Friday, February 21, 2014

Tony Wikrent — The amazing historical ignorance of US business leaders

....Chester Bowles, a Madison avenue advertising executive who would become governor of Connecticut in 1949, and would serve President Kennedy as Under Secretary of State, then as Ambassador to India.... wrote in a 1946 book, Tomorrow Without Fear, “that prosperity cannot continue unless enough income is being distributed to all of us—farmers and workers as well as businessmen.”
....The plutocrats had had their opportunity, and they had blown it [just prior to the Great Depression]. America had given them everything they desired. The freedom to do whatever they wanted. The power to bend others to their will. And ever-grander fortunes as both incentive and reward. Americ choked on those fortunes. A maldistribution of income and wealth that severe the American economy simply could not swallow.

“Even with the most business-minded administration in our history, even with falling taxes and a government surplus, even with everything that businessmen thought they needed to insure continued prosperity,” Bowles reflected, “we could not duck that basic issue for more than a few tinsel-decorated years.”
Quoted in Sam Pizzigati, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970
The scourge of neoliberalism

real economics
The amazing historical ignorance of US business leaders
Tony Wikrent

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