The Common Good

by Robert B. Reich

  The answer is: Nothing is stopping them, except their own parched, self-serving notion of leadership as maximizing profits and shareholder value, whatever it takes. But as leaders of institutions with the greatest influence over American politics, they also have a duty to the common good and are uniquely positioned to advance it. For too long they have abdicated this responsibility. We are now living with the consequences. They can see these consequences as readily as you can, if they’re willing to look.

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  None of this is simply a matter of “ethics.” Ethics involves fulfilling legal responsibilities, avoiding obvious conflicts of interest, and behaving in an aboveboard manner. As now routinely taught in graduate schools of business and as required for obtaining many professional licenses, ethics is about how to avoid legal troubles or public relations disasters. Leadership as trusteeship extends way beyond ethics. It goes to the heart of the job. It requires a different way of thinking about the central obligation of leading any institution. Part of the responsibility of elected or appointed government officials, of corporate executives, and of leaders of nonprofits and other major organizations in society must be to enhance the public’s trust in their institutions and in our political economic system as a whole. Their success should not be measured solely in how much money they or their organizations make or raise, how much power they accumulate, or how much influence they wield. They must also be judged by the legacy of trust they pass onward. As Shimon Peres, a former prime minister and president of Israel, put it in his memoir, “We need a generation that sees leadership as a noble cause, defined not by personal ambition, but by morality and a call to service.” Exactly. The purpose of leadership is not simply to win. It is to serve.

  CHAPTER 8

  Honor and Shame

  SOCIETIES TRADITIONALLY ENFORCE the common good through honor and shame—honoring those who make exemplary contributions to it and shaming those who exploit it for personal gain. Can we do so again? Ideally, children learn about honor and shame at an early age by watching and hearing parents, teachers, mentors, and religious leaders. Adults help a young child develop a moral consciousness through how they live their lives, whom they admire and respect, and whose behavior they disdain. Some of these lessons are also conveyed by one generation to the next in morality tales—the Bible or other sacred texts, histories and prominent biographies, and fictionalized stories of heroism and treachery. Other lessons are embedded in popular culture—songs, movies, biographies, and the daily news. As I’ve said, a president of the United States has a special role because he or she is a living embodiment of honor or shame. These lessons establish and reconfirm the common good, not as propaganda but as the expression of a society’s values.

  Tribal cultures live by honor and shame. These sentiments also play a large role in certain Asian societies. Since the founding of the United States, as I have noted, religious communities have informed people’s understandings of what they owe to one another as participants in the same community. These influences can be powerful because one of humankind’s deepest needs is to belong. Through most of human history survival has depended on extended families, clans, and tribes. To be highly respected has meant strong support from the group. Historically, to be ostracized has often meant death.

  Modern America seems to have misplaced honor and shame. We often honor people who haven’t advanced the common good but have merely achieved notoriety or celebrity, or amassed great wealth or power. We shame people not for having exploited the common good for personal gain but for failing to conform to prevailing ideas about fashion or coolness, or for associating with the wrong people.

  If we’re to revive the common good we must use honor and shame appropriately, bringing public attention to virtuous behavior and public condemnation to behavior that erodes public trust. Doing this, of course, can be tricky. If shame is to be meaningful, average people must retain their capacity to be offended by actions that undermine the common good. If they tip over into cynicism or become numbed to such behavior, they may no longer see it as particularly shameful. The behavior becomes normalized. It’s also the case that people who have shown utter contempt for the common good are often the least capable of feeling shame. They are literally shameless. During his trial for criminal fraud, Martin Shkreli ridiculed prosecutors; after his conviction, he smirked.

  By the same token, some of the most truly honorable people in society don’t seek honors. Their modesty and humility often make them nearly invisible. They credit others, and respect their craft or calling too much to think of themselves as exemplary or extraordinary. Hugh Heclo relates a speech given by Chicago Cub Ryne Sandberg when he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005: “I was in awe every time I walked onto the field,” Sandberg said.

  That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. Make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases; hit a home run, put your head down, drop the bat, run around the bases, because the name on the front is a lot more important than the name on the back.

  Sandberg credited others who had been inducted before him:

  These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you, and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up. Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect….If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game…did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.

  Honor and shame can be dangerous sentiments in the wrong hands or if used for the wrong purposes. Dictators and demagogues throughout history have bestowed honors on those loyal to them and sought to disgrace those with the courage to stand up to them. Public shaming can also carry a painful stigma. “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” wrote Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who also sought to put an end to public stocks and whipping posts. Four centuries ago, public shaming included scarlet A’s. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy destroyed reputations and careers by accusing people of being communists. These days, social media can unleash torrents of invective upon people who do little more than say something silly or insensitive, or who look different. It can cause a sensitive teenager to take his or her life.

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  In contemporary America, the meaning of honor has become confused partly because those who bestow honors often have ulterior motives. Government funding has dried up for nonprofits such as universities, hospitals, and museums. Funds for social services of churches and community groups are growing scarce. Appropriations for public television, the arts, museums, and libraries have been slashed. Research grants are waning. Legislatures are cutting back on university funding. Meanwhile, vast riches have been accumulating in the hands of a relative few. As a result of both trends, nonprofits have been using the lure of honors to hook rich donors. Presidents of universities, congregations, think tanks, and other nonprofits are now kissing the posteriors of wealthy donors as never before. Galas are held in their honor. Colleges bestow on them honorary degrees. Endowed professorships carry their names. They are awarded prizes and medals. Awards and prizes themselves are named in their honor. University buildings, concert halls, and museums are also named after them, their family names etched for eternity in granite or marble. In all these ways their identities become synonymous with society’s notions of honorability.

  Curiously, though, little or no attention is giv
en to how these donors obtained their wealth. They may have violated or skirted laws, paid off politicians, engaged in insider trading or price-fixing, defrauded investors, or even brought the world economy to near ruin because of their disregard for the consequences of their schemes. These behaviors, though, are assumed to be irrelevant to the deal at hand: In return for their donation, they are imbued with moral approval. The subtle message is that the common good doesn’t really count. Wealth and power do.

  The aforementioned Michael Milken was indicted in 1989 for racketeering and securities fraud. He pleaded guilty to securities and reporting violations and was sentenced to ten years in prison (subsequently reduced to two), a fine of $600 million, and a permanent ban from the securities industry. In 2016, the very same man was honored with the Dr. Armand Hammer Philanthropy Award. “I don’t think…prostate cancer research would be where it is today without Michael Milken,” gushed former film studio executive Sherry Lansing at the award ceremony. “He is the pioneer in this field, so I’m incredibly grateful to him in all areas of cancer research. He’s extraordinarily generous.”

  Milken’s generosity was admirable, but bestowing a public honor on him required that the benefactors suspend any moral judgment about how his wealth had been obtained. It is an example of the intentional unawareness that conservative writer and former education secretary William Bennett had once warned about. “Nonjudgementalism…has permeated our culture,” he wrote, “encouraging a paralysis of the moral faculty.” It would be one thing if Milken had publicly admitted that his fraudulent acts were wrong and then openly sought to redeem himself through philanthropy. At least then the subsequent honors wouldn’t seem so at odds with the common good. But to the contrary, he heaped praise on himself for what he did. In 2017, his webpage claimed that his “use of convertible bonds, preferred stock, high-yield bonds, collateralized loans, equity-linked instruments, securitized obligations and derivatives, among other instruments, helped create millions of jobs, leading a Time bureau chief to write, in 1997, ‘Milken was right in almost every sense.’ ”

  Sometimes these deals put their beneficiaries in the awkward position of having to defend the honor of philanthropists tainted by scandal. The Taubman Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is named after Alfred Taubman, who in 1988 donated $15 million to establish it. In 2002, Taubman was sentenced to prison for orchestrating a price-fixing scheme between the nation’s top two auction houses. After the conviction, Harvard students asked Harvard officials whether they would change the name of the center. The answer was no. The center’s director explained that “in the great scheme of things, [Taubman] has led a very ethical life. His conviction does not mean that his life has not been ethical, or one that Harvard doesn’t want to associate with.” Hello? Taubman had just been convicted of price-fixing. His name was etched on Harvard’s school of government, which is supposed to train students to work for the common good. A criminal conviction for price-fixing did not alter the appropriateness of honoring this man?

  At other times, such deals confer on donors a patina of respectability and social approval that obscures the donors’ ongoing attacks on the common good. Consider David Koch, co-owner, with his brother, Charles, of Koch Industries. In 2008, the New York City Ballet renamed its home at Lincoln Center the David H. Koch Theater after he donated $100 million to modernize it. “The renaming acknowledges the extraordinary generosity of Mr. Koch,” said a spokesperson for the ballet. To my knowledge, David Koch has broken no law, but his political activities have undoubtedly undermined the common good. I’m not talking about the Koch brothers’ right-wing political views. People may differ in their opinions about taxes or the environment. It’s that the Koch brothers’ political spending has been so vast that it has made a mockery of the ideal of equal voting rights. As Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of law-breaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.” Early in 2017, a spokesman for the Kochs’ political network said it planned to spend between $300 million and $400 million to influence politics and public policy during the first two years of the Trump administration.

  Public honors are similarly lavished on celebrities—people sufficiently well known that the act of honoring them generates positive publicity for the institution and assures current and prospective donors of its importance. In return, the celebrity gets an honorary degree or an embossed plaque or, sometimes, even money (appropriately called an “honorarium”) for attending. In many instances, the celebrity is repaying a friend or business associate (say, a movie producer who happens to serve on the board of the conferring institution). The transaction is innocent enough. No overt harm is done. But in the process, the idea of “honor” is debased. The celebrity is already celebrated, by definition. He or she is being honored for being celebrated, a tautology that displaces any intervening thought about the common good.

  Honors should matter, especially when they appear to convey social judgment. We automatically attach the prefix “the honorable” to the names of presidents, vice presidents, members of both houses of Congress, judges, and other people appointed to office nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate (except for military officers). Once the title is conferred, the recipient keeps it for the remainder of her life. By some estimates, nearly 100,000 people in the United States are addressed as “the honorable.” I don’t mean to sound priggish, but I don’t see why members of Congress who have been convicted of taking bribes or embezzling money should continue to be referred to as “the honorable”—nor, for that matter, any members who have been censured or reprimanded by their colleagues. Why should a cabinet member convicted of breaking the law while in office remain “the honorable,” even if he subsequently receives a presidential pardon? Why should a member of Congress who beats up a reporter for asking a question he doesn’t like be referred to as “the honorable”? Their behavior was shameful. They’ve dishonored themselves and the offices they held in trust.

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  Those who are honored should have shown the courage to stand up for the common good against the forces of greed, corruption, and abuse of power. I’m thinking of people like Cheryl Eckard, who, in 2002, as a quality assurance manager at pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, discovered serious problems at its largest plant—drugs produced in nonsterile environments, a water system contaminated with microorganisms, and medicines made in the wrong doses. After Eckard alerted management, she was fired. She then shared her findings with the Food and Drug Administration, and sued the company. After an eight-year trial, GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay the government $750 million for manufacturing and selling adulterated drug products. The court also ordered the firm to compensate Eckard for her dismissal and the emotional harm it caused her. “It’s difficult to survive this financially, emotionally, you lose all your friends, because all your friends are people you have at work,” Eckard said afterward. “You really do have to understand that it’s a very difficult process but very well worth it.”

  We should also honor people like Army Major General Antonio Taguba, who insisted on an honest investigation into the alleged torture of prisoners by the CIA and U.S. Army at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq even though his military and political superiors didn’t want one. “From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” said Taguba. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget these values….The fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles, and we violated the core of our military values.”
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  We should honor Eileen Foster, who in 2008, while in charge of fraud investigations at Countrywide Financial Corporation (the nation’s largest subprime mortgage lender at the epicenter of the mortgage meltdown that almost brought the entire economy to its knees), told her superiors that many executives in Countrywide’s chain of command were working to cover up the massive fraud. A few months later, Countrywide’s new owner, Bank of America, fired her for “unprofessional conduct.” Foster then began a three-year fight to clear her name and prove she and other employees had been punished for doing the right thing. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor ruled that Bank of America had illegally fired her for exposing the fraud. “I don’t let people bully me, intimidate me, and coerce me,” Foster told the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News. “And it’s just not right that people don’t know what happened here and how it happened.”

  I’m also thinking about people who have quietly and modestly worked for the common good over long periods of time, in ways that have made all of us better off or more secure—public servants like Daniel Fried, to whom I referred earlier, who joined the Foreign Service in 1977 and served for forty years. Fried rarely made the headlines. Instead, he quietly demonstrated the importance of steady diplomacy and patient engagement with the rest of the world.

  We should honor unsung heroes like John Mindermann and Paul Magallanes, the FBI agents who were on duty when they received word of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in 1972. Years later, Mindermann remembered Nixon’s aides who tried to stonewall their investigation as “gutless and completely self-serving. They lacked the ability to do the right thing.” Mindermann and Magallanes had no doubt that the right thing was to bring that wrongdoing to light. As Magallanes recounted to The New York Times, “It was we, the FBI, who brought Richard Nixon down. We showed that our government can investigate itself.”