On March 30 of this year the CBC Post-News Talk carried an interesting talk on the subject of People’s Capitalism by Peter Whitehouse, then a staff member of the CBC in Mont- “~ B eal. _ Why-CBC listeners heard no more from or about White-. house became public last week when the National Guardian, a ~ U.S, weekly newspaper, published the text of that talk, together with an explanatory letter. “In his letter to the National Guardian Whitehouse wrote: _ “Incidentally, it might be interesting to note that I was dis- missed from my post for giving this talk on the CBC. One of _ the directors heard the talk and advised me that I couldn’t stay _ in a big capitalist organization if I critized capitalism. I asked __ him, in view of the fact that everyone had to work in a capital- ist organization in a capitalist society, whether he didn’t think _ my dismissal was a coercive measure aimed at suppressing free _ speechBand freedom of thought and opinion. He then advised ‘me to .go to Russia. In reply to this crude suggestion I asked him whether he realized that one of the basic principles of © democracy was that minority opinions should be able to be free- ~ ly expressed, and that what he was suggesting by advising me to go to Russia was that anyone holding a minority opinion ~ should either shut up or get out, a distinctly fascist outlook.” ° be 4 _ Here is the text of the speech that cost Whiehouse his job, as ms printed in the National Guardian: - es : Madison Avenue experts who have the job of demon- rating the virtues of Ameri- cal \-style capitalism have just come up with a staggering _ claim that Marxism exists in America. Karl Marx, they say, would _ do a somersault in his grave if ‘ knew that the millions and millions of America’s “little” people have today become cap- italists and-own the nation’s tools of production. This idea of People’s Capitalism can be found in a recent flood of Magazine advertisements by corporations like General Elec- tric, and in slick, expensibely produced brochures put out by. the public relations depart- ments of Standard Oil of New Jersey, the duPont Corp., and ‘similar industrial giants. Briefly the theory is this. Because nearly nine million _ people in the USA own stock of some sort, this wide diffu- sion of ownership gives these lucky nine million effective contro] over the nation’s ecen- omy, and thus over the nation itself. Well, in the first place, az I see it, nine million people is only five percent of the vopu- lation, which leaves 95 percent _ without any stock at all. That takes care of the theory right there. " However, not long ago, a writer in Life magazine, Ernest Haveman, spotted this glaring eror, be- cause he cunningly expanded the figure of nine million stockholders to 106 millions. How? By the simple expedient of including anyone and every- one who has a few dollars in insurance and pension plans. must have. According to Mr. Haveman’s logic everyone who pays any kind of insurance is a stock- holder, bécause the insurance companies, of course, invest his. money for him. Unfortunately a touch of harsh reality here immediately punctures this nonsense. Just consider. It takes $25,000 of invested capital at current rates to produce a bare $1,000 of annual dividends. You can bet that Aunt Sadie and Uncle Bob haven’t anywhere near that amount of insurance or pension funds. They probably are just drawing an annual $7.80 like most everyone else. It’s nice flattery to call Aunt Sadie a stockholder and Uncle Bob a financier, and all the millions with pittances in pen- sion plans or insurance schemes blue chip investors — it’s nice flattery — and utter nonsense too. So let’s stick to a figure of nine or ten million owners of corporate stock — the five per- -cent of the population I men- tioned earlier on — and get deeper into the theory. Do we really have even nine or ten million People’s Capitalists? A _ glance at how these stocks are distributed gives us the answer. Take the American wage earner ... what does he own? According to official figures only one wage earner in a hundred owns any stock at all . and all the stocks owned -by wage earners put together only amount to a mere $750,- 000,000 worth, whis is so small it’s beyond the vanishing point. By contrast the Rockefeiler and Mellon families ‘own over ~ $3,000,000,000 in stock, the du- Ponts over $4,000,000,000. In fact, the holdings of the Rocke- feller family in one company — People's Capitalism’ cost CBC CONSOLIDATED} TRUST BANK |: “It’s simple, Pierpont. Jones has four dollars in his savings account, so that makes him a People’s Capitalist.” alone, Standard Oil of New Jersey, amount to twice the amount of stock held by all the American wage earners com- bined. So the wage earner isn’t a People’s Capitalist after all. Then who is, besides the Rocke- fellers, the duPonts, the Mel-. lons, the Pews, and the>Whit- neys? That five percent of the nation, of course — middle and upper class people — except that most of, them own the wrapping paper and a very few what’s inside the parcel. _All of which makes me think of an amusing little cartoon I recently saw in a paper called the. Weekly People. The caz- toon appeared during the height of last year’s lay-offs, and it showed a long line of gloomy workers in front of a - pay window. The worker st the head of the line is just get- ting a card marked “Laid Off” in big black letters, and he’s saying, “But you can’t lay me off ... I’m a stockholder.” Let’s get back to our 10 million People’s Capitalists. A short time ago a senate com- mittee announced that out of the country’s 43 million fam- ilies, something like a half a million only own four-fifths of all the nation’s stockholdings. Last Juns, Victor Perlo, a well known »American economist, confirmed this pretty well in the American Economic Re- view with this example. Vic- tor Perlo said that 100 of the largest stockholders in Stand- ard Oil of New ‘Jersey—that is about .0707 percent — own nearly half the stock. On the other hand, more than 100,000 stockholders, representing more than three-quarters of the total number, own _ less than eight percent of Stand- ard’s stock. And this same pat- _ tern of stock distribution ap- plies to all the large Amer- ican corporations. So this People’s Capitalism is a myth . . a myth, it seems to me, that is really de- signed to conceal one fact... . that distribution of wealth is grossly unequal in the USA, reputedly the most democratic nation on earth. Economic control of the USA is not in the hands of 10 million peo- ple’s capitalists. It lies in the employee his job hands of a very small elite which, according to G. A. El- ‘jot, formerly president of the Canadian Political Science As- sociation, probably consists of some 2,000 men, or one eighty- thousandth part of the popula- tion. And incidentally, the story is exactly the same in Can- ada where, with one-tenth of the USA’s population, her ec- onomic elite is one-tenth of theirs . .. about 300 men. As for all the other Americans ... the almost 200,000,000 who aren’t in the club of the elite, well— maybe they’d like to save enough to become Peo- ple’s Capitalists too, but un- fortunately they can’t. Even in the boom year of 1956 after all, the annual income of 35,000,000 of America’s 45,000,000 families— roughly three-quarters of America’s households — aver- aged less than $2,500. That’s right, a $2,500 average annual income for more than three- quarters of America’s families. At the same time one-tenth of one per cent (America’s top income families) earned just as much as what more than half of America’s families — the lower income families — earned. And just one more statistic. What about personal savings? Well, 80 per cent of - bank savings are owned by about 6 per cent of the people. Charles V. Neal, a promin- ent family counselor, writing in the Los Angeles Times a - year ago, ‘gave a pretty good summary of the situation | when he declared that an av- erage family living on $4,000 a year was able to cary on only by running $62 a month into the red, a debt of $700 a year. Two years ago the well known magazine Business Week put it even better. “Sav- ings,” it said, “on any income below $7,500 a year are triv-- als Well, I'd add this too, that savings on any income below $10,000 a year are, if not tri-. vial, at least very limited. And only about four families in 50 get over $10,000 a year, so. whichever way you look at it, the number of Americans who can save enough to invest sub- stantially is abysmally small. The number of Americans, in other words, with bouton- nieres in their lapels, a seat at the stockholder’s meeting and | a pair of scissors handy in a well packed safe-deposit box - is about as impressive a total as—well—the number of oases ° in the Gobi desert. I pay my respects to the public relations - geniuses of the ESSO Corpor- ation, duPonts and General Electric, but really, People’s Capitalism is pure Madison Avenue Moonshine. July 17, 1959 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 5 = .