Interesting article in the New York Times today - comparing a company that embraces social responsibility vs. one that pursues profit over customer service. Starbucks vs. Goldman Sachs
I don't know enough about Starbucks to cheerlead for it, but I think what they're saying is what we hope for from an American business.
On Wednesday, Howard Schultz, the chairman and chief executive of Starbucks, will take the podium at his company’s annual meeting and talk about the importance of morality in business.
Yes, morality. I don’t know that he’ll use that exact word. But there can be little doubt that in recent years, especially, Schultz has been practicing a kind of moral capitalism. Profitability is important, he believes, but so is treating customers, employees and coffee growers fairly. Recently, Schultz has defined Starbucks’s mission even more broadly, creating programs that have nothing at all to do with selling coffee but are aimed at helping the country recover from the Great Recession.
In the speech, Schultz plans to make a direct link between Starbucks’s record profits and this larger societal role the company has embraced. He will make the case that companies that earn the country’s trust will ultimately be rewarded with a higher stock price. “The value of your company is driven by your company’s values,” he plans to say.
That's a sharp contrast to Goldman Sachs, which got a public smackdown from an executive who aired his concerns about the predatory greed as he resigned. Bloomberg rushed to their defense.
Apparently, when Greg Smith arrived at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) almost 12 years ago, the legendary investment firm was something like the Make-A-Wish Foundation -- existing only to bring light and peace and happiness to the world.
Smith, who was executive director and head of the firm’s U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, does not go into details in his already notorious op-ed article in Wednesday’s New York Times, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs.” But one imagines Goldman bankers spending their days delivering fresh flowers to elderly shut-ins and providing shelters for abandoned cats. Serving clients was paramount. “It wasn’t just about making money,” Smith writes. “It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization.”
That article is one of the saddest things I've ever read. Corporate responsibility, community involvement is so far from the Wall Street pale that it's actually mocked.There was a time when a company's reputation was its most valuable asset. To be accused of putting profit above morals and ethics would be a slur that would have to be answered vehemently and definitively. These days, the response is a cynical "Get your head out of the clouds, Pollyanna - that's business."
It doesn't have to be. Research. Go to Good Company- see the company ratings. And stop doing business with the ones that don't share your values.
The New York Times this morning had two stories about people suffering from the winter cold with no way to escape it. One was a child who froze to death in a refugee camp in Afghanistan. The other was about desperate people who cannot afford heat in Maine.
People on fixed incomes cannot afford oil and cannot afford to retrofit their homes for alternatives to oil. Our austerity measures, designed to help the economy recover from the recession, are cutting programs that used to help. But as the funding is cut, the price of oil continues to rise. So an elderly couple turned on all four burners on their electric stove, rerouted the dryer hose back into the basement, and, in desperation, offered the local oil company the title to their old car in return for oil.
The more I read, the more I pay attention, the more I conclude that capitalism has ruined this country. A system with profit as its end motive, not surprisingly, leaves humanity by the side of the road in pursuit of more, more, more. We are not a democracy - that illusion was discarded long ago but we still like to use the word to describe ourselves. We are not free - the only freedom we still have is the ability to leave. But we stay, hoping to recover the illusion of what we thought America was. We work harder and harder to pay bills that rise faster than our two and three job incomes, education for our young children is de-funded and college is equivalent to buying a Mercedes Benz every year for four years.
Meanwhile, Washington makes the rules - and multi-national corporations (people, according to the Supreme Court) call the shots. They fund the campaigns, they fund the PACs, they pay trillions for lobbyists and they have one agenda: profit. Please find me an administration that hasn't been in bed with Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs and other predators influence policy to create new money making opportunities. And somehow, an entire segment of the population has been convinced that a policy based on profit is GOOD for people.
It's bizarre logic and requires a particular brand of tunnel vision.
Government, they argue, shouldn't be providing basic services for its citizens' welfare. That's socialism. In capitalism, it's every man for himself. Meanwhile, their elderly parents scrape by on Social Security and Medicare while living in subsidized housing.
Capitalism's apologists argue for the tax breaks and loopholes that maximize corporate profits, for to deny those benefits would discourage business. But big business squats in this country like Jabba the Hut while many of the jobs it creates are sent off shore (it's cheaper and there are fewer annoying safety regulations to worry about - right Apple?) and it demands even more tax incentives to create jobs within the US. Local officials pant after them only to discover that they're paying dearly, and constantly, for the privilege of having industry in their communities.
New York's Comptroller this week warned that the state's economic situation is still tricky - it's health is tied to the health of its biggest industry - Wall Street. The message: "Don't mess with the goose that lays the golden eggs." Regulations have been twisted to allow Wall Street and its big business cronies to maximize their profits.
Wall Street is the world's biggest casino and they're gambling with your money. The media breathlessly reports every gasp and burp the Dow utters as though it's a meaningful indication of a trend. It's just the outcome of the latest game of craps. We don't see the profits when they win, but we pay when they lose.
I am sick of it. All of it.
I pay taxes. Like every American (except for those who can afford to hide in the loopholes), I pay far more taxes than I can comfortably afford. But I have no say in how my money is spent.
I don't want to give Wall Street a break. I do not consider them too big to fail. I consider them too big. Period.
I don't want my tax dollars to go to wars that are nothing more than efforts to open up new commodities for corporations. I don't want my tax dollars to help give breaks to the exploitation of finite, unsustainable energy sources. I don't want my tax dollars to give incentives to businesses that don't pay taxes and send most of their jobs overseas. I do not consider a big box store an economic driver - it kills entrepreneurship and competition and creates minimum wage jobs.
I want my tax dollars to provide a good education for every American. I want my tax dollars to provide every American with health care. I want my tax dollars to make sure every American can meet their basic needs - and has access to programs that lead to self-sufficiency. I don't want my government dictating my behavior or limiting my rights so long as I abide by a basic rule of law.
I pay for the privilege of living in this country, and I'm okay with that. But it's not giving me value for my dollar. And that's not the capitalist way.
I am not in need of a Big Daddy Government. Nor am I willing to play serf to a corporate overload anymore.
I want my tax dollars to fund government programs that assure a basic, decent quality of life for its citizens. And I want corporations to pay taxes. And I want all tax breaks withdrawn for every single corporation that ships its work overseas. I do not care if they threaten to leave. Call their bluff. Let's see if they can be competitive from the Third World.
I'm heading for my Howard Beal moment - "Network" has proven to be far more than a movie.
I don't consider myself a raving conspiracy theorist. But recent events make me wonder if I should reconsider and become one.
The Occupy Movement's central theme is disgust with what corporations are doing. They control health care. They control media. They control finances and they control what we eat. They control energy and they want to control the earth's water supply.
And the bottom line, for all of it, is profit.
I recently interviewed one of the authors of "Good Company", a book that studied the behaviors of the Fortune 100. They established a list of criteria that studied them as employers, as producers and as stewards of the environment and communities. And most of them scored no better than a D.
The good news is that the study also showed that those companies who scored better also were more profitable. Consumers respond positively to good companies. But most companies studied aim for a quick profit and chew up employees, communities, the environment and produce poor quality products while skirting regulations or break laws while building the cost of fines into the price of doing business.
While researching a story on the shortage of psychiatrists in my region, I found that insurance companies manipulate the market. They collect profits while offering seemingly-sufficient panels of specialists. But those panels are composed of doctors who don't accept new patients, who no longer accept their insurance, or who've been dead for years. Other psychiatrists take only cash because they cannot spend the time filling out the reams of paperwork required by insurance companies. Treatment centers have to fight with insurance companies to get continuing coverage for patients who still need care.
Doctors are pressured to prescribe the newest medicines because they have a better profit margin. Companies spend millions on ad campaigns to get you to ask your doctor for them.
And it's so "normal" we haven't even stopped to ask what the hell is going on. It's capitalism run amok - create the demand to satisfy the needs of an ever hungrier group of investors. Maximize profit, minimize expense. Taken to extremes, it means shortcuts. Cheap labor. Defective, insufficiently tested products raced to market. Minimal care with maximum profit.
Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. You're forcing a second look. And the view is disturbing.
Maybe I'm a Populist. I don't pay much attention to labels, but I stumbled across a Bill Moyers interview with Howard Zinn last night that made me sit up and cheer.
Zinn, if you don't know, is the author of "The Peoples Guide to the United States", a history of the events behind the history of our country. The transcontinental railroad may have been an incredible milestone in our development, but we're told very little about the thousands of men who built it. Those are the people Zinn wants to know about.
"The People Speak" is a film featuring actors reading some of the most dramatic, inspiring, yet seldom-heard words from great Americans.
These are everyday people who spoke out for social change. Their words are no less stirring today - a time when all of us again are called to stand up, to speak out, to demand reform, to demand that our country discard the rotting trappings of governance by greed and again stand proud and clean, a democracy created for, of and by we, the people.
The United States of America declared its people free, free to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We actually wrote that as part of our societal goal - the pursuit of happiness. Not the struggle to survive, not the hunt for the almighty dollar, not the chance to have more than your neighbor. The goal was happiness. We lost sight of that.
I demand it. I demand to be allowed to pursue happiness. I demand it for you, too. I am willing to work for it. You have to work, too. But our government was established for us - not for a few CEOs, not for Wall Street, not for the people with the most money, the most influence. It was not intended to tax us into submission, to conquer the world, to impose our form of government on everyone else. It was not intended to support corrupt and bloated industry.
We have lost our way. What I've seen of these performances convinces me it's not impossible to find our way back. We have to be willing to speak.
I went to see Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" last night. Excellent film. Go. If you disagree with him, it's most important that you go. Go to scoff, but go. Listen.
I took it hard; the facts are so cold when presented on a large screen, when you see the faces of the people who are being crushed by the Capitalism machine:
"Dead peasant" insurance policies that enrich an employer for a worker's untimely death. Citibank crowing to its top investors that America is now a plutonomy, with the only possible threat to a perfect corporate/government synergy being the one man one vote policy. A laundry list of Goldman executives who have been or are now the top financial people in the government.
Moore did a terrific job of contrasting life before Ronald Reagan and life after him. He describes him as the perfect pitch man, and what he sold us was trickle down economics; the idea that if you let the rich get richer, the money will come down to the rest of us. And the incredible part is that many bought that argument so solidly that despite the fact that they're sinking, that they can't pay their bills, that their salaries have been flat and families must work at least two jobs to survive, despite the fact that car loans are now routinely for five years because we can't possibly pay off a car in three, despite the fact that it is nearly impossible to get a young person through college without massive loan debt, despite the fact that we work longer and harder, make comparatively less yet have little or no job security, despite the fact that we lose our homes, go bankrupt because of health costs, and get poorer quality care from lawsuit-fearful doctors, despite all of this, they still BELIEVE the Reagan line. They believe it with all their hearts.
They're convinced that government is an evil which much be contained, rather than believing that government can be a tool for ensuring the public good. Is government evil right now? Yes, for the most part. It's corrupt, it's become what the Reaganites wanted - an arm of corporate America. It is populated by people who are indebted to the very interests they should be regulating, rather than the voters who put them in office. That's the system we've allowed to exist. And that's what has to change.
There are a few lights shining in the dark. Marcy Kaptur, for example, has my vote if I could vote for her. I like Dennis Kucinich. Don't dismiss him as a strange little man - that's what the System does to threats - it either attacks them or mocks them. He envisions a government that I could support. Bernie Sanders is a democratic Socialist? He's immediately got my vote if only for raw, buck the system honesty. He believes that government should be used to ensure the public good. Maurice Hinchey shares my philosophy, and would be an ally if Congress took a step toward reform.
The list of legislators who should be tossed out on their ears is too long to list and it is totally bipartisan. If you participate in the game as it's currently played, you should be fired. Period.
And you, you reading this, if you're in the US, you should be getting involved. You should consider running for office. Yes, it's a total drag and not what you want to do with your life, but that's exactly the kind of people who should be in office; citizen legislators who view the job as jury duty; I'll do it for a term because I should, but then I want out so I can have my life back. It isn't supposed to be a career.
But how do we get people riled up enough to act? Michael Moore's doing his part. He's pretty much doing it in a vaccuum. The Depression had Woody Guthrie to spread the message of discontent. The sixties had Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, even Woody's son. Who is the Troubador for the New People's Movement? Who can speak to both Red and Blue and make them see that their interests are the same: they want an America where they can live, work, raise their families and pursue opportunities to better themselves.
Our businesses make record profits while the workers go bankrupt. Giant corporations push through a bailout that they use to give bonuses to the people who created the banking crisis, for conferences in exotic locations, to increase their profits while attempting to crush the local competition. Small businesses are driven out by giant box stores and farmers are squashed by giant agribusiness.
It's simple logic: it's gotten too big to be sustainable. We're less healthy, less happy, less hopeful and more angry. To paraphrase the Great Communicator: Are You Better Off Than You Were Before We Made Capitalism America's God?
Thank you to a local independent political hopeful who strongly believes in the capitalist system in theory and the Constitution in practice...I finally understand the basis of the health care reform debate and many other philosophical struggles that have seemed to be based in nothing but fear.
There is fear, of course. Only fear could make someone believe that yelling over others at town hall meetings or packing a gun is appropriate behavior for a discussion of the issues.
But for rational, thinking people who are opposed to what they call "big government", people like the gentleman I spoke with last night about this subject, the bottom line is clear: the government's role is constitutionally very limited and that's the way it ought to be.
"But shouldn't the government, in exchange for the taxes we pay, offer a basic level of service that not only protects us from attack but maintains our health so that we can pursue life, liberty etc?" I asked.
"No." He was emphatic. "I'm not trying to not be compassionate. I truly believe this. If you can't afford health insurance, that's too bad. I've paid into Social Security for twenty years. I get back what I put into it."
I didn't ask him how he feels about Medicare, which he is undoubtedly using. I didn't have to. He told me the worst thing that ever happened to this country was FDR.
"He began the role of government as caretaker. That's not in the Constitution."
"But isn't it what it ought to be?"
"If that's what you want, then change the Constitution. I'm all for that if that's what the people want. But until they do, no. Government is supposed to exist to defend us in time of war. That's about it."
He and I agree that the current political system doesn't work. And perhaps that common ground is what makes it possible for us to discuss this dispassionately. I don't think he's evil incarnate and he doesn't think I'm a tax and spend liberal. But we have a basic, fundamental difference of opinion.
"So what you're telling me," I concluded, "is that my vision of a government that provides basic services for its citizens in exchange for tax dollars..."
"...isn't the way it works here," he continued.
"But what if I think it should?"
"Then you should move to another country. That's socialism."
And I think he's got something there. Maybe the ideal America I envision isn't what it was intended to be. Period. Just because I was born here doesn't mean that the system of government I studied in school is one I agree with.
What an amazing thought. Somehow I assumed I belonged here.
