Americans should rage against the dying of the light that once shone from our shores as a beacon of a free and self-governing society to the world. We once held the promise of opportunity and were a source of inspiration and hope to people around the world yearning for liberty, justice and equality. Presently, we inch ever closer to becoming a failed state. At our founding, the greatest threat was a foreign one. Now, as it was for many great empires, it is a domestic one. The primary source of this internal threat is a sin as old as time – greed, which then drives corruption.
We have all heard the statistics about the growing inequality and the crony capitalism that is choking meritocracy and entrepreneurialism. It suffocates our citizens in debt and crushes their quality of life, as they run faster and faster only to move backward. This latest trend began about a half century ago. As Mishel and Wolfe (2019) stated, “From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by 1,007.5% (940.3% under the options-realized measure), far outstripping S&P stock market growth (706.7%) and the wage growth of very high earners (339.2%). In contrast, wages for the typical worker grew by just 11.9%.” And Saez and Zucman (2014) wrote, “The share of wealth held by the top 0.1 percent of families is now almost as high as in the late 1920s, when ‘The Great Gatsby’ defined an era that rested on the inherited fortunes of the robber barons of the Gilded Age.”
Under the free market capitalism model, a company’s board of directors is supposed to act as a check on irresponsible executive behavior. Instead, the boards of many companies effectively abdicate their duties and allow the executives to lavish themselves at the expense of the long-term interests of their companies. In more recent years, this is particularly evident in the stock buybacks, which have driven share prices, enriching the executives and, as usual, leaving behind the workers, who are the lifeblood of the company. (See Useem, 2019)
The callousness of the rich is particularly apparent at this precarious moment when the nation is facing a pandemic on top of the long-standing and exacerbating structural problems. Instead of putting the country’s interests first, the corporate cronies have been lobbying the GOP for a slush fund. It is not enough to undercompensate the American people for their hard work or to deprive them of secure, well-paying jobs, these parasitic corporations are now trying to siphon the American taxpayers’ money into their own pockets. As these greedy individuals and corporations continue to put their interests above the American people’s and the country’s, the country drifts further and further to plutocracy. (Also see the film series “Plutocracy,” Noble, 2019.)
- Mishel and Wolfe (2019) –
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ - Noble (2019) –
https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/plutocracy/ - Saez and Zucman (2014) –
https://equitablegrowth.org/exploding-wealth-inequality-united-states/ - Useem (2019) –
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-stock-buyback-swindle/592774/
>>https://longinglogos.com/the-economic-consequences-of-the-vote/<<
