Neil H. Jacoby Quotes

In its two most dramatic conflicts with the Nixon Administration—publication of the purloined Pentagon Papers and of the Watergate scandal—the Washington-based press corps and the New York-Washington press axis not only challenged but defeated a President of the United States. Indeed, Professor Huntington has asserted that the media were able to accomplish what no other group of politicians or disgruntled citizens had previously done in American history—bring about a journalistic coup d’etat that forced the resignation of a President.

Experience has taught that a great power must always act with deliberation and restraint in pursuing its national interest, even when they coincide with the long-run global interest. U.S. efforts to reduce corruption in the business-government relationship throughout the world should be undertaken patiently and persistently, with an understanding of the problems confronting the governments of other nations, and without unrealistic expectations of speedy results.

Indonesia dramatizes the dilemmas of the poor countries whose officials are forced to be corrupt. Maladministration reduces the collection of income taxes to provide revenue for the national treasury. Widespread smuggling further deprives the treasury of needed customs revenue. Lack of revenue prevents the payment of adequate salaries to the bureaucracy. This function of government is, then, fulfilled by private payments to underpaid civil servants. Thus, a vicious cycle breeds corruption in business-government relations.

Communist propagandists have long maintained that capitalism is the breeding ground of corruption. One would, therefore, expect to find in the communist orbit a ‘new man’ who has no appetite for the decadent bourgeois habits of the West. But fact as distinguished from myth reveals that corrupt practices abound in the communist nations.

The central them of Humanistic Marxism is the replacement, in the economy, of authoritarian penalties and material incentives with democratic processes and moral incentives…Great stress is laid upon an egalitarian distribution of income and wealth. Everyone is expected to perform some physical work… Corporations are maintained as state-owned facilities under joint government-worker control. Market competition and profit motivation are blunted or obliterated. Authoritarian political methods, officially shunned, are used in some degree to stifle dissent and to enforce industrial discipline provided by market competition in the United States.

It would be virtually impossible to obtain proof outside the United States that foreign companies were making payments to officials of foreign governments to assist them in obtaining business. American companies may engage in mea culpa breastbeating in this country, but it is not a popular addiction abroad.

During the war years, the United States government gave serious thought to acquiring a direct interest in Arabian [oil] reserves.

A static technology is, however, almost inconceivable. It runs so strongly against established drives in American society as to be practically impossible. So long as we are thinking beings, we will find new ways to increase the productivity of work! The basic point, however, is that economic growth is needed to improve the quality of life. A rise in the GNP, taken by itself, is neither good nor bad. Everything depends upon what kind of production has increased, its costs to society, and who benefits from it. What people now want and need is resource-conserving, pollution-free growth—growth that does not harm the environment and demands less of the earth’s limited resources.

The 4,400 business corporations that disappeared by merger during 1968 were a small number compared with the 12,000 that disappeared by failure, or the 207,000 new corporations that were formed. Even the $43 billion in securities exchanged in mergers that year were only 3.3 percent of the market value of corporate securities.

It is widely believed that big business firms collectively own the preponderance of America’s wealth and are steadily expanding their share. The facts show the contrary. Corporate business owns about 28 percent of the tangible wealth of the United States, and its share has not changed much during the past fifty years. The bulk of the nation’s tangible wealth is held by the household and government sectors of the economy and is not employed in profit-seeking enterprise, corporate or noncorporate. …If the character of a society were to be designated by its major wealth-holding institution, the United States could more appropriately be described as a ‘household state’ than a ‘corporate state’.

The multinational corporation is, beyond doubt, the most powerful agency for global economic unity that our century has produced. It is fundamentally an instrument of peace. Its interest is to emphasize the common goals of peoples, to reconcile or remove differences between them. It cannot thrive in a regime of international tension and conflict. The instrumentality of multinational business is man’s best hope of achieving political unity on this shrinking planet.

During the decade of the 1970s, the print and electronic media emerged as an institution comparable in power and influence to the three coordinate branches of government. Shielded by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the press has become almost invulnerable to the criticism and legislative curbs that limit the power of such other social institutions as business or government. Congressmen, who depend upon the radio and television networks for national visibility, are loath to level criticisms at the media.

Like their counterparts in other Third World nations, Middle Eastern socialist-orientated regimes are inefficient and mismanaged, and they tolerate the use of the political payments by those who must deal with them… The Middle East is one of the world’s most politically volatile regions. Nationalization of foreign investment is frequent, and taxation is high. National rivalries and the unresolved Israeli-Arab conflict contribute to the investor’s political risks.

It comes as a shock to many, therefore to learn that the majority of the labor force in the United States works for government, unincorporated business, nonprofit institutions, or are self-employed. Less than half of the total labor force was employed in the entire corporate sector in 1969.Less than one-quarter worked for ‘large companies,’ defined for present purposes as those employing more than two hundred people.

Private business investment is inherently superior to governmental aid as an instrument of development because it combines transfers of managerial and technical assistance with that of capital.