Curbing Oligopolies

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/25/curbing-oligopolies/

The call to “occupy Wall Street” is a call to occupy corporations. But how do we actually do that? Here are three ways.

1. Occupying the Boardroom

The first thing to recognize about our big corporations is that they have thousands and even hundreds of thousands of owners; as a result, there is nobody to mind the store. Nominally, every corporation has an independent board of directors. But as Ross Perot observed long ago, in 1985, “The managers of mature corporations with no concentration of owners have gotten themselves into the position of effectively selecting the board members who will represent the stockholders.” And how does a board that is loyal to the CEO behave? Perot was intimately familiar with the relationship between the board of GM and its CEO at the time, Roger Smith, because he was trying to take over the company. “Is the board a rubber stamp for Roger?” Perot asked. “Hell, no!” he said, answering his own question. “We’d have to upgrade it to be a rubber stamp.”

The victims of these corporate hijackings are everywhere. Executives fleece both shareholders and workers, paying themselves enormous salaries that bear no relationship to the work that they do, and dipping into company funds to finance political candidates who side with them against the interests of both shareholders and workers (many shareholders are of course workers themselves). Germany faced this very problem before the rise of Hitler and has some interesting lessons to offer.

The stock market crash of 1929 had even more dire consequences for Germany than it did for the US. The German government had a budget deficit at the time, and it financed it by short term loans from US banks. After the crash the banks could not renew the loans and the German government wanted to raise taxes. At first, German executives supported the policy because it would have balanced the budget. But when the Nazi executive of Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG (United Steelworks) Fritz Thyssens pointed out that forcing the government to cut its expenses would increase unemployment and weaken unions, they withdrew their support. The government then cut its expenditures and unemployment and suffering soared just as the executives hoped they would. Workers concluded that they had no choice but to vote for pro-labor parties. But they were no match for the executives who used their corporate coffers to finance Hitler who promised to crush the unions.

More at the link --

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. This is interesting. n/t

-Laelth