Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
The
other day, at our local bookstore, we passed a book. And then doubled back.
The book is titled Who Owns America?: A Declaration of Independence.
Sounded like it was written by people we should know. But on further
investigation, we recognized none of the names on the cover.
Who
Owns America? was written by 21 "conservative" decentralists. And it
was first published in 1936. Re-released this year, with a new
introduction by Seton Hall University History Professor Edward S. Shapiro, Who
Owns America? (ISI Books, Wilmington, Delaware, 1999), is highly critical of
large corporate institutions that controlled the political economy in 1930s
America. Its publisher believes the book is as relevant today as the day it was
published.
Edited
by Pulitizer Prize winning Louisville Courier-Journal columnist Herbert Agar and
southern poet Allen Tate, Who Owns America? puts forth the type of scathing
critique that you just can’t find in today’s political debates. Like
today’s corporatist conservatives — George Will, James Glassman and Charles
Krauthammer — the conservatives who wrote Who Owns America? believed that the
specter of big government threatened individual freedom and the ideal America.
But unlike the corporatists of today, Agar, Tate and their colleagues
understood that public authority was the only antidote to the excesses of big
corporate power.
Agar,
Tate and their colleagues argued that to attain the conservative goal of less
government, you’d first have to limit the size and power of the large corporate
institutions that were roaming the land.
Typical
of the 1930s conservatives writing in this volume is the pro-decentralist
economist Richard Ransom. "The permanent lease on life which corporations
possess tends more and more to concentrate within a few hands the ownership and
control of general property," wrote Ransom in a chapter titled Corporate
and Individual Persons. "The disproportionate distribution of the national
wealth is very evidently due in large part to the corporate tendency to mass
larger and larger aggregates of ownership which are held together by corporate
permanence and corporate inertia. …"
Ransom’s
solution to the problem of corporate control of the national wealth? Federal
chartering of corporations doing interstate business. And what should the
states do about excessive corporate power? The states should limit the
"profitable business life of the corporations which they charter."
And how could the states accomplish this end?
"This
could perhaps be done by means of heavy selective inheritance taxation on the
transfer of corporate shares or assets," Ransom answers. And what
would this achieve?
"Such
a shorter term of corporate life, either accomplished indirectly as suggested
here or accomplished by more immediate means, will produce a more direct
personal responsibility in corporate managements," Ransom says. Once
interstate corporations are federally chartered, Ransom proposes that the
personal liability of stockholders should be extended to an amount at least
equal to twice the proportionate investment of each stockholder (currently, you
can only lose what you put in.)
Can
you imagine Will or Krauthammer contemplating these thoughts?
Lyle
Lanier, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, wrote a chapter
titled "Big Business in the Property State," in which he observed that
"the American people have long recognized the danger to democracy of
economic power concentrated in the hands of big corporations." Lawmakers
passed the antitrust laws at the turn of the century, "but these laws have
been impotent to stem the rising tide of big business organization," Lanier
wrote.
Industrial
capitalism, Lanier wrote, "has followed a course of development which is
both self-destructive and dangerous to democratic institutions." Lanier,
like his co-authors, finds hope in a Jeffersonian ideal of small business and
small farmers.
The
publication of this volume today makes George Will, James Glassman and their
conservative contemporaries look like empty suits compared those who wrote Who
Owns America?. Big corporations still roam the land and still threaten a
fragile democracy. But there is no Agar on the right to challenge them.
Needless
to say, we cannot and do not agree with everything written by these 21
self-proclaimed "conservatives" of the 1930s.
But
we do agree with the conservative sentiment put forth in the book, as summarized
by Agar, that corporate concentration and democracy are at odds.
"When
democracy goes down before monopoly capitalism," Agar writes, "the
result has been a greedy tyranny, preserving all the vices of capitalism and
extinguishing its virtues."
Russell
Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor.
They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the
Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999, http://www.corporatepredators.org)