Corporations
The Evolution of America’s (Un)protected Consumer
Consumer protection started to be seen as a responsibility that individuals, deemed rational and capable, were expected to shoulder themselves, assuming they were provided adequate information about the terms of exchange. ...
Who’s to Blame for Out-Of-Control Corporate Power? One man is...
Who’s to Blame for Out-Of-Control Corporate Power?
One man is especially to blame for why corporate power is out of control. And I knew him! He was my professor, then my boss. His name… Robert Bork.
Robert Bork was a notorious conservative who believed the only legitimate purpose of antitrust — that is, anti-monopoly — law is to lower prices for consumers, no matter how big corporations get. His philosophy came to dominate the federal courts and conservative economics.
I met him in 1971, when I took his antitrust class at Yale Law School. He was a large, imposing man, with a red beard and a perpetual scowl. He seemed impatient and bored with me and my classmates, who included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, as we challenged him repeatedly on his antitrust views.
We argued with Bork that ever-expanding corporations had too much power. Not only could they undercut rivals with lower prices and suppress wages, but they were using their spoils to influence our politics with campaign contributions. Wasn’t this cause for greater antitrust enforcement?
He had a retort for everything. Undercutting rival businesses with lower prices was a good thing because consumers like lower prices. Suppressing wages didn’t matter because employees are always free to find better jobs. He argued that courts could not possibly measure political power, so why should that matter?
Even in my mid-20s, I knew this was hogwash.
But Bork’s ideology began to spread. A few years after I took his class, he wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox summarizing his ideas. The book heavily influenced Ronald Reagan and later helped form a basic tenet of Reaganomics — the bogus theory that says government should get out of the way and allow corporations to do as they please, including growing as big and powerful as they want.
Despite our law school sparring, Bork later gave me a job in the Department of Justice when he was solicitor general for Gerald Ford. Even though we didn’t agree on much, I enjoyed his wry sense of humor. I respected his intellect. Hell, I even came to like him.
Once President Reagan appointed Bork as an appeals court judge, his rulings further dismantled antitrust. And while his later Supreme Court nomination failed, his influence over the courts continued to grow.
Bork’s legacy is the enormous corporate power we see today, whether it’s Ticketmaster and Live Nation consolidating control over live performances, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Amazon, Google, and Meta taking over the tech world.
It’s not just these high-profile companies either: in most industries, a handful of companies now control more of their markets than they did twenty years ago.
This corporate concentration costs the typical American household an estimated extra $5,000 per year. Companies have been able to jack up prices without losing customers to competitors because there is often no meaningful competition.
And huge corporations also have the power to suppress wages because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs.
And how can we forget the massive flow of money these corporate giants are funneling into politics, rigging our democracy in their favor?
But the tide is beginning to turn under the Biden Administration. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are fighting the monopolization of America in court, and proposing new merger guidelines to protect consumers, workers, and society.
It’s the implementation of the view that I and my law school classmates argued for back in the 1970s — one that sees corporate concentration as a problem that outweighs any theoretical benefits Bork claimed might exist.
Robert Bork would likely regard the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts with the same disdain he had for my arguments in his class all those years ago. But instead of a few outspoken law students, Bork’s philosophy is now being challenged by the full force of the federal government.
The public is waking up to the outsized power corporations wield over our economy and democracy. It’s about time.
Cartoon: Forced labor funnies
This cartoon is based on the AP story entitled "Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands" that was recently published here on DK. (It's a long piece, so if you're in a hurry, you can check out the AP’s "takeaways" article summarizing the report.) To put it briefly, prisoners are doing a lot more labor in the food supply chain than I think most of us realized. While some inmates choose to work, many are compelled to do so under threat of punishment. The 13th Amendment allows involuntary labor as punishment for a crime, so the practice -- which disproportionately affects people of color -- can look an awful lot like slavery. The Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where inmates do farm work, is literally located on a former slave plantation.
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Labour front bench takes £650k from health privateers – more than Tories
Starmer and co rake in cash from private health donors – twenty-five percent more than the Tories
Keir Starmer and his front bench MPs have taken almost £650,000 from private health companies, according to a compilation of their declarations of MPs’ interests.
The totals accepted by MPs in Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet between 2020 and 2023 are:
- Keir Starmer £157,500
- Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting £193,225
- Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper £231,817
- Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves £14,840
- Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner £50,000
- Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy £1,640
- Total £649,022
Figures compiled by David Powell
The total accepted by Labour beats similar donations to the Tories by around twenty-five percent. Starmer and his health spokesman Streeting have vowed to extend the use of private companies for NHS services if Labour gets into government, while promising further austerity and refusing to say they will increase NHS funding to meet need, or increase wages for NHS staff, instead saying – just like Tories – that the NHS must ‘reform’ to be ‘sustainable’.
Both are also fully committed to the ‘Integrated Care’ programme of health rationing and incentivised cuts through withholding care – a direct import from disastrous US healthcare – that is wrecking the NHS even more thoroughly that previous Tory ‘reforms’.
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As Gaza burns, Labour organises ‘Keir-aoke’ to raise party funds
Starmer’s party isn’t satisfied with making us cringe through billionaire donations, support for war crimes and contempt for Palestinian suffering
With more than 20,000 slaughtered in Gaza by Israel – around half of them children – and many more maimed, Keir Starmer is rightly facing jeers and heckling everywhere he goes, because of his support for Israel’s ‘right’ to ‘defend itself’ by the mass murder of civilians and the razing of schools, hospitals and homes.
Labour’s response? A fundraiser titled ‘Keir-aoke’ – not to raise funds for oppressed Palestinians facing an illegal occupation and an apartheid system that treats them as lower than animals, but for whatever purposes the party thinks fit:
Despite donations from billionaires and corporations, Labour is still telling its members that it depends on their donations to survive – but clearly the regime’s numerous begging letters aren’t getting a good response and the party machine is somehow deluded enough to think mutilating language to name an event after Starmer is going to be more, not less appealing.
The lowest price for a ticket to this cringe-fest is £16.96 (but only for ‘concessions’), though people can save money by not going and instead buying – seriously – a ‘solidarity’ ticket for a mere £15:
Labour has already had to cancel one event because of protests by human rights supporters outraged by Starmer’s and local MP Steve Reed’s enthusiastic support for genocide, but the party is clearly not inclined to think, let alone learn, and its delusion runs deep.
Meanwhile, people with actual human feeling will be marching in their hundreds of thousands, in London and around the country, for justice, a ceasefire and an end to the illegal occupation of Palestine:
Check here for the actions near you – but be aware that at the time of writing, the PSC event page appears to be under an attack that is suspiciously affecting only that page on the PSC’s website.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
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Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned The Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back – review
In Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned The Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, Elizabeth Anderson argues that neoliberalism has perverted the Protestant work ethic to exploit workers and enrich the one per cent. Magdalene D’Silva finds the book a compelling call to renew a progressive, socially democratic work ethic that promotes dignity for workers.
Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned The Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back. Elizabeth Anderson. Cambridge University Press. 2023.
Find this book: 
Elizabeth Anderson’s excellent 2023 book Hijacked was published the same month Australian multi-millionaire Tim Gurner said:
“Unemployment has to jump … we need to see pain … Employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them … We’ve gotta kill that attitude…”
America’s Senator Bernie Sanders rebuked Gurner’s diatribe as “disgusting. It’s hard to believe that you have that kind of mentality among the ruling class in the year 2023.”
Ironically, Gurner’s comments favouring employees’ objectification and employer coercive control show just what Hijacked says is: [T]he ascendance of the conservative work ethic… (which) tells workers … they owe their employers relentless toil and unquestioning obedience under whatever harsh conditions their employer chooses …”(xii).
Indeed, “neoliberalism is the descendant of this harsh version of the work ethic … [i]t entrenches the commodification of labor … people have no alternative but to submit to the arbitrary government of employers to survive.” (xii).
Anderson defines neoliberalism as an ideology favouring market orderings over state regulation […] to maximise the wealth and power of capital relative to labour
Anderson defines neoliberalism as an ideology favouring market orderings over state regulation (xii) to maximise the wealth and power of capital relative to labour (272) where the so-called “de-regulation” of labour and other markets doesn’t liberate ordinary people from the state; it transfers state regulatory authority to the most powerful, dominant firms in each market (xii).
Hijacked follows Anderson’s prior writing on neoliberalism’s replacement of democratically elected public government by the state, with unelected private government by employers. Like other work ethic critiques, Hijacked explains how Puritan theologians behind the work ethic dismissed feelings with contempt for emotional styles of faith worship (3).
Hijacked explains how Puritan theologians behind the work ethic dismissed feelings with contempt for emotional styles of faith worship
The original work ethic proselytised utilitarianism (19) but with inherent contradictions between progressive and conservative ideals (14). Early conservative work ethic advocates included Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus and Edmund Burke (Chapters 2 and 3) who aligned with the new capitalist, manager entrepreneur classes and “lazy landlords, speculators and predatory capitalists” (65) who claimed they exemplified the work ethic (127).
The work ethic split into conservative and progressive versions which Anderson distinguishes by class-based power relations, rather than competitive markets
The work ethic split into conservative and progressive versions which Anderson distinguishes by class-based power relations, rather than competitive markets, as conservatives “favour government by and for property owners, assign different duties to employers and employees, rich and poor” (while expecting) “workers to submit to despotic employer authority” (and) “regard poverty as a sign of bad character … poor workers as morally inferior” (xv).
Progressives like Adam Smith (130-135) supported “democracy and worker self-government. They oppose class-based duties … and reject stigmatization of poverty” (xvi). Anderson traces this “progressive” work ethic to classical liberals like John Locke (Chapter 2), Adam Smith (132-135), John Stuart Mill (Chapter 6) and progressive, socialist thinkers like Karl Marx (Chapter 7) who stressed how paid work should not alienate workers “from their essence or species-being…” (209) but express their individuality, as “[t]he distinctively human essence is to freely shape oneself…” (209).
Marx applied Mill’s emphasis on the importance of individuality, which Anderson links to the Puritan idea that our vocation must match our individual talents and interests (206) whatever our economic class.
Furthermore, Locke “condemned the idle predatory rich as well as able-bodied beggars” (65). Marx applied Mill’s emphasis on the importance of individuality, which Anderson links to the Puritan idea that our vocation must match our individual talents and interests (206) whatever our economic class.
Yet our worthiness now had to be proved (to God) by ‘work’ that entailed: disciplining drudgery (9), slavery (10, 259), racism (97-99), exploitative maltreatment of poor people (106) and industrious productivity (52) which became conspicuously competitive, luxury consumption (170).
Conservatives (Chapters 3, 4) secularised these ideas so the “upper-class targets of the Puritan critique hijacked the work ethic … into an instrument of class warfare against workers. Now only workers were held to its demands … the busy schemers who … extract value from others cast themselves as heroes of the work ethic, the poor as the only scoundrels” (65).
Anderson doesn’t idolise Locke, Smith, J. S. Mill and other early progressive work ethic advocates like Ricardo (Chapter 5) by highlighting harsh contradictions in their views. For example, within Locke’s pro-worker agenda were draconian measures for poor children (61) such that Anderson says Locke’s harsh policies for those he called the idle poor, contain “the seeds of the ultimate hijacking of the work ethic by capital owners” (25).
[Anderson’s] scrutiny of both left and right-wing support of the neoliberal conservative work ethic complements other critiques of the left-wing origins of neoliberal markets.
Anderson criticises the perversion and reversal of the work ethic’s originally progressive, classical liberal aspirations “and successor traditions on the left” (xviii). Her scrutiny of both left and right-wing support of the neoliberal conservative work ethic complements other critiques of the left-wing origins of neoliberal markets. Anderson also says the conservative work ethic arose in a period of rapidly rising productivity and stagnant wages, “when market discipline was reserved for workers, not the rich” (108).
Yet it was the progressive work ethic that culminated in social democracy throughout Western Europe by promoting the “freedom, dignity and welfare of each” (242). Marx was so influenced by the progressive work ethic espoused by classical liberals, his most developed work on economic theory apparently quotes Adam Smith copiously and admiringly (226). Anderson thus contends that criticism of social democracy as a radical break from classical liberalism – is a myth, as ideas like social insurance “developed within the classical liberal tradition” (227).
However, “Cold War ideology represented social democracy as … a slippery slope to totalitarianism … the title of Friederich Hayek’s … Road to Serfdom, says it all” (226).
Social democracy declined worldwide in the 1970s and 1980s when neoliberalism arose and the conservative work ethic returned with the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher
Social democracy declined worldwide in the 1970s and 1980s when neoliberalism arose and the conservative work ethic returned with the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (Chapter 9). Social democratic centre-left parties like the US Democrats and the UK’s Labour Party (293) didn’t counter neoliberalism’s conservative work ethic, as “the demographics of these parties shifted… from the working class to the professional managerial class” (257), seduced by meritocracy ideology in a competitive race for (their own) superior status (257). Anderson’s observation complements Elizabeth Humphry’s research on how Australia’s Labor Party and labour union movement introduced vanguard neoliberalism to Australia against workers, in the 1980s.
[Anderson] argues the focus on efficiency and aggregate growth neglected workers’ conditions and plight as neoliberal work (for welfare) policies degrade people’s autonomy and capabilities
Anderson recognises the success of some neoliberal policies in the US’s economic stagnation in the 1970s, like trucking deregulation, emissions reduction trade schemes and international trade liberalisation (285-287). However, she argues the focus on efficiency and aggregate growth neglected workers’ conditions and plight as neoliberal work (for welfare) policies degrade people’s autonomy and capabilities because “the most important product of our economic system is ourselves” (288).
Hijacked’s last chapter recommends social democracy renewal and updating the progressive work ethic “to ensure … every person … has the resources and opportunities to develop … their talents … engage with others on terms of trust, sympathy and genuine cooperation” (298). Employees could be empowered through worker cooperatives (297).
A gap in Hijacked’s analysis is a lack of clear definition of “work.” Anderson doesn’t distinguish between “employment” in a “job,” and rich elites’ voluntary, symbolic “duties,” like those of Britain’s “working royals” who call their activities “work”.
Another dilemma is whether economic class power struggles can change peacefully, noting Peter Turchin says we’re facing ‘end times’ of war and political disintegration because competing elites won’t relinquish power.
Nevertheless, Hijacked is compelling reading for everyone on the left and the right who needs employment in a paid job to survive, so today’s neoliberal conservative work ethic no longer gaslights us to believe our dignity demands our exploitation.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: Daniel Foster on Flickr.