Nice post...

on the O'Reilly point though, it isn't because the elites are wealthy.  It is because they are wealthy AND disagree with his views.  Let's be honest, O'Reilly is very rich now that he is one of the most (if not the most) powerful person on TV.  He frames arguments in ways that he can't lose.  He either demeans a person, a group of people, or an issue AND THEN he proceeds to debate about an issue with the person he just demeaned.  Or he will use some other trick such that the audience is predisposed to agree with O'Reilly. 

Or, if he wants someone to agree with him...

O'Reilly will take a stand on an issue and then have a guest on that he respects and who also just happens to completely agree with O'Reilly.  one of the best lines he has is the...  "Am I crazy [insert opinion+issue]...?"    "No Bill, you are completely right...[continue unfair and unbalanced viewpoint]"

Thus, his opinion, which may seem a bit out there is reinforced as being "the correct opinion" by an "independent" guest. 

 

oh wait, this was suppossed to be about corporations.... I think they can be good, but often they put company profits, company bottom lines, company "shareholders" [a few rich people with thousands of shares, and a lot of middle class people with about 10s-100s shares] first, while leaving the rest of society behind.

Example:  The oil companies are making a killing right now... Exxon-Mobile has had record profits and doesn't know what to do with the money.  Giving people a break on prices, giving money to communities, etc...  are all possible things that Exxon could do, to my knowledge they haven't done any of these things (and probably won't).  Maybe they are worried about another Valdez.

In the interest of full disclosure, I own 25 shares of Exxon-Mobile and I collected a sweet dividend of $7.25 in june.  Boo Ya!

-Zen Blade 

I simply invite you to listen to Rush Limbaugh one afternoon, or tune in Bill O’Reilly, self-appointed voice of working America. These people hate, despise, deplore, and pray earnestly for the death of what they call “the elites.” They openly mock these “elites” on class grounds, too, deriding them for—surely you’ve heard—their tastes in wine, cheese, cars, coffee, and colleges.

It has always galled me that the likes of Limbaugh can rant about cheese eaters in one breath and then riff on his various Rolex watches, (one for golf, one for the beach, one for speeches, etc...) and his mega million "EIB" seaside compound in Florida in the next.

The unfortuantely successful Orwellian reverse jujitsu of the co-opted rhetoric of populism is perfect case study for a Psych 101 chapter on the phenomenon of projection. 

One days like this, I really miss Paul Wellstone.

Just for pedantry's sake, the interests of managers aren't really aligned with those of owners either (except perhaps in the here-today, gone-a-minute-later fashion that corporate raiders managed to redefine ownership in the 80s). All the incentives for managers are to fatten their own shares of the corporate pie at the expense of both workers and the shareholders who are their ostensible employers. (For various reasons managers aren't usually as effective at skinning shareholders as they are at skinning workers, but it sure isn't for lack of trying.)

 Meanwhile, "no class resentment in America" should probably go down in history right next to "no history of sectarian strife in Iraq." What makes the play on class resentment so effective for Coughlin-wannabees like Limbaugh and O'Reilly is that the "elites" they hate aren't so much the rich and the powerful as the educated and "cultured" (and by implication atheist and queer). What's so weird about it is that only in America are multiple generations of wealth and power considered sufficient to buy yourself a repuation as just plain folks.

"As for the argument that there is no class resentment in America, I simply invite you to listen to Rush Limbaugh one afternoon, or tune in Bill O’Reilly, self-appointed voice of working America. These people hate, despise, deplore, and pray earnestly for the death of what they call “the elites.”"

You hit a great point here, I am mad at myself for not realizing it, but this exactly what worked for left in the 1930s.  It is almost as if the Labor movement needs to take back these terms and take back the arguement of class warfare.  Although I was not a huge fan of John Edwards, I have to commend him on his "two americas" speeches, whether he could solve that is another issue, but it is something that the left needs to take back into the strategy.  

I'll admit, that although the left and liberals do stand for helping those that need it and helping those break the class divide, but I also think the "berkenstock wearing, latte drinking, yadda liberals" does easily stick in peoples minds as the left being elite, when in fact it is the right that are the elites.  I mean bush himself lives in crawford, which from my understanding has some of the most polluted drinking water, but he has the most hightech water purifying system. 

But in order for the workers to realize the peril the live in, we need to speak about and show that the divide between rich and poor is not rhetoric but reality.  I don't think we see or hear this enough. 

Most of what ails our society today, especially the greed, the me-first attitudes, the worship of money, the denigration of the poor, are all major parts of the legacy of Ronald Reagan. And, many of us saw this coming early in Reagan's first term. But, many of us also saw the disaster coming in Iraq before Bush even started his invasion. Oddly enough, many of us are in both groups!

Now that you mention it, the discussion is loaded with irony. 

It is also an indication of how completely our society has drunk the kool-aid that capitalism is the one true and only worthy economic system in the world.  Proof is your disclaimer:

"(By the way, just to anticipate what I know will be said, this is not a Marxist distinction. It’s a sociological one and, more importantly, a legal one, even here in the USA.)"

Now don't get me wrong.  I think capitalism has lots of positives.  But there are some negatives too.  The fact that you can't question or criticize any aspect of it without being accused of being socialist or, even worse, a communist tends to squelch any chance of doing much about the negatives.

As for corporations.  Like someone else said, they are just tools that can be used well or badly.  They are simply forms of organization used to accomplish a goal.   Unfortunately, they are all too often misused by selfish, greedy people who try to convince us that they are entitled to special privileges because they provide jobs, etc. 

Supposedly, they can do things better than the "government".  But that really depends on the abilities of the people involved and what needs doing, doesn't it.  Our current, very business-friendly government looks like it is going to bankrupt the whole country.

What I wish is that someone would point out to corporations and businesses is that they are simply sub-contractors of the government.  People in a society elect or accept leaders to accomplish particular goals.  Our founders said it better:

"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of governed."

and

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

We the people created a government to act as our fiduciary to accomplish things that are easier done as a group than we could individually.  Common defense being the most widely accepted.  

Government in turn created laws that permitted corporations to be formed.  Some of the things government could do directly are subcontracted to corporations.  Think of all the defense contractors like Lockheed and Boeing.  Technically, the government could build plants, hire people and build airplanes.  After all that is how other countries do it.   In fact, some countries control all means of production.  They even choose jobs for people.  Not a pleasant thought.  I like our way better.

But is it really too much to ask that the people who form and operate corporations recognize that they have been granted a privilege.  It is a privilege that at its best benefits us all.  At its worse it threatens society and our current form of government which I, for one, prefer to all others I've ever heard about.
 
My point is that maybe its time to remind people that government and businesses work for them -- not the other way around. 

----

Okay, so I oversimplified.  But if you truly believe our founding principles, the logic of the sequence, people created government which created corporate law, stands.  We made the laws; we can revoke them.

"It has always galled me that the likes of Limbaugh can rant about cheese eaters in one breath and then riff on his various Rolex watches, (one for golf, one for the beach, one for speeches, etc...) and his mega million "EIB" seaside compound in Florida in the next." - Greg Roach

It's less about wealth, or consumption, than it is about taste. In particular, it's the belief that tastes that differ from one's own are inauthentic and put on for show, as pretense. To me this ties in with the ongoing anti-intellectualism of the right - in that at some level anti-intellectualism is a failure of imagination, an inability to believe that other people can really, truly, actually believe (or even know) things you yourself do not believe or understand.

What's worse, they're proud of it. I've seen Tom Frank speak twice (go Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops!), and I wanted to relay this anecdote each time but was unable to - but years ago, my wife Rose worked with a woman (Julie) who was a "Dittohead." One day as Julie was ditto'ing the latest Rush blathering idiocy, Rose pointed out that, basically, nothing he'd said was actually true, and cited various facts, logic, etc., to prove it. Julie the Dittohead's response was priceless: "Well, you're biased, because you know too much about things. I'm responding from the heart, and that's much better."  

And there you have it... Since the social right-wingers cannot conceive that anyone could actually prefer brie over processed American cheese slices, therefore those who claim to love brie are faking it just to impress others, because they've read that it's the thing to do. (Note that the imagined process of intellection is merely fashion-following: taste is conflated with cognition is conflated with faddishness.)

Back in the seventies I was a Milwaukee Teamster loading trucks full of soda pop.  Our union leaders took our dues and generally accepted the contract they could get from the company for a minimum of struggle.  The stewards were regular guys, certainly more like us than the bosses.  But the higher ups in the local and above that acted like they had more in common (culturally and income wise) with management than with us.

When I was in law school, I did a story for WBAI on unions in New York.  All the shop level people were black, Puerto Rican or Asian; all the higher ups were old white guys who drove big (american-made) cars.  You could just feel the gulf and the alienation between union "management" and the shop floor cadre.  Is it any wonder that unions lost their organizing touch even before Ronald Reagan took power?

Congressional Democrats and their apparatcheki have the same problem today.  The local party people -- the county committemen, the people who hold house parties, the door knockers and phone callers are just like us.  Indeed, they are us.  But people in the Senate, on K Street, in the media and the consulting jobs -- they have much more in common with Republicans and corporate managment than they do with us.  And they act like it.

Like the Teamsters, they'll take our money and put out the minimum credible job they can to justify getting more.  Sure, being in the majority would be nice for them.   But they won't rock the boat too hard to get there because that would be too much work and it would upset their little clubhouse and the people they golf with. 

The decline of unions certainly contributed to the fall of the Democratic Party and vice versa.  Twelve years of Republican rule helped too.  But the collapse of both unions and the Democratic party was each a metaphor for the other and both share a common cause -- a leadership out of touch with the rank and file.

Throughout the history of America, the wealthy elites, the rulers, have managed to quell dissent and dissatisfaction among the ruled class by creating common enemies as typed by external forces, races, or ideologies. 

There is some appeal to the conservative message but few people realize what a great leap it would be for all of us if the conservative ideology were fully manifested.  Like GW's presidency, it would be a tremendous gamble.  I don't wish to see just how tyrannical and extreme an unfettered capitalist market can be. 

 

Why the cheap shot at lawyers?
Would Thurgood Marshall fit in your list?  What about the thousands of public interest counsel in the US?  How about the employment discrimination, civil rights and poverty-law counsel?
Why denigrate an entire profession?

A few random thoughts on the many themes being discussed:

1. It seems to me that there was a real change in self-perception among "working people" in the 1960s and 70s. Prior to the 60s/70s, most working Americans identified with labor and looked at management with suspicion. Things started to change in the 1960s/70s as more workers were college graduates, hired into salaried (rather than hourly) jobs, and often working at a desk rather than on an assembly line. These new workers--often the children of blue-collar laborers--began to associate themselves more with management than with labor. Maybe the first in their families to attend college, they felt they were upwardly mobile and were proud to disassociate with their parent's past and join the ranks of the successful management class. And at work, they were treated pretty well--decent salaries, decent benefits, decent levels of respect. This confirmed their sense of having made it and increased their loyalty to the corporation.

2. Also in the 60s and 70s, traditional social networks--centered on family and neighborhoods--began to break down. Workers were more mobile, less attached to their extended family and their neighbors. Instead, they became attached to their jobs and workplaces. In addition, more women entered the workplace--limiting the time available to them to perform traditional roles of managing social relationships with extended family and neighbors. Increasingly work became the center of social life, not the home. People began to form their self-identity in relation to their jobs--not their families. Thus began an obsession with being a great worker--and the hero worship of the most succesful workers of all, CEOs. All this peaked in the 1990s.

3. Now, with outsourcing and globalization, a new generation of workers is beginning to question the assumptions of the 1990s. Workers no longer feel secure--the CEOs they worshipped in the 1990s are now outsourcing their jobs to China, cutting their benefits, and limiting their wage growth. The CEOs themselves are reaping huge rewards for this, often while allowing the companies they manage to contract or even collapse into bankruptcy. Increasingly the heros of the 1990s look like crooks. Mny workers are starting to question their own obsession with work and wondering if they should bring more balance into their personal lives. The change in attitude is only just beginning, but I suspect workers will soon be less supportive of their corporations--and much more willing to oppose corporate-friendly policies.

4. The emergence of hyper-CEOs who appear to be acting in their own self-interest and not the corporation's interest (and certainly not in the interest of workers) is beginning to alienate shareholders as much as workers. While shareholders are the nominal owners of  public companies, CEOs are the effective owners, having nearly complete, dictatorial control over the company's activities--and reaping huge portions of the wealth generated by the corporation. Something needs to be done to reform the ownership structure of corporations to make other "stakeholders" more effectively represented and to share the wealth generated by the corporation more equitably. The rules of corporate governance need to be revised to give both shareholders and employees a stronger voice. Top management is out of control.

5. Liberals used to have close connections with blue collar laborers. But in the 1960s and 70s, the leaders of the liberal movements also became increasingly college educated, distancing themselves culturally from blue collar workers. The liberals, however, did not connect with the new generation of college-educated white collar workers. In fact, they tended to look down at those corporate cogs. Instead, liberals connected with "counter-culture" types--academics, artists, socialists--people who avoided or oppossed the emerging corporate culture. This made the liberals easily open to the charge of being elites.

6. There's a great deal of change happening right now in people's attitudes toward work--and a huge opening for liberals if only they can stop acting like elites and re-connect with average working people--both the blue collar and the white collar types.

"Just reform corporate law -- the worst in the world.  That's the problem that gives management control with not obligation to stockholder."

Frankly, I'm not so worried about shareholders. They buy shares with, supposedly, the understanding that risk is involved. With the exception of criminally bad management, shareholders usually make out just fine.

But as I asked upthread, what are the obligations of the corporate management to its workers? To the community in which it resides? Every protection that workers have gained needed to be wrenched from managements kicking and screaming all the way. Managers find it so easy to imagine that the corporation's success is due to their "genius" rather than to the hard work of employees who rarely, if ever, share in the profits.

Just take a look at the Rust Belt, then the Southern union-free belt. In their turns, communities have beggared themselves trying to attract corporations and factories by giving huge tax breaks and sweetheart land deals. Then, when the grass looks greener offshore, the corporation picks up and leaves.

In the name of the holy god of Efficiency, we are demonstrably hurting this country. Mere profit is never enough. It's never enough to have people employed, self-sufficient and useful. No, maximum profit must always be the goal, and in pursuit of maximum profit every person and every community is expendable.

That's the bathwater that comes with modern capitalism. That's the taint that gives corporations and their rapacious managers a bad name. Management serves only the corporation, over and above any other loyalty to community and country.

Corporations in medieval times and earlier (nonprofit towns and guilds) clearly had social untility.  Modern corporations, beginning with the East India Company and letter of marque were licensed to accumulate capital in high risk sutations such as piracy and pillage abroad.  The question is, do we really need that kind of added incentive today to foster innovation and investment?  Repeal of limited liability might well promote greater responsibility in the business community.
      A new liberal agenda should include a major review and overhaul of corporation law.
     In passing, I believe (heresy) that many major American Corporations are rather liberal on all except their immediate pocketbook concerns, but that is another story.  

It seems that the relationship between workers and corporations is similar to the situation you describe in WMK. It seems that workers should be allied against corporate bosses, but that is not the way things usually work out.

As a corporate cog myself, I can sympathize. While I realize that the management’s interests do not coincide with mine, I often feel that my interests do depend on management. I have seen annual raises of 2-3% for the past four years while corporate profits have risen at a rate of around 10% over that same time period, and I am resentful. But at the same time, I know that I am paid quite well and enjoy my work. Leaving this job for another might improve things financially, but it would entail costs such as moving, leaving friends and family, and lead perhaps to a less emotionally rewarding job.

We – workers – are afforded a good life. While we realize that our circumstances could be better (perhaps much better), and recognize that management greed prevents that improvement, we also see that management is making our good lives possible.

I think you've pointed out an unfortunate consequence of election finance today.  Only independently wealthy candidates can afford to run competitive statewide campaigns. 

OTOH, Salazar managed to best the Coors family fortune, and Obama was running tough in Illinois before Ryan had to bow out.  Perhaps some of this language can be turned against GOP elites.

A though experiment: If we could set aside the bill of rights for a while and send the CEO of every large corporation to the gas chambers tomorrow, would that solve the woes of the "working families".

Thank you for saying this and saying it more eloquently than I could have :-)  I think the brilliance of Mr. Franks' analysis IS EXACTLY that it's Marxist and that it makes Marxist thought relevant in a 21st century context.  I certainly wouldn't presume to tell Mr. Franks that he should embrace the Marxist label, but I do think ignoring it detracts from the importance of his unique analysis and is something to be praised.

Though I do think What's the Matter with Kansas?  also shows the flaws in Marxism that Engels once addressed.  Icons of blue-collar rage like Limbaugh and O'Reilly (and to a lesser extent right-wing comedians that play to this rage like the Blue Collar Comedy tour) have been able to turn the working class against themselves by using religion and ideology.  It's a coup of class warfare and something that needs to be addressed in part with a Marxist lens, new and improved for the postmodern era -- which is what Franks has provided.

Spot on, Purple State!

From the original post: 

Most of the time workers do not share the interests and goals of management.

Mr. Frank, this assertion strikes me as a simple statement of a very complex situation, and the fact that you've written a book on your view  the subject doesn't prove the assertion, especially for those of use who have been introduced to you through another polemic work.

To second what Purple State said, part of the reason that this doesn't fit very simply into corporate America is that a large fraction of the workers are titular managers.  And even if you define the Managers with capital M to mean someone at the C-level or thereabouts, many corporate cogs still think they have a shot at being a Manager.  Unsurprisingly, those sectors where management is small and cordoned off from labor, like retail and manufacturing are ones where unions do well, and where this argument is clear.  Those like finance where many employees are "middle management" have no union penetration whatsoever (and honestly, the unions haven't made particularly attractive offers to these fols), and workers' interests become a lot more mixed.

None of this is to disagree that there has clearly been a breakdown of the corporate management structure that is leaving a whole lot of workers in the lurch.  But I think we'll have an awfully hard time getting traction on labor issues as long the paradigm is essentially the People vs. the System.  The most recent Pew study shows that most Americans (67% to be precise) profoundly reject the view that their success is out of their control.

On the anti-elitism side of things, there's a good argument to be made that this is in fact a backlash driven by the penetration of modern and post-modern lifestyles into areas where more traditional ways of living predominated before.  I'm not sure I totally but that one either, but it's plausible.

Anyway, kudos for being getting the juices flowing, even if I don't agree with all of what you say.

All the opinion polls show that Americans are concerned about the growing power of corporations.  In response to Daniel Greenbaum's point, I'm not convinced that shareholders necessarily identify with corporations; on the contrary, they often feel that corporations are cheating them out of their rightful earnings. A populism that can build on shareholders' distrust of corporations can be poltiically successful.

From a substantive point of view, however, I am very dubious about the value of anti-corporate campaigns.   The reality is that small business are far more politically reactionary provide lower wages, and more dangerous (safety-wise) than big businesses. 
 
P.S. It is true that corporations are treated as persons under the 14th Amendment, but that was not the intention of the framers of the 14th Amendment.  Rather, it was the product of a lobbying campaign by big business after the Civil War that culminated in the 1880's.     

Corporations were created by the state to carry out worthwhile projects. There were implicit obligations to achieve certain ends. the 14th amendment and the courts broke the back of the charter idea and allowed charted corporations rather free reign to act in self (owner, manager) interests. The corporations, in this phase, have the clout to reach out and support political candidates and obtain regulations through legislation (th e new energy bill).Government leaders see themselves as peers of the business leader class (large, not the small guys).

The answer seems to me to

1. work legally to reimpose charter conditions on state created corporations and

2. to rethink how to create a vibrant economy for such reform business, an economy that is high tech,m environmentally restoring, and job creating.

The problem now is simple: the democratic leadership is part of the corporate establishment nexus.

The opportunity is that most democrats and republicans share similar values in that they want good families, communities, and jobs. Even the leadership, driving so hard for neoliberal globalization want to live in a detached house surrounded by trees in a safe, not a gated, community. The shared values are not consistent with where the opportunity seems to lo lie - which is with the mega corporate concentrated wealth model.

Hence developing an alternative vibrant job creating entrepreneurial state chartered corporate world is the way to go.