The last time I speculated about When It All Went Wrong, I was thinking about plastic, how, without our input or consent, every last bit of our lives has become shrinkwrapped and double-bagged and, how it all started with a fuckwit in Chicago who thought it would be funny to lace some Extra Strength Tylenol with potassium cyanide.
Many commenters offered their own suggestions about WIAWW, the majority suggesting November 22, 1963, certainly as good a date as any to put on the marble monument to our republic.
Today, however, I want to try to pinpoint another nadir of liberty, and this one's a bit hard to nail down.
It's hard to specify because it involves a paradigm shift that reshaped the thinking of governments, consumers and, most especially, businesses. It can be called, without hesitation, a "Reagan-era" shift, though the roots of the change began before the B-movie actor ever set foot in the Oval Office.
For the sake of simplicity (admittedly, erroneous simplicity), we will mark the date as March 13, 1986, when the Delaware Supreme Court upheld the Delaware Court of Chancery's opinion in the case of Revlon, Inc. vs. MacAndrews and Forbes Holdings, Inc.
If you want to know the ins and outs of the case, Wikipedia has a good summary, as does Courtroom View Network. Put succinctly, the Revlon corporation was in deep trouble and it's board tried everything it could--debt loading, poison pills, the works--to keep from being bought out by Pantry Pride. When another entity matched its own, inflated, valuation, Revlon's board rejected the offer. When sued, the board lost, the courts of jurisdiction ruling that, when the chips are down, the overriding consideration of any corporate entity is the maximization of shareholder value.
This was the moment that the men in black robes cut the words in the granite of the courthouse: The Bottom Line is, Well, the Bottom Line.
Now, the dawn of 1986 was certainly not the beginning of the Era of Greed on Wall Street. Michael Milken began his career of low-security bonds legerdemain before the 80s dawned, and by 86, his junk-y fellow traveler Ivan Boesky was already in deep federal doodoo, soon to be followed by Milken himself.
But the Delaware Supremes' decision opened up an era of rapacious takeovers on Wall Street, with junk-capitalized speculators preying on companies of decades' standing, convincing boards that they were liable to legal retribution under the Revlon principle unless they turned over their companies to the highest bidder.
This "maximizing" principle soon flooded down from boardrooms to mid-management offices, becoming the single, unifying principle of American business. No longer were managers conflicted by questions of obligations to workforce or community. Now the equation was simple: what brought the most bang for the buck.
Would people pay to watch a TV network? Why couldn't that network have commercials, too? How small a candy bar could you sell for a quarter? Okay, will they pay half a dollar for it?
There were countless forces leading to our current state of Citizens United=free speech, Blackwater="our troops," and the intermediary steps, from the "productivity increase" mania and outsourcing bonanza of the 90s are easy to point out.
But the decision of the Delaware court in the spring of '86 surely marks the opening notes of some sort of requiem.