism”?
REICH:
There’s no doubt that Wall Street has huge clout in Washington, not just in terms of all the campaign contributions given by the banks, but also by virtue of the personnel who move from Wall Street to Washington and back at very high levels. The other important fact is that most people in Washington, even those at relatively responsible levels of public policy, find themselves somewhat intimidated by Wall Street. Often, they don’t fully understand finance. They fear that they will be held accountable if something goes terribly wrong with financial markets, particularly if they have not done what Wall Street wants.
And because of that fear and the connections between Wall Street and Washington, there is a fundamental question involving the bailout that few people in positions of power are willing to ask: Why should taxpayers be bailing out Wall Street’s executives, shareholders, and creditors? After all, these executives, shareholders, and creditors were paid to take risks; they just made the mistake of taking the wrong ones.
S+B: And because the bailout skeptics are relatively quiet, there is a general belief that the Bush administration, through Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, may have worsened economic conditions by not rescuing Lehman. What is your position?
REICH:
I’m not sure I agree with the conventional wisdom. After all, the panic on Wall Street is mostly about Wall Street’s own investors and creditors. To be sure, they constitute a large number of people and institutions. But the mutual funds and pension funds, where most Americans’ savings are held, are really not in jeopardy. Capital markets have ceased to function because Wall Street made some colossal errors, in terms of risk management. How in the world are those errors ever going to be rectified unless Wall Street executives, creditors, and investors pay a severe penalty?
Now ask the question a slightly different way: Why should Wall Street executives, shareholders, and creditors come out any better from this taxpayer-supported bailout than they would under a typical Chapter 11 reorganization, where they would get relief from a portion of their debts and bad loans, but not all of them, and they would have to restructure compensation, management, and governance procedures? Despite the bailout — and the relatively easy course that Wall Street has enjoyed — Main Street is still suffering: People are losing their homes at a faster rate than they did before. Small businesses can’t get loans, creditworthy car buyers and others are seeing credit lines shrivel and disappear. So from the standpoint of average Americans, the bailout has had no positive effect whatsoever.
Frankly, I don’t quite understand why Lehman didn’t go into Chapter 11. Now, maybe it was too small, or it wasn’t prepared to go into Chapter 11. But in general I don’t see why Wall Street firms are in any greater danger of Chapter 7 liquidation when they can’t pay their bills than any company in the real economy. Even Citigroup: Presumably it is worth more alive than dead. Its creditors would much rather that it stay afloat to pay off its loans than disappear completely. And it has a lot of assets — not necessarily physical assets, but a very strong customer base and a lot of talent. No one would support that it would cease to exist if it chose Chapter 11.
S+B: So you see the contours of the bailout as little more than a successful marketing effort?
REICH:
It’s a giant public relations campaign. But I’m not sure that anyone consciously regards it as such. The Treasury Department traditionally has been Wall Street’s embassy in Washington. Treasury secretaries traditionally are closely allied with Wall Street. I’m sure Hank Paulson views Citibank or Morgan Stanley or his old hunting ground, Goldman Sachs, as profoundly different from a manufacturing company or another major services company. The funny thing is, I think that Paulson would be aghast to think of what he did as industrial policy. But of course that’s exactly what he did.
S+B: Might that opposition to setting industrial policy explain why the bailout of the banking sector has been so much easier to sell than the bailout of Detroit?
REICH:
Detroit’s clout in Washington has diminished, while Wall Street’s influence has grown. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce has traditionally represented Detroit’s needs, and the United Auto Workers [UAW] union has had a powerful presence in Washington for many years. But Michigan Representative John Dingell, who headed up the House committee, has been stripped of his chairmanship and the UAW is losing members. So Detroit increasingly seems less politically important, although obviously the states that feed into the auto industry — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, as well as Michigan — remain critical battleground states when it comes to presidential elections. But there are many other states that have their own auto industry that happens to be owned by non-American firms. All of this turmoil among the U.S. automakers and their backers adds up in the end to a loss of importance in Washington, except perhaps at election time. And that makes it increasingly difficult for the Big Three to get what they want from D.C.
I expect that the likely outcome for the auto industry would be a kind of cross between Chapter 11 and public bailout, not unlike what happened to Chrysler in the early 1980s. Every stakeholder will be required to sacrifice, and that means creditors, shareholders, executives, and blue-collar employees, to ensure that there is enough money on the table for Detroit to restructure itself. Taxpayer dollars have already been added to that money, but only on the condition that the other stakeholders make real sacrifices and that there is a restructuring plan.
Today, the management of the Big Three seems to believe that if they can only get through the recession, they’ll be fine. They view their challenge as primarily cyclical. They may be right technically, but they’re wrong over the long haul. Their challenge is structural. They’ve been losing market share for years, they’ve been producing cars that the public doesn’t want. Few young car buyers would ever think to buy an American car anymore. The Big Three have to come up with an entirely different vision of their industry and of their operations, and I hope that that is part of any bailout.
S+B: Why has it taken Detroit so long to get this message, when it’s so obvious to so many people?
REICH:
The culture at the Big Three is very insular, for one thing. The invasion of Japanese carmakers into the U.S. to make vehicles shook up Detroit, and in response, the Big Three have made substantial improvements in quality. But management and labor are still living in a different age. They haven’t been shaken up nearly enough. Labor understands the situation probably better than management. The new UAW contract recognizes the need for substantial changes. Young workers will be coming into the Big Three with wage and benefit packages not all that different from what American workers are getting from the Japanese automakers. But there’s still a long way to go on the management side.
S+B: You were one of the earliest supporters of President Obama during the primary season, a somewhat unexpected move considering your connections to the Clinton administration. And you have served Obama as an advisor on economic matters. Why do you believe that the Obama administration has a chance to make a difference in a very difficult time?
REICH: The economy stinks, and the country is fed up with the old order. We’ve gotten ourselves into a terrible mess, and it’s not going to be easy to get out of it. But no president runs the economy. Not even the head of the Federal Reserve runs the economy. There are limits to what monetary policy can do. Having said that, I have high hopes for the changing of the guard. Obama is exceedingly capable, and I have great faith in him and the new administration to do what is necessary to at least put the brakes on supercapitalism and begin the remaking of a sustainable economy that serves Main Street as well as Wall Street
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Author Profile:
Edward H. Baker, former editor of CIO Insight magazine, is a contributing editor at strategy+business.

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