He refers to the book The Modern Corporation and Private Property, published in 1932. It noted that top executives of America's giant companies were not even accountable to their own shareholders and operated their companies in their own interest. The solution, the authors said, was to make these executives responsible to a broad range of interests: investors, employees, consumers, and the general public. According to him, this actually happened:
Sitting atop America's largest corporations were men who repeatedly stated that their job was to balance the needs of everyone affected by the corporation. “The job of management.” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address that typified what other chief executives were saying, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the variously affected interest groups...Fortune lectured its executive readers on their duty to maintain a broad national perspective: “To take the professional point of view, the executive must adopt a detached, reserved attitude toward the opportunities and tactics of the moment. He must become an industrial statesman.”
These business leaders could afford to be corporate statesman—acting, in their view, for the betterment of the nation rather than strictly for the benefit of their own consumers and shareholders—because the oligopolistic system allowed them the license to be statesmen. Just as they could grant their blue-collar workers generous wages and benefits without any worry that a competitor would undercut them, they could go to Washington and advocate the Marshal Plan without concern that a rival would steal away market share while their attention was elsewhere.
He finishes this chapter with these words:
Then something happened that changed everything: America and the world got on the road to supercapitalism.
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