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

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