A Second Gilded Age

Would it be too early to sense a sudden, uncovenanted shift against the corporate ethic, if ethic is the word? I can barely turn the page of a newspaper or magazine without striking across either some damaging admission, or at least some damage-control statement, from the boardroom classes. The "Money & Business" section of the New York Times on Sunday, June 16, carried a graphic photomontage of two well-tailored wrists, cuffed from behind. Henry Paulson of Goldman Sachs made an appearance in Washington to call for drastic reform of accounting and oversight as it applies to business. Then Murdoch's Weekly Standard fell on my desk, with a headline--"The Problem With K Street Conservatism"--surmounting its main editorial. The essay, by David Brooks, made some candid admissions about the differences between sheer, crass corporatism and the breezier kind of libertarian, market-oriented politics with which the right consoles itself on its better days.

Two of these differences might be termed strategic. The corporate world doesn't care about an energy policy that might abolish dependence on Saudi oil. (Brooks spoke, in terms that must have cost him something, of the missed chance for "a large plan that would one day rid us" of such dependence.) And the corporate masters are indifferent, in their demand for steel tariffs, both to the purities of free-enterprise ideology and to the effect that such crudeness has on US diplomacy with Europe.

Behind this, I suspect, lies an even deeper unease about the relationship between the war against Al Qaeda and the lutte de classe. Historically and morally, wars that involve a general social mobilization are at least supposed to involve some notion of equality of sacrifice. This must apply at least as much to any war in which civilians are the main targets of the foe. The headline on the handcuff article read "Bush Doctrine: Lock 'Em Up," a not quite accurate summary of the Administration's policy on corporate malfeasance. Clearly, though, the White House doesn't want to be caught running a fat cat's war, while the citizens scrabble for crumbs. The number of those average citizens who now hold stock or have private retirement schemes--itself supposedly a proof of the very success of the privatized world--only makes the failure and squalor of Merrill Lynch and other outfits more salient.

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