THE WORLD OF BUSINESS IN CONTROL -- CONTINUED!

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

HENRY WRITES:

Well, Jim, people have neither the time nor inclination to read just about the same stuff over and over again. And as a reverse to the previous sentence, it behooves us to respect the time of others.

I remember writing this on a blackboard — a greenboard, really — while a meeting was delayed because some people hadn’t arrived yet.

As for business in control, we might begin by distinguishing businesses run by those the true entrepreneurs, i.e. those who set them up, from those who got into them on daddy’s coat tails, from cooperatives run by cliques of buddy-buddies, from those ultimately controlled by almost invisible financiers.

Best,

H.

JIM REPLIES

Henry,

Point well taken. You sound like my wife. She claims I sometimes beat a dead horse to death as if that is possible. I suspect you are both right. I do repeat myself.

I've studied entrepreneurs, however, such as Steven Jobs and Bill Gates, and both of them (as well as many others) stole ideas created by others, both were sued many times, and both settled at a fraction of the cost to them, but substantially for budding entrepreneurs-in-the-making with whom we have never heard from again.

Such disclosures are buried in my books and blog, and one of the reasons, despite the wisdom of what you say being true, I am reluctant to do otherwise. As a writer and interpreter of my times, few know I exist. I have no problem with that as what I have recorded will likely live on well beyond my life.

Perhaps it is because my perspective is different than yours, I don't know, but I have seen the profit motive in business always, and I mean always skewed towards the legal at the expense of the ethical. Sure, once wealth is established, the wealthy become well known philanthropists. That was the case of Alfred Sloan at General Motors, who bragged to GM stockholders that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, GM never missed giving a dividend. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a College of Business that carries his name to this day.

If the coronavirus pandemic has shown us anything, it is that capitalism as a system is on its last leg. The answer is not socialism or communism or some other ism. But rest assured, it will first survive as a hybrid as in the case of Communist China and Indonesia, and then branch off into something entirely new, as Jacques Barzun suggests in his magnum opus FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE: 1500 to the Present (2000), incidentally published when he was 93 (see pages 768 and 800). 

Everything has been reduced to econometrics. Over the last 200 years those in business leadership have been close to a final formula to capture the essence of capitalism. He writes:

"It is from this class that the governors and heads of institutions were recruited. The parallel with the Middle Ages is plain -- clerics in one case, cybernists in the other . . . the Deschooling Society movement rapidly converted everybody to its view . . . business affairs were in the hands of corporation executives whose view of their role resembled that of their medieval ancestors. Not the accumulation of territories but of companies and control over markets were their one aim in life, sanctified by efficiency" (p. 800).

I live in the State of Florida. Of the 50 states of these United States, it has the poorest economic support system for workers seeking financial aid quarantined by the current pandemic.

If that were not enough, of the millions who qualify for this aid in this state's hospitality dependent industry, less than 20 percent have received financial relief, although over 80 percent of those eligible have made such claims for months, without even able to get on line to submit their claims, despite many attempts.

Some $71 million dollars were spent to fix this system when Governor Rick Scott, a businessman turned politician, was in office.  While this initiative failed, he managed to cut the dollar aid such workers would get along with reducing the number of weeks of support as well. Now, the majority don't even get that.

Finally, Arundhati Roy, Booker Prize winning author of “The Gods of Small Things” (1997), has written a devastating little book, CAPITALISM: A Ghost Story (2014).

This book covers the December 2, 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster in India of a Union Carbide chemical plant, a plant similar to the kind I serviced here in the United States when I was in the Industrial Division of Nalco Chemical Company.

In fact, in an explosion at a Monsanto Chemical plant in Louisville, Kentucky, I left only an hour before an eruption sprayed life threatening gases into the air. So, I know a little about what author Roy covers here.

Forty (40) tons of highly toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) were released from this plant with 3,598 dying almost immediately, two weeks later, there were another 8,000 deaths, an additional 8,000 subsequently died from gas related diseases.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story is about how Union Carbide, the Government of India, and the United States diplomatic corps handled the affair.  It is not a comforting story.

People as persons have become expandable when economic issues encounter some jeopardy, always with the justification that “without economics, what would support the population?”

I am not suggesting changing anything, as Sir William might say, circumstances eventually become the driver as they have throughout human history.  I am simply explaining my redundancy.

Be always well,

Jim