DISMISSING AND DISTRUSTING THE PROFIT MOTIVE

In most quarters of our society there’s no shame in possessing money (or the flashy signifiers of wealth and comfort) but there is an odd unease over admitting the means by which those resources were acquired. We all benefit from the unparalleled and prodigious productivity of the capitalist system but feel uncomfortable in embracing the pursuit of profit at its very core.

Recent surveys, for instance, display startling levels of contempt for leaders of business, reflecting the assumption that entrepreneurs and executives count as sleazy, greedy, selfish and unreliable. In February, 2009, a Harris Interactive poll asked 1,050 respondents if “people on Wall Street” were “as honest and moral as other people”; a stunning 70% said “no.” In November of 2008, a Gallup Poll evaluated the “Honesty and Ethics of Professions.” The category “business executives” ranked near the bottom --- even below such frequently reviled occupations as “Lawyers,” “Labor Union Leaders,” “Funeral Directors” and “Real Estate Agents.” (The businessmen beat out only “Congressmen,” “Car Salesmen,” “Telemarketers,” “Advertising practitioners” and, at the very bottom of the barrel, “Lobbyists”.)

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In a similar survey of “America’s Most Admired Professions” for the Harris organization, the designation “Business Executive” fared even worse. The bulk of 1,020 respondents felt that these capitalist commanders deserved “hardly any prestige at all,” ranking them 21st out of 23 categories – barely outpolling only “Stock Broker” and “Real Estate Agent.” The most prestigious professions, in order, were “Firefighter,” “Doctor,” “Nurse,” “Scientist,” “Teacher,” “Military Officer,” “Police Officer,” “Clergyman,” “Farmer,” and “Engineer.” As Forbes Magazine aptly observed, “none of top-ten most admired jobs can be accurately described as being driven by the profit motive – quite a contradiction in a country that was built on it. The A-list is comprised of those who serve others, including engineers (they build things) and farmers who ‘feed the world.’)”

Surprisingly, this survey appeared in the summer of 2006 – well before the financial meltdown of September, 2008 and the beginning of the most recent recession provoked a fresh tidal wave of stories about corporate malfeasance and the collapse of capitalism. In the last generation, public attitudes toward the business community have remained unexpectedly consistent and overwhelmingly negative, regardless of the vagaries of the stock market or the unemployment rate. For most Americans this antagonism begins in childhood, with school curricula that downplays the prominent participation of corporations, free enterprise and the accumulation of wealth in the development of the United States.

CENSORING AND SLANTING THE AMERICAN STORY

Even the most cursory examination of elementary and middle school textbooks reveals the present tendency to distort or ignore the role of business in building the country. Consider the national holidays celebrated in the course of an academic year.

--For Thanksgiving, kids learn all about the idealistic Pilgrims and their interaction with the Indians, but hear nothing about their obsessive concern to make their colony profitable or their sponsorship by a for-profit corporation back in England, the London Company.

--Our little ones prepare for Presidents Day by studying Lincoln the Great Emancipator and Washington, the military hero and Father of Our Country, but they spend no time acknowledging the deep business involvements of both men. Lincoln became prosperous and prominent (by the standards of his time and place) by pursuing a career as a corporate lawyer, specializing in representing railroads and other dynamic enterprises. Washington, meanwhile, became one of the richest plantation owners in the colonies through his land investments and the canny, hard-headed management of the resources he acquired after marriage to the wealthy widow, Martha; in contrast to his careless Virginia colleague, Thomas Jefferson, he cared deeply about his financial status and avoided debt and money-losing ventures.

-- In preparing for the fireworks of the Fourth of July, most kids get some exposure to the revolutionary slogan “no taxation without representation,” but never connect it to the background of nearly all our Founders as entrepreneurial merchants and farmers ready to risk their lives to prevent undue governmental interference in their business affairs.

-- Finally, we focus on the nation’s military history on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, but seldom acknowledge that all the greatest victories of the United States owe as much to economic power and prosperity as to battlefield courage. The Union forces prevailed in the War Between the States because the industrial might of the North easily out-produced the Confederacy. In World War I, America rescued our struggling British and French allies as much with financial support as with a massive expeditionary force, and 27 years later the unprecedented manufacture of planes, war ships, tanks, landing craft and, ultimately, atom bombs played an utterly decisive part in crushing the Germans and the Japanese. In the forty-five year struggle against Communism in the Cold War, Americans shed blood (in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere) but finally prevailed through the vastly superior productivity and prosperity of our economic system.

When social studies classes teach stories about American heroes they will naturally include inspiring tales about the civil rights activism of Martin Luther King, of the pioneering feminism of suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, or the fierce resistance of Indian warriors like Tecumseh or Sitting Bull (who actually slaughtered members of the American military, but never mind). It’s even possible that new generations will discover the amazing contributions of “inventor” Thomas Edison, but they learn nothing about the fact that he actually spent most of his time and energy building major corporations to make sure he enjoyed the monetary rewards of his technological breakthroughs. No business leader currently occupies a place on the A-list in the American pantheon and if youngsters hear anything at all about the builders and bosses who made the nation the world’s dominant power they will study sneering accounts of their predations as “Robber Barons.”

By the time Franklin Roosevelt took over the White House for the first of his four elected terms, the hostility and scorn for the captains of capitalism had migrated from the magazines and salons of radicals and mandarins into the larger society’s cultural and political mainstream.

In his celebrated inaugural address of 1933, FDR himself not only warned about the paralyzing impact of “fear itself,” but denounced “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods” in harsh and sweeping terms unthinkable for a major American politician of the 21st century. “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men,” thundered the new president, in unmistakably Biblical terms. “Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored conditions. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.

“They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

“The money changers have fled their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.

“The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

Amazingly, at a moment of acute financial crisis and uncertainty in the business community, Roosevelt sought to return confidence and vitality to the free market system by denouncing (repeatedly) the pursuit of profit. In his stirring speech, he presented no specific cures for the devastation of the Depression but he affixed unequivocal and exclusive blame for the national catastrophe on the “unscrupulous money changers.”

“CORRUPTION IS WHY WE WIN!”

Growing up in a family that worshipped Roosevelt (my immigrant grandmother kept a framed photo of the late president on her living room wall till the day of her death in 1961), I saw no reason to question FDR’s indictment of the “economic royalists”—that capitalist class denounced by the president’s distant cousin Theodore as “malefactors of great wealth.”

Cultural encounters – particularly at the movies --- reinforced the notion that great power in the business world normally meant great (and appalling) compromises in terms of basic decency and morality.

The most common template for Hollywood’s business-bashing involves some unlikely, underdog hero or heroine (generally played by a glamorous star, of course) digging deep for unexpected reserves of courage and pluck to do battle against some evil, all-powerful corporation. In “Norma Rae” (1979), Sally Field stands up against a corrupt, rapacious, union-busting textile mill; in “The Verdict” (1982), Paul Newman stands up against the corrupt, rapacious health care industry; in “Silkwood” (1983) Meryl Streep stands up against a corrupt, rapacious nuclear power company; in “A Civil Action” John Travolta stands up against corrupt, rapacious conglomerates associated with a polluting Massachusetts tannery; in “American Beauty” (1999) Kevin Spacey stands up against the corrupt, rapacious values of his supposed suburban paradise (and his corrupt, faithless realtor wife); in “The Insider” Al Pacino AND Russell Crowe stand up against a corrupt, rapacious tobacco company. Just in time for the upcoming market meltdown, 2007 brought two business-bashing Oscar nominees for Best Picture. In “Michael Clayton”, George Clooney stands up (somewhat reluctantly) to a corrupt, rapacious drug company, but in “There Will be Blood” no one can possibly stand up to Daniel Day Lewis, a flamboyantly villainous monster who becomes a wealthy, 1920’s oil tycoon by overwhelming everything else on screen (including the handsomely photographed natural scenery).

Lewis won the Best Actor Academy Award for his ferocious performance as an implacably evil entrepreneur (and fulfilling the prophecy, “There Will Be Oscars”), and in 2005 George Clooney won Best Supporting Actor for his role as a disillusioned CIA operative in yet another condemnation of corporations, “Syriana.” In this unapologetically anti-American film, U.S. oil companies represent the ultimate source of cruelty and injustice on the planet and earn even less sympathetic treatment than the CIA or blissfully determined, suicidal jihadists. Tim Blake Nelson plays an energy protective whose corrosive cynicism seems designed to make Gordon Gekko seem idealistic and pure-hearted. Rather than praising greed, Nelson’s character hails the power of corruption itself: “Corruption is our protection,” he helpfully explains. “Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win!”

Meanwhile, no big studio film went further in demonstrating the prevailing fear and loathing of big business than the 2004 remake of “The Manchurian Candidate,” with a glittering cast including Oscar winners Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, and Jon Voight. The original 1962 film (and the 1959 Richard Condon novel that inspired it) centered on a Communist assassination plot that exploits an American GI brainwashed by the North Koreans. In the remake, the International Communist Conspiracy gives way to the International Corporate Conspiracy. The malevolent, brainwashing force in the new film (directed by “Silence of the Lambs” Oscar-winner Jonathan Demme) is a multinational business behemoth called “Manchurian Global” determined to seize total control of the American government. The film’s tagline, “Everything is under control,” made its underlying message unmistakable.

“THE PATHOLOGICAL PURSUIT OF PROFIT AND POWER”

In the same year, an acclaimed documentary, “The Corporation,” explicitly explored the same notion that big business had taken over from Communism as the true Evil Empire of our time, and a potent threat to all humane values. Screenwriter Joel Bakan wrote a book to accompany the film’s release, with a subtle subtitle -- “The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power” – that concisely summarized its point of view. Focusing on the legal theory that treats a corporation as a “person” before the law, the film argues that nearly all these business entities deserve diagnosis as dangerous, even murderous psychopaths. In praising the film, reviewer Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that “viewers come away with the uneasy sense that the defeat of communism may very well have cleared the way for another form of heartless, godless totalitarianism to threaten freedom – governments of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.”

Some of those same diabolical corporations obviously dominate the television industry (as well the world of motion pictures), yet the tube has offered several decades worth full of negative stereotypes and sleazy plot twists involving businessmen. As long ago as 1987, a controversial PBS documentary called “Hollywood’s Favorite Heavy: Businessmen on Prime Time TV” (hosted by movie legend Eli Wallach) pointed to the tendency of major networks to portray corporate executives as felonious, ruthless, blackmailing, violent, lecherous, unfaithful, greedy and, frequently, murderous. The program cited studies at the time showing that on fictional network series (including dramas, soap operas, and even comedies), no occupational group so frequently committed major crimes so frequently as wealthy business leaders.

In 1994, the principals of the nonprofit Center for Media and Public Affairs, S. Robert Lichter and Linda S. Lichter, reported on the results of thirty years of analyzing network TV shows in “Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture.” They concluded that “across the entire three decades of our study, business characters were consistently depicted more negatively than those in other occupations…The proportion of bad guy businessmen is almost double that of all other occupations… Businessmen are over three times more likely to be criminals than are members of other occupations…. Although businessmen represent 12 percent of all characters in census-coded occupations, they commit 40 percent of the murders and 44 percent of vice crimes like drug trafficking and pimping.”

The scope of the Lichter study (going all the way back to the presumably less cynical era of mid ‘60’s) and the date of its completion some fifteen years ago destroys the claim that lurid portrayals of corporate executives represent an appropriate and inevitable response to the devastation of the 2008 financial meltdown. All attempts to quantify the treatment of business characters demonstrate that even in eras of prosperity and progress (the “Go-Go ‘80’s,” the bubbly champagne years of the Clinton Boom in the late ‘90’s) the portrayal of the business world remained relentlessly and consistently disapproving.

Most recently, the Emmy nominations of 2008 showed that series which focus on corporate corruption win a disproportionate share of critical praise. “Damages” on FX won seven nominations (including Outstanding Drama Series) for its celebrated non-linear presentation of Glenn Close as a crusading attorney pursuing a class action lawsuit against a vicious CEO (Ted Danson) on behalf of his workers in season one, while season two focused on another “cutthroat case” against a greedy energy company. Another nominee for Outstanding Drama (and in fifteen other categories) was “Mad Men,” a dark, jaded, stylized look at the soulless manipulation and rampant, adulterous sexual exploitation in a New York advertising agency of the ‘60’s. “Dirty Sexy Money” (ABC, 2007-2009) won its own Emmy attention for its lurid portrayal of the fabulously wealthy, scandal-plagued Darling family, and made clear its cynical attitude toward the pursuit of profit in its very title. “Arrested Development” on Fox (2003-2006) received even more critical praise (including six Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe) for its off-kilter presentation of yet another deeply dysfunctional, criminally corrupt business family.

The television news departments affiliated with these same entertainment conglomerates powerfully and predictably reinforce the negative messages about the capitalist system. The Business and Media Institute sponsored a yearlong study of evening news programming on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox, monitoring the treatment of business issues between January 1 and December 31, 2006. Amazingly, in nearly two thirds (63%) of all business stories, business men or women never appeared to comment, even briefly. In those stories, a clear majority 57% (481 of 848) featured negative treatment of the commercial figures involved – employing terms like “corporate fat cats” or “crooks heading to the slammer.” The most popular attacks centered on monetary transgressions – unfair pricing, overly lavish CEO pay, or “obscene” corporate profits.

The bitterly negative portrayals of business ethics and accomplishment continue to bombard the public, unaccompanied by contrasting or countervailing visions of heroism or dynamism in the corporate world –a surprising imbalance considering that the source of all these entertainments remains one of the most ruthlessly competitive and globally consequential of all US enterprises.

BITING THE HAND THAT IS YOU

Why would Hollywood, dominated by a handful of shamelessly capitalistic conglomerates, regularly trash the free market system which allowed American media companies to conquer the globe? Why should movie directors, TV producers or Tinseltown stars, all of whom have benefited spectacularly from the business of entertainment, display such consistent negativity to the free market opportunities that made it all possible?

This isn’t merely an example of “biting the hand that feeds you.” In terms of the entertainment companies, it amounts to a case of biting the hand that is you. Continued...