One of the enduring American myths is that we shape and control our own destiny. A recent Pew-commissioned poll found that more than 70% of Americans believe that their own hard work was the major factor in upward mobility — even as the middle class has experienced stagnating wages and witnessed an historic transfer of wealth to the top 1% of the US population.
By a 71 to 21 percent margin, Americans said that personal attributes such as hard work and drive are more important to economic mobility than structural issues such as the state of the economy and one’s economic circumstances growing up.
Are self-motivation and personal responsibility important? Absolutely. Is it all there is to the story? Not by a long shot. In the past few decades, changes to tax policies and lack of regulations have enriched the top 1% of the economy at the expense of the middle class. Meanwhile, real wages for the middle class have been stagnant for decades. Rather than face this fact, we cling to our belief in exceptionalism. “These statistics may apply to someone else, but not to me,” we seem to think. This is, of course, the same viewpoint that leads folks to the casinos and lottery-ticket-dispensers. Ironically, it is this very belief that keeps us from being properly outraged at a whole series of bubbles – from real estate to tech to mortgage-backed securities – that have allowed a few individuals to become obscenely wealthy by doing nothing more than manipulating the financial markets – no value added at all.
An even-more-disturbing downside to this view is that, in our religion and politics, as well as our economics, we value individual concerns over corporate concerns. Salvation over justice, tax cuts over fiscal responsibility, my own income over a living wage and an equitable distribution of wealth. We are quick to yell “Socialism” when money goes to those who need it, but have only admiration when the elites raid our own bank accounts to enrich themselves (which is exactly what has been going on in the US, with the amount of income going to the top 1% increased from 8.9% in 1972 to 21.8% in 2005). This is certainly a redistribution of wealth, and one that hurts us all. But the millionaire right-wing pundits, for some reason, don’t see this as a problem!
It has gotten to the point that even folks like Alan Greenspan and Richard Posner are questioning their former support for deregulation and “free-market” capitalism. It should hardly comes as a surprise when you champion the idea that profit should be the only motivation in an economic transaction that this creates a tremendous pressure to align laws and practices around maximizing of profit at the expense of all other values – including human rights, conservation, pollution, global warming, local communities and even basic community values like honesty, hard work and respect for your neighbor.
So the appropriate response? Insist that corporations behave like good neighbors, and make profit just one aspect of their mission statement. This means, for example, finding a way to pay a living wage, providing universal health insurance and a way to save for retirement that is not based on the shell game that the stock market has been shown to be. It means discovering a way to pay for the full cost of goods and services – from extraction to transportation to manufacturing, marketing distribution and disposal. It means finding a way to value strong communities and local ownership, while valuing universal human rights and ecological responsibility.
Some may argue that this is already happening, with businesses heavily involved in corporate philanthropy, public-private partnerships and community planning. Not only is this kind of corporate citizenship rare, but all too often, the “good neighbor” part of a business is divorced from the core mission of the company. Yes, there are positive examples of manufacturers working to reduce their environmental footprint, becoming proactively involved with local concerns, and holding their off-shore suppliers accountable to better standards of responsible practices. But all-in-all, these are the exception, not the norm. What is more, as companies become more global, local and regional philanthropy and involvement decline, if for no other reason than the owners are no longer on-site, experiencing the impact of their operation and the needs of the community first hand. And at the end of the day, a company is judged solely on its short-term financial performance. This cannot help but have dire consequences for issues like the ecology and quality of life that have no hard economic value.
We’ve seen, once again, what happens when we give business a free reign. The antidote is personal responsibly. Not theirs (at least at first) but ours. We have to insist that our own employers behave more responsibly. We have to insist that the folks we buy from behave more responsibly. We have to reject the notion that our most important role in life is that of consumer, and reshape an economy where our primary role is a member of a community, a nation, the world. When each of us takes on, as our own personal responsibility, working for justice and equality and fairness, when we each make it our personal responsibility to advocate for meaningful work at a living wage for everyone then we will have made a start.
Can such a thing happen? Well, we’ve managed to believe the lie that unregulated capitalism is good for us, why not accept the truth that personal and corporate responsibility is the only path to a livable future?
Apr 29, 2009 at 3:08 pm
And our clinging to exceptionalism is what still propels many of us to believe that the very right to exist is deserved by some people more than others. This keeps alive ideas that those of us who got here “first,” or at least before people trying to come now, have more right to citizenship! As a student of American Studies, it’s harrowing to realise how culturally embedded exceptionalism and manifest destiny can be. All this is also tied to our contructions of race, and unfortunately often contributes to our collective misjudgment that our actions are not connected to past injustice! It’s much easier to sleep at night if injustice is imagined as isolated incident, perpetuated by lone individuals–rather a society at large!