[CounterCorp] FW: Locked in the stocks -- and out of the game

[CounterCorp News and Events List]

[EDITOR'S NOTE: CounterCorp's forthcoming "Locked in the Stocks"  
project will examine the role that stocks, stock traders, and stock  
markets play in the U.S. and global economies, and how media coverage  
has shaped and distorted the public's perception of that role. Naomi  
Klein's article below, which was originally posted on CounterCorp's  
Corporation Watch list <www.corporationwatch.org>, describes the way  
in which corporations -- with the help of pro-corporate politicians  
and "embedded" journalists -- have successfully convinced most  
Americans that they stand to benefit whenever stock indices rise.  
More news and event announcements coming soon ...]


Begin forwarded message:


> Disowned by the Ownership Society

>

>  by Naomi Klein

>

> (The Nation, Feb.18 issue) -- Remember the "ownership society," a  

> fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years  

> of his presidency?

>

> 	"We're creating … an ownership society in this country, where more  

> Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they  

> live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of  

> property," Bush said in October 2004.

>

> 	Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the  

> ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long  

> after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah."

>

> 	Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once- 

> ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder:  

> Rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the  

> ownership society's undertaker.

>

> 	But long before the ownership society had a neat label, its  

> creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic  

> revolution around the world.

>

> 	The idea was simple: If working-class people owned a small piece  

> of the market -- a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private  

> pension -- they would cease to identify as workers and start to see  

> themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses.

>

> 	That meant they would vote for politicians promising to improve  

> stock performance rather than job conditions -- and class  

> consciousness would be a relic.

>

> 	It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an  

> empty slogan -- "hokum", as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put  

> it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to  

> a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit  

> the wealthy.

>

> 	The problem boiled down to this: People tend to vote in their  

> economic interest. Even in the wealthy United States, most people  

> earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest  

> of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute  

> wealth from the top down.

>

> 	So what to do? It was conservative British Prime Minister Margaret  

> Thatcher who pioneered a solution. Her effort centered on Britain's  

> public housing (known in the UK as "council estates"), which were  

> filled with die-hard socialist Labor Party supporters. (Thatcher  

> was the leader of the Tory party.)

>

> 	In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to  

> buy their council estate apartments at reduced rates (much as Bush  

> did decades later, by promoting sub-prime mortgages).

>

> 	As a result, some of them could afford to become homeowners, but  

> those who couldn't faced rents almost twice as high as before,  

> leading to an explosion of homelessness.

>

> 	As a political strategy, it worked: Renters continued to oppose  

> Thatcher, but polls showed that more than half of the newly minted  

> owners did indeed switch their party affiliation to the Tories.

>

> 	The key was a psychological shift: They now thought like owners,  

> and owners tend to vote Tory. The ownership society as a political  

> project was born.

>

> 	Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan ushered in a range  

> of policies that similarly convinced the public that class  

> divisions no longer existed. By 1988, only 26 percent of Americans  

> told pollsters that they lived in a society bifurcated into "haves"  

> and "have-nots"; 71 percent rejected the whole idea of class.

>

> 	The real breakthrough, however, came in the 1990s, with the  

> "democratization" of stock ownership, eventually leading to nearly  

> half of American households owning stock.

>

> 	Stock watching became a national past-time, with tickers on TV  

> screens becoming more common than weather forecasts. Main Street,  

> we were told, had stormed the elite enclaves of Wall Street.

>

> 	Once again, the shift was psychological. Stock ownership made up a  

> relatively minor part of the average American's earnings, but in  

> the era of frenetic down-sizing and off-shoring of jobs, this new  

> class of amateur investor had a distinct shift in consciousness.

>

> 	Whenever a new round of lay-offs was announced -- sending stock  

> prices soaring -- many responded not by identifying with those who  

> had lost their jobs, or by protesting the policies that had led to  

> the lay-offs, but by calling their brokers with instructions to buy  

> more stock.

>

> 	Bush came to office determined to take these trends even further,  

> to deliver Social Security accounts to Wall Street and target  

> minority communities -- traditionally out of the Republican Party's  

> reach -- for easy homeownership.

>

> 	"Under 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans own  

> a home," Bush observed in 2002. "That's just too few." He called on  

> Fannie Mae and the private sector "to unlock millions of dollars,  

> to make it available for the purchase of a home" -- an important  

> reminder that sub-prime lenders were taking their cue straight from  

> the top.

>

> 	Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been  

> broken. First the dot-com bubble burst; then employees watched  

> their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom.

>

> 	Now we have the sub-prime mortgage crisis, with more than 2  

> million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are  

> raiding their 401(k)s -- their pieces of the stock market -- to pay  

> their mortgage.

>

> 	Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street.  

> To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly  

> traded stocks and toward private equity.

>

> 	In November, the NASDAQ stock exchange joined forces with several  

> private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a  

> private equity stock market open only to investors with assets  

> upward of $100 million. In short order, yesterday's ownership  

> society has morphed into today's members-only society.

>

> 	This mass eviction from the ownership society has profound  

> political implications. According to a September Pew Research poll,  

> 48 percent of Americans say they live in a society carved into  

> haves and have-nots -- nearly twice the number of 1988.

>

> 	Only 45 percent see themselves as part of the haves. In other  

> words, we are seeing a dramatic return of the very class- 

> consciousness that the ownership society attempted to erase. Class  

> is back. And the free market ideologues have lost their most potent  

> psychological tool.

>

> _____________________

>

> CORPORATION WATCH: Shining a Spotlight on Corporate Pathology

> Send feedback or article suggestions to: editor at corporationwatch.org

> (Corporation Watch is not affiliated with CorpWatch or its "corp- 

> watchers" list)



      CounterCorp: Putting an end to business as usual
     Organizers of the 2008 Anti-Corporate Film Festival
			    www.countercorp.org

      :-:-=-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-:

Add CounterCorp events to your computer or iPod calendar:
webcal://icalx.com/public/CounterCorp/CounterCorp.ics

Subscribe to CounterCorp's "Corporation Watch" e-mail list:
More information at http://www.corporationwatch.org

Donate to CounterCorp: Select our name from the drop-down
menu at https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=695