美国企业为什么向特朗普“屈膝”
Why Corporate America Is Caving to Trump

On Tuesday night, Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air, and many Americans concerned about government coercion seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.
周二晚，吉米·坎摩尔重返荧屏，许多担心政府高压政治的美国人似乎松了一口气。

Though Mr. Kimmel’s employer, Disney, should have never caved to pressure to remove a talk-show host, the thinking went, and though it took too long for business leaders to stand up to the president’s bullying, they allowed, at least corporate America was finally drawing a line in the sand. “This is about fighting for free speech and against these abuses by Donald Trump,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, wrote on X.
尽管坎摩尔的雇主迪士尼根本不该屈服于压力让这位脱口秀主持人停播——这是舆论的普遍看法，尽管商界领袖对总统霸凌行为的反抗来得太晚——这一点他们也承认，但美国企业界终归还是表明了立场。参议院民主党领袖查克·舒默在社交媒体平台X上写道：“这关乎为言论自由而战，反对唐纳德·特朗普的这些滥权行为。”

But if the first eight months of the Trump presidency are any indication, the initial capitulation by Disney appears to be the more revealing part of the episode. After all, it’s hardly the first time that corporate America has caved to the administration.
若以特朗普执政前八个月的情形为参照，迪士尼最初的屈服似乎更能体现这一事件的本质。毕竟，这绝非美国商界首次向白宫低头。

When Mr. Trump first issued an executive order against a prominent law firm, the firm quickly sued, and several more firms discussed joining a collective response. But by the following month, nine major firms had cut deals with the White House.
当特朗普首次发布行政令打击某家知名律师事务所时，该所立即提起诉讼，另有数家律所商讨联合应对。但到了次月，这九家大律所与白宫达成了协议。

After Mr. Trump suggested he might fire the chair of the Federal Reserve, some Wall Street chief executives gently pushed back, emphasizing the importance of an independent Fed. But these executives seemed to go mysteriously silent about Mr. Trump’s actual firing of a Federal Reserve governor. (Mr. Trump alleged that the governor had committed mortgage fraud, which she denied.)
当特朗普暗示可能解雇美联储主席时，一些华尔街的首席执行官还曾温和地提出反对，强调美联储独立性的重要。但在特朗普真的着手解雇一名美联储理事时，这些高管却神秘地沉默起来。（特朗普声称该理事涉及房贷欺诈，但她予以否认。）

Even ABC’s fellow broadcaster, CBS, showed some fight after Mr. Trump sued it for $10 billion (later increased to $20 billion) over what appeared to be the unremarkable editing of a news interview. CBS journalists appeared uncowed during a May 4 segment on “60 Minutes” featuring a Democratic election lawyer who compared the president to a “mob boss” seeking “protection money.” But CBS’s corporate parent settled two months later.
即便是与美国广播公司(ABC)同属电视媒体的哥伦比亚广播公司(CBS)，在特朗普因一段看似寻常的新闻采访剪辑而发起诉讼索赔100亿美元（后来增加至200亿美元）后，一度展现出抗争的姿态。5月4日，《60分钟》的记者们毫无畏惧，还采访了一名民主党选举律师，他将总统比作一个索取“保护费”的“黑帮老大”。但两个月后，CBS的母公司还是选择了和解。

Why are leaders in the media, law and finance failing to stand up more forcefully to what many inside these industries say are abuses of presidential power?
为何来自媒体、法律和金融领域的领袖人物，未能更有力地反抗许多业内人士所称的总统权力滥用？

Fear is the most obvious answer. They are scared that the president will do more damage if they try to resist, scared that he may even target them personally.
恐惧是最显而易见的答案。他们害怕如若反抗会招致总统更猛烈的报复，甚至担心自己成为被针对的目标。

“It’s astonishing how spineless the masters of the universe and big bad billionaires really are,” said Dennis Kelleher, a former corporate lawyer and Senate staff member who runs the financial reform group Better Markets. “If they’re going to cravenly capitulate over the independence of the Fed, it’s pretty clear they will not stand up for anything.”
“那些宇宙主宰者和手眼通天的大富豪竟然如此懦弱，真是令人震惊，”曾担任企业律师和参议员幕僚，现为金融改革组织“更好的市场”负责人的丹尼斯·凯勒赫说道。“如果他们在美联储的独立性问题上都能如此卑躬屈膝，那么很明显，他们不会为任何事情挺身而出。”

Sheer terror undeniably plays an important role. But there appears to be a deeper explanation, too. Resisting government coercion is often a matter of collective action: Companies are much more likely to succeed if they stand together, rather than fight on their own. “It’s easy to pick off individual companies,” Mark Mizruchi, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies large corporations, said in an interview. “But if they’re all coming after you as a single collective, you can’t — he’d tank the whole economy.”
纯粹的恐惧无疑扮演了重要角色。但似乎还存在一个更深层次的原因。抗拒政府胁迫往往需要集体行动：如果企业能团结一致，而非单打独斗，它们成功的可能性会大得多。“逐个对付单个企业很容易，”密歇根大学研究大企业的社会学家马克·米兹鲁奇在接受采访时说，“但如果它们作为一个整体来对抗你，你就无法得逞——他会拖垮整个经济。”

Over the past few generations, however, the culture and ethos of the American business elite has changed. A once cohesive establishment has broken down, making collective action rarer and much harder to achieve. Competition among companies has become increasingly cutthroat. Chief executives are often more concerned with their share price than their company’s long-term health, much less any genteel sense of obligation to a vague greater good. The civic organizations that once bonded corporate leaders to one another have been hollowed out or disappeared altogether.
然而，在过去的几代人里，美国商界精英的文化和精神面貌已经发生了变化。原本紧密团结的精英圈子已经瓦解，使得集体行动变得更加罕见，也更难实现。企业间的竞争愈发残酷。首席执行官们往往更关心公司的股价，而非其长远的健康发展，更遑论那种模糊的、出于公共利益的责任感。曾经把企业领袖们联结在一起的公民组织已被掏空，甚至彻底消失。

“There’s no conceivable way anything like this could have occurred in the 1950s or ’60s,” added Mr. Mizruchi, author of “The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite.” But today, “it’s every person for themselves.”
“在1950、60年代，发生这样的情况是根本无法想象的，”著有《美国企业精英的分裂》(The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite)一书的米兹鲁奇补充道。但如今，“每个人都是自顾自的。”

The Rise of Shareholder Capitalism
股东资本主义的崛起

The business world of the 1950s and 1960s was a clubby, inbred place and its apotheosis was the boardroom — especially the bank boardroom. The country’s biggest banks populated their boards with chief executives from a wide range of industries in order to keep tabs on the economy. When they gathered around a conference table, the executives tended to agree on matters large and small.
上世纪五六十年代的商业世界是一个排外封闭、近亲繁殖的圈子，它的极致体现便是董事会——尤其是银行的董事会。为了掌握经济动向，美国各大银行的董事会成员囊括了来自各行各业的总裁。当这些高管们围坐在会议桌旁时，他们倾向于在所有大小事务上达成一致。

The bank boards “served as a source of normative consensus and stability among the leaders of the largest corporations, in part by helping to forge similar worldviews and behavior,” Mr. Mizruchi wrote in his book.
正如米兹鲁奇在书中写道，这些银行董事会“通过帮助塑造相似的世界观和行为模式，在一定程度上促成顶尖企业领袖群体中的规范共识与稳定性”。

The agenda that these executives hashed out often reached far beyond their individual companies: Keynesian economic policies at home, anti-Communism abroad and, above all else, social order. It was an agenda of patrician civic-mindedness, built on feelings of mutual interest that often transcended party lines. And they enacted it through organizations and associations that allowed them to act as a unified front.
这些企业高管们所拟定的议程往往远超各自公司的范围：在国内推动凯恩斯主义的经济政策，在海外反对共产主义，而最重要的是维护社会秩序。那是一种带有贵族气质的公共精神议程，建立在超越党派界限的共同利益感之上。他们通过各种组织和协会来推动这些议程，这使他们能够以一个统一的阵线采取行动。

The Wall Street lawyer John McCloy, who served as the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank as well as the Ford Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations, was so well-situated that he came to be known as “the chairman of the establishment.”
华尔街律师约翰·麦克洛伊曾担任大通曼哈顿银行董事长，以及福特基金会和外交关系委员会的主席，他的地位如此之高，以至于后来被称为“商界统治集团的主席”。

Other business leaders joined groups like the Committee for Economic Development, which advocated what they considered to be sound economic policy. The committee, whose trustees included the president of General Electric and the chairman of Coca-Cola, was a key player in the making of the Marshall Plan and pressed the government to hold down unemployment by spending more and cutting taxes during recessions. After President Richard Nixon pressured the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates in the early 1970s, another group of top executives, the Business Council, announced that a majority of its economic consultants had “strong concern” that the government’s approach would trigger “more rapid inflation.” (Inflation did subsequently spiral.)
其他商界领袖也加入了像经济发展委员会这样的团体，倡导他们认为合理的经济政策。该委员会的成员包括通用电气的总裁、可口可乐的董事长，在马歇尔计划的制定中发挥了关键作用，并敦促政府在经济衰退期间通过增加支出和减税来抑制失业。上世纪70年代初，当尼克松总统向美联储施压要求降低利率后，另一个顶级高管组成的商业理事会就宣布，其大多数经济顾问“强烈担忧”政府的方法会引发“更快速的通货膨胀”。（事实证明，通胀随后果然急剧恶化。）

By the mid-1970s, however, this order was collapsing. Global competition and inflation chipped away at the profits that had kept the boardroom-dwellers feeling flush, and social change was chipping away at the race and gender barriers that had kept boardrooms so white and male. Prominent conservatives, like the Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, had urged business leaders to fund opposition to government intervention in the economy and other threats to free enterprise. Their efforts helped pave the way for the deregulation of industries like airlines, media, telecom and finance.
然而到了70年代中期，这种秩序开始瓦解。全球竞争和通货膨胀侵蚀了让董事会成员感到财务宽裕的利润，社会变革也冲击了长期将董事会局限为白人男性的种族和性别壁垒。与此同时，像最高法院大法官刘易斯·鲍威尔这样的保守派知名人物，敦促商界领袖资助反对政府干预经济和对自由企业构成其他威胁的行动。他们的努力为航空、媒体、电信和金融等行业放松管制铺平了道路。

Around the same time, a new theory was descending from the ivory tower. Based on the work of economists like Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago and Michael Jensen of the University of Rochester, it held that the interests of shareholders should reign supreme in corporate decision-making, and that the key challenge of capitalism was to ensure that the hired help — that is, the executives — did what was best for the owners.
大约在同一时期，一种新理论从象牙塔中传出。基于芝加哥大学的米尔顿·弗里德曼和罗切斯特大学的迈克尔·詹森等经济学家的研究，该理论认为股东利益应当在公司决策中处于至高无上的位置，而资本主义的核心挑战是如何确保受雇的管理层（也就是高管们）做出对股东最有利的事情。

Economists of this ilk favored tying executive pay to a company’s share price, through stock options and stock grants. But their thinking unleashed a broader revolution, in which companies with underperforming stock became targets for corporate raiders, who could take them over, fire management and unlock vast piles of wealth.
持这种观点的经济学家主张通过股票期权和股票奖励将高管薪酬与公司股价挂钩。但他们的思路引发了一场更广泛的革命：股价表现不佳的公司成了企业掠夺者的目标，这些掠夺者会收购企业、解雇管理层，并释放出大量财富。

Within a decade, the incentives of chief executives had completely changed. In the heyday of John McCloy and the bank boardroom, most chief executives had only a vague mandate to look out for their “stakeholders,” and often sought to maximize status and influence. By the 1980s, chief executives had to spend their waking hours plotting to maximize their share price, or find themselves out on their ear.
在十年之内，首席执行官们的激励措施已经彻底改变。在约翰·麦克洛伊和银行董事会的黄金年代，大多数首席执行官只有一个模糊的使命去关照他们的“利益相关者”，他们追求的往往是地位和影响力的最大化。到了80年代，首席执行官们不得不把所有精力都放在如何最大化公司股价上，否则就会发现自己在业内混不下去。

After relatively little turnover among the country’s largest corporations throughout the 20th century, almost one-third of the Fortune 500 companies vanished in the 1980s, many because of hostile takeovers. The average tenure of a Fortune 500 chief executive dropped from about nine and a half years in the early 1980s to around seven years in 2002, according to Mr. Mizruchi’s book, where it has continued to hover.
在整个20世纪，美国顶级大企业的更替率一直很低，到了80年代，近三分之一的财富500强公司消失了，其中许多是因为恶意收购。根据米兹鲁奇书中的记载，财富500强首席执行官的平均任期从1980年代初的大约九年半下降到2002年的七年左右，并一直徘徊在这一水平。

But breaking up the American business establishment did have at least one major downside: It made it increasingly unlikely for companies to stand together. Instead of trying to fit in at the club, executives were inclined to kneecap fellow club members.
但是瓦解美国商界统治集团至少带来一个重大弊端：企业间越来越难以团结协作。高管们不再试图融入那个俱乐部，反而倾向于对俱乐部同伴下绊子。

One clear measure of this was their behavior in Washington. Through at least the 1960s, a large majority of corporate lobbying was a collective enterprise — it happened through trade associations, not lobbyists that companies hired directly. That had completely reversed itself a generation later. In 1998, the typical industry spent about 63 percent of its lobbying money on its own lobbyists rather than trade associations, according to the political scientist Lee Drutman. By 2012, that portion had jumped to 71 percent.
一个明显的衡量标准就是他们在华盛顿的行为。至少到20世纪60年代，大部分企业的游说还是集体行动——通过行业协会来进行，而不是各自单独雇佣说客。但到了一代人之后，这种情况完全颠倒了。政治学者李·德鲁特曼的研究显示，1998年，一个典型行业大约有63%的游说经费花在了雇佣自己的说客上，而不是行业协会；到了2012年，这一比例已跃升至71%。

“Shareholder capitalism puts intense pressure on quarterly earnings,” Mr. Drutman said in an interview. And that turned into pressure to gain an advantage over competitors with the government. “It becomes a real arms race,” he said.
“股东资本主义给季度盈利带来了巨大的压力，”德鲁特曼在采访中说。而这种压力又转化为通过政府获取竞争优势的压力。“这简直成了一场名副其实的军备竞赛。”

Getting Yours
各谋其利

In some ways, corporations have never been more powerful. But they are also more vulnerable than ever to outside pressure — at exactly the moment when a president was determined to bend them to his will.
在某些方面，企业比以往任何时候都更强大。但与此同时，它们也比以往任何时候都更容易受到外部压力的影响——恰恰是在这个时刻，出现了一个决心迫使它们屈从于自己意志的总统。

The country’s biggest banks have trillions in assets. But while bankers were once at the center of the club, they have spent the last few decades in an uneasy competition with hedge funds, private equity firms, asset managers and insurance-companies-that-act-like-banks.
美国最大的几家银行拥有数万亿美元的资产。但尽管银行家曾处于那个俱乐部的核心位置，在过去几十年里，他们却一直在与对冲基金、私募股权公司、资产管理公司以及行为类似银行的保险公司进行着令人不安的竞争。

Two banking-industry officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, highlighted the rising challenge from financial tech firms and cryptocurrency, which have brought about fears that customers might go around traditional banks.
两位因话题敏感要求匿名的银行业官员强调，来自金融科技公司和加密货币的挑战正在上升，已引发客户可能绕过传统银行的担忧。

“If I’m a traditional investment bank, my first instinct would be crypto should be regulated like everything else,” said Mr. Drutman, the author of “The Business of America is Lobbying.” “But now that it’s not going to be, my second instinct is, ‘How do I make it work for me?’” When the collective solution fails, make sure you get yours.
“如果我是传统投行，我的第一反应是：加密货币应该像其他东西一样受到监管，”《美国的生意就是游说》(The Business of America is Lobbying)一书的作者德鲁特曼说。“但既然监管不可能到位，我的第二反应就是：‘我该怎么让它为我所用？’”当集体解决方案行不通时，至少要确保自己能捞到好处。