While the economy somewhere between a downer and devastating for most people, the CEO class made out like bandits, with each of the three top paid corporate honchos pocketing as much as a billion dollars in personal pay!
Anyone who thinks the robber baron era ever left us is kidding themselves. They've had more than a century to tweak the modus operandi to perfection...of grift and downright thievery. They keep getting viewed as "captains of industry" when the truth is, they are generals of ironhanded greed.
A much needed commentary on corporate America. Your words as eloquent as Waley's Non-sequitur cartoon two or three days ago about a cafe owner mimicking the current government hiring the incompetent and the inexperienced.
It also inspired me to add this to an article on another blog today regarding ICE's total lack of planning when inflicting a 10,000 person detention center on a community of 2,000:
"The Trump Administration: Government by the incompetent and the uncommitted -- to anything including prison, but that time will come."
No matter how bad the economy is or gets the Billionaires ALWAYS make money, while the rest of us suffer, because of them! We are not going to fix this mess until we fix the Tax System, rules and regulations, that since the Eisenhower era has been taken over by the Billionaires. The U.S. tax system has been RIGGED and RIGGED and RIGGED to favor the Billionaires on an Upward slide for them and a Downward slide for everyone else since then. We can fix it, but we must elect people who will do it and NOT those that are beholden to the very people that are screwing the rest of us. These offer solutions: "Burned By Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet" by Chuck Collins. The Patriotic Millionaires - patrioticmillionaires.org
You are right Jim! It is strange what we can afford as a country and what not! Billion dollar executives but can’t afford to pay social security and Medicare tax! Tax the prima Donna’s!
How about we follow the "Ben and Jerry" approach to wage structuring in taxing corporate america. The highest paid employee should be paid no more than 7X, 10X, even 20X the lowest paid employee in the company for tax purposes. Boards can pay CEOs more than that if they choose, but the amount over the established factor can not be deducted as an expense for corporate tax purposes. We can mess around with the minimum wage but until there is a relational dynamic between the upper and the lower rungs on the wage ladder, it will not change the ASTOUNDING gap between the haves and the have nots.
Money is the tool that governments use to control the lives of us all. The corporate structure rewards failure in the bankruptcy procedures. Do the same CEO's count the resources used up and the debts incurred as a profit when the bankruptcy zeros out the old paperwork only for the next corporation to be formed to then buy the assets back on the cheap? Then the process begins again as the number of dollars is unlimited and the government affords whatever they want to do while we are told that "in the real world" we can't afford to pay for whatever is needed to be done for good healthy quality of life on Earth.
I've had the privilege (?) of meeting a few corporate management guys (all men) as a consultant to their companies. If any of them were geniuses, they hid it very well. Their only genius seemed to be convincing everyone around them of their brilliance were while moving company resources directly into their pockets.
Le's fix the system first by firing Trump.We need problem solvers not corporate toadies or party hacks.Let us, the voting public start with public servants not corporate grifters.
Of course when Trump is gone, economic fairness will magically appear! Yeah, right. The D party offering nothing more than "lesser of two evils" will renounce decades of corporate lite evil and nourish the party's New Deal roots they chopped off decades ago.
They'll oppose bailing out Wall St. the way they did in 2008--encouraging same financial behavior to continue on to next econ crisis. Instead, they'll prioritize the millions who lost jobs, pensions, houses yet got nothing. They'll stop being Vichy Ds, collaborating with corporate econopaths. Or with the Rs like in NYC because the corporate friendly D got primaried out.
They'll not only acknowledge the suffering of the working class majority and Rust Belt deaths of despair, they'll act. For example, making stock buybacks illegal as they were during the New Deal, a proposal they brushed aside in 2024. These are financed by mass layoffs benefitting only CEOs and their Wall St. bankster cronies while hitting millions of working people in the last 10 years.
Read the stuff at the Inequality.org site; research stats that confirm what I'm saying. Same for the Center for Working Class Politics, (www.workingclasspolitics.org) the Labor Institute www.thelaborinstitute.org), the Equality Action Center at UCSF Law School (https//:equalityactioncenter.org) the Labor Education Action Research Network (https://smir.rutgers.edu), and people whose lives have been decimated while their angry, heartfelt testimony is ignored by the party once ours.
Anyone who thinks the robber baron era ever left us is kidding themselves. They've had more than a century to tweak the modus operandi to perfection...of grift and downright thievery. They keep getting viewed as "captains of industry" when the truth is, they are generals of ironhanded greed.
Jim,
A much needed commentary on corporate America. Your words as eloquent as Waley's Non-sequitur cartoon two or three days ago about a cafe owner mimicking the current government hiring the incompetent and the inexperienced.
It also inspired me to add this to an article on another blog today regarding ICE's total lack of planning when inflicting a 10,000 person detention center on a community of 2,000:
"The Trump Administration: Government by the incompetent and the uncommitted -- to anything including prison, but that time will come."
No matter how bad the economy is or gets the Billionaires ALWAYS make money, while the rest of us suffer, because of them! We are not going to fix this mess until we fix the Tax System, rules and regulations, that since the Eisenhower era has been taken over by the Billionaires. The U.S. tax system has been RIGGED and RIGGED and RIGGED to favor the Billionaires on an Upward slide for them and a Downward slide for everyone else since then. We can fix it, but we must elect people who will do it and NOT those that are beholden to the very people that are screwing the rest of us. These offer solutions: "Burned By Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet" by Chuck Collins. The Patriotic Millionaires - patrioticmillionaires.org
You are right Jim! It is strange what we can afford as a country and what not! Billion dollar executives but can’t afford to pay social security and Medicare tax! Tax the prima Donna’s!
How about we follow the "Ben and Jerry" approach to wage structuring in taxing corporate america. The highest paid employee should be paid no more than 7X, 10X, even 20X the lowest paid employee in the company for tax purposes. Boards can pay CEOs more than that if they choose, but the amount over the established factor can not be deducted as an expense for corporate tax purposes. We can mess around with the minimum wage but until there is a relational dynamic between the upper and the lower rungs on the wage ladder, it will not change the ASTOUNDING gap between the haves and the have nots.
Hell, yeah we need to break it
Money is the tool that governments use to control the lives of us all. The corporate structure rewards failure in the bankruptcy procedures. Do the same CEO's count the resources used up and the debts incurred as a profit when the bankruptcy zeros out the old paperwork only for the next corporation to be formed to then buy the assets back on the cheap? Then the process begins again as the number of dollars is unlimited and the government affords whatever they want to do while we are told that "in the real world" we can't afford to pay for whatever is needed to be done for good healthy quality of life on Earth.
Tax the rich on the State and Federal level
I've had the privilege (?) of meeting a few corporate management guys (all men) as a consultant to their companies. If any of them were geniuses, they hid it very well. Their only genius seemed to be convincing everyone around them of their brilliance were while moving company resources directly into their pockets.
Le's fix the system first by firing Trump.We need problem solvers not corporate toadies or party hacks.Let us, the voting public start with public servants not corporate grifters.
Of course when Trump is gone, economic fairness will magically appear! Yeah, right. The D party offering nothing more than "lesser of two evils" will renounce decades of corporate lite evil and nourish the party's New Deal roots they chopped off decades ago.
They'll oppose bailing out Wall St. the way they did in 2008--encouraging same financial behavior to continue on to next econ crisis. Instead, they'll prioritize the millions who lost jobs, pensions, houses yet got nothing. They'll stop being Vichy Ds, collaborating with corporate econopaths. Or with the Rs like in NYC because the corporate friendly D got primaried out.
They'll not only acknowledge the suffering of the working class majority and Rust Belt deaths of despair, they'll act. For example, making stock buybacks illegal as they were during the New Deal, a proposal they brushed aside in 2024. These are financed by mass layoffs benefitting only CEOs and their Wall St. bankster cronies while hitting millions of working people in the last 10 years.
Read the stuff at the Inequality.org site; research stats that confirm what I'm saying. Same for the Center for Working Class Politics, (www.workingclasspolitics.org) the Labor Institute www.thelaborinstitute.org), the Equality Action Center at UCSF Law School (https//:equalityactioncenter.org) the Labor Education Action Research Network (https://smir.rutgers.edu), and people whose lives have been decimated while their angry, heartfelt testimony is ignored by the party once ours.