Thu Feb 09 2012

Alexander Cockburn

Dockers and capitalists
October 9, 2002

Here are 10,500 dockworkers locked out at every port on the West Coast from Seattle to San Diego, with the shipping and terminal operators and big retail chains like Wal-Mart begging Bush to help them break the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), and Bush beginning the process of imposing an 80-day back-to-work order under the Taft-Hartley law.

He could escalate by trying to place the longshore workers under the aegis of the Railway Labor Act rather than the National Labor Relations Act. The former allows the government to close down a strike by fiat and impose a settlement.

Another line of attack would be to try to undercut the ILWU's strategic ace in the hole, its status as a bargaining unit for every port on the Pacific Coast. Before Harry Bridges won that right for the union back in the 1930s, the owners could simply whipsaw the different bargaining units by shifting shipments from a struck port to one still operating. A modern escalation of that would be the development of a port on Mexico's West Coast, where labor costs are negligible, and whence under NAFTA the containers could be funneled up by rail.

The West Coast longshoremen stand as a good symbol of what organized labor can do: get its members a decent wage (after 30 years or so of dangerous, skillful work they can maybe hope to earn what an MBA in his mid-20s, two years out of the Wharton School, would demand on walking in the door at a Wall Street firm); display a social and political conscience; and advertise the unfashionable idea that blue-collar work does not have to mean a starvation wage, looted pension fund and no health care.

If you want the latter, drive, as I have, down the streets of Odessa, Texas, down the interstate a few miles from where George Bush grew up in Midland. Odessa no doubt formed his notions of what constitute workers' rights and a livable wage. It has a murder rate that regularly battles Miami for first place on the national charts.

So much for labor. On the capitalist side of the ledger, Fortune magazine reports that officers and directors of the 1,035 companies that have fallen the most from their recent bull-market peaks, cashed in $66 billion worth of stock before the crash. Meanwhile, those companies' non-insider employees were watching as their children's college fund and their retirement incomes were plummeting. Before the crash executives from AOL-Time Warner cashed in $1.79 billion. Enron executives hauled off $994 million. Charles Schwab's commissars netted $951 million.

It's clear that America's corporate executive are, as a class, crooks. The "bad apple" count runs at about 75 percent per barrel, the B.A.s honed to immoral conduct in costly business schools, forcing grounds for a career in crime, the same way prisons are for the humbler classes.

Here's a writer I don't often quote with approval: " ... a great disaster has occurred. It is the establishment during the last decade or so of the MBA as the moral equivalent of the M.D. or the law degree, meaning a way of insuring a lucrative living by the mere fact of a diploma that is not the mark of scholarly achievement ... the pre-business economics major, who not only does not take an interest in sociology, anthropology or political science but is also persuaded that what he is learning can handle all that belongs to those studies. Moreover, he is not motivated by the love of the science of economics but by love of what it is concerned with -- money."

This is from Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," which shot up the best-seller list in the 1980s. Bloom goes on to say that prospective MBA students have "blinders" put on them. Now, why is it that all of Bloom's paranoid passages about the effects of Sixties radicals and shallow multiculturalism on the university are quoted by William Bennett and not the passage above?

Bloom was right about the MBA student. Anyone who attended an American university in the '80s or '90s can remember those smug fellows who dreamt of the riches derived from a Wharton or Harvard MBA. (The role model was Donald Trump with his degree from the Wharton School of Finance.) Who can forget their superior attitude toward their fellow students who were wasting their time in the humanities department?

My colleague Willie Johnson talked to Marjorie Kelly, editor of Business Ethics. Kelly says, "ethics courses are 'not taken seriously' by most business students or, apparently, the many business schools that are considering 'dropping business ethics classes' altogether. Business schools essentially teach one thing -- 'how to maximize shareholder value.' They are 'too focused on (that) single goal.'"

By the way, G. Bush Jr is the first president with an MBA.

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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Alexander Cockburn

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