Many of our readers have commented positively on the vehement attacks this column has made over the years regarding corporate greed, one of America’s chief economic and political problems. Whether we are speaking about stamping out competition, which is bad for the consumer, or buying elections, which is bad for democracy, corporate greed is one of the major negative factors extant in our national makeup.
Hundreds of thousands of column inches have been dedicated to the negative aspects of the Supreme Court’s, Citizens United decision and how it has led to attacks on the democratic process. This column has already covered it ad nausea so today we’ll stick to the business, rather than the political, aspects of corporate greed. Where does it come from? Is it more prevalent today than in the past and what are its principal ways of dominating a country’s commerce and lifestyle?
The first of these questions is easily answered. Human beings are naturally possessed of a certain level of greed. It’s what drives us to succeed and what often drives us past that point to a place where it becomes detrimental to those around us. This is where we are today when our country is divided financially into the 1% and the 99%. There are many who say that it wasn’t always this way. They are deluded. There has always been a one percent. In the past they were called kings. Now they’re just the robber barons of industry.
In the short history of this country, man has mostly labored under the same unfair conditions that the corporate barons had always imposed, but following WWII it seemed that this condition was somewhat mitigated and we experienced the emergence of a functioning middle class. Maybe it was a reaction to the industrial revolution, maybe it was the war-reinforced concept of democracy, maybe it was a flowering of the entrepreneurial spirit; whatever, it seemed to lead to a way of doing business that accepted fair competition and rewarded the fruits of labor with an acceptable life. It didn’t happen by itself or by accident. It had to be prodded by government regulation and battling unions, but it came close to happening. From 1944 to about 1970 this country experienced a blooming of fair recompense for labor that had never before been seen anywhere in the world. For one brief shining moment it looked like we were on a permanent upward course. Then the GOP got its way.
Unfortunately just making millions hasn’t been enough for some. In the last few generations, principally since the early sixties, we have bred a corporate creature that cares nothing for the functional balance that leads to the better life of a nation and only wants more for itself. More of what, you may ask? More of anything and everything that is available, with no regard for the well being of those around it, with no concept of how it is their labor as well as its own that has made it successful.
Corporations and their lobbies cry out that government regulations are killing small business but it is the large corporations themselves that are the biggest enemies of entrepreneurial ventures and small business.
We all know that anecdotal evidence is only that, but there are times when an anecdote is essential to making a point and today I am about to give you one of which I have intimate knowledge. It involves a small company that did work for a large advertising agency and when it came time to get paid the large advertising agency, just because it could, refused to pay the amount that was due. They knew that the total amount wasn’t great enough to justify the expense of a lawsuit. The small contractor was put in the position of either accepting half its billing, an amount on which it would lose money, or trying to sue the behemoth and its army of high priced lawyers.
This is a situation that plays out over and over in the business machinations of our country and it is this kind of bullying and unfair business practice that is far more responsible for small business failure than any government regulations. In fact it shows the need for even more government regulation to end practices such as this. Big businesses feel that they can do pretty much what they want and there isn’t much a small business can do about it. They just don’t have the resources to fight the behemoth’s teams of shyster lawyers.
So next time you hear some corporate lobbyist whine about how government regulations are killing small business, take it with a boulder size grain of salt. Big business and its policies of bullying and cheating small business has a hell of a lot more to do with small business failure than any government regulation. Government regulation, as a matter of fact could help small businesses fight this kind of unjust action and most small business owners would welcome some kind of protection from those in larger companies that make it a habit to cheat them.
Our Federal Bankruptcy Laws are a typical example of this. When Donald Trump brags that he is only complying with and taking advantage of our laws, when he files for bankruptcy he is telling the truth. Listen to this truth because you aren’t going to be hearing much more of it from this guy. Federal Bankruptcy laws enable him to stiff all the small businesses to which he owes money and to do it legally. My wife actually owned a company once that had to give money back to the company that had paid her, so it could be redistributed to bigger creditors by the Federal Bankruptcy Courts. Sounds crazy doesn’t it. Well it’s true.
More important, is how very simple it was for things to get this way. It’s called lobbyists and they should be illegal. The monster corporations, spend millions on lawyers and lobbyists whose only job is to influence, (read bribe), the congress to pass legislation that is in their interest in their dealings with smaller businesses, as well as the general political and tax negotiations. It has always been so.
It’s interesting that for years, the Republican Party has worn the mantle of the business party. Even their description – conservative- has been of a type to let us know that they were the ones looking after our money and the liberal Democrats were just spend thrifts, throwing our hard earned tax dollars around on give-a-ways like unemployment, healthcare, food stamps and the like, when we should really be spending what we are not hoarding on bigger battle ships and louder bombs. It all sounds very Amurrican but then one looks at who occupied the White House for the last quarter century and one sees a far different story. In the last twenty-five or so years only two presidents will have departed office leaving the country in better financial shape than when they took over. Their names are Clinton and Obama. All the other presidents, two Bush’s and a Reagan left with worse economic conditions than when they took office. That’s not conjecture, that’s fact. You can look it up.
Another fact is that the GOP doesn’t give a rat’s ass whether or not you can pay your rent and doctor bills or feed your kids, as long as the billionaires that keep the GOP election coffers filled with thousand dollar bills, retain their tax breaks and off-shore tax havens and can always afford another yacht.
That’s why Bernie Sanders happened this year and to a lesser extent Donald Trump. Both are saying the same thing about economics; reaching almost the same audience; it’s just that they each mean something very different. Sanders is saying that the future lives with the working man and that if he is left behind, that is the end of American manufacturing and eventually the American dream. Trump is saying that we need to release the corporate giant from it regulatory bonds and then it will zoom to the stratosphere carrying American labor with it. Just like trickle down economics did.
The key difference is found in one simple statement by Trump. He states definitively that he is not for increasing the minimum wage. He takes this position despite the fact that anyone working for minimum wage can’t make a living, at least not a decent one. Trump tries to sell the idea that we are in competition with the rest of the world and in order for us to compete we must minimize our costs, especially the cost of labor.
The reality is that we can’t compete with some countries on certain products. What we can do, is compete with and far out gain most countries when it comes to our inventiveness and entrepreneurship and that is why we have the ability to build a new kind of industry, dependent on our creative talents, our entrepreneurial spirit and a strengthening of patent & copyright laws that will enable us to profit from our own inventiveness.
This process, along with changes in the kind of government regulation that currently allows greedy corporations to set up manufacturing on foreign soil; giving work to low cost foreign labor and allowing for the avoidance of taxes paid in this country, will have to be the battle plan of the next administration.
Such regulation will create new jobs and more importantly, new kinds of jobs. As long as our government prevents other nations from stealing our patents and thereby undermining new manufacturing processes, we will continue to maintain world economic leadership.
It is unfortunate but we cannot expect our corporate management to generously comply with the necessary cooperation needed to bring back our manufacturing base. It will therefore be left to a government that understands the necessity and is fully in line with its enforcement. This means that we will not only need a Democratic President but also a Democratic Senate and as close to a functional House as possible.
This is a lot to ask of an electorate that almost destroyed the House in the 2010 elections and then turned the Senate to red in 2014. It will probably come down to whether or not those voters who now look to Trump, because they are so dissatisfied with the current crop of losers, will see the light and understand that it is truly in their best interests to give up their petty fights against abortion, gay rights, foreign immigration and illegal residents and finally vote in their real financial self-interest.
It’s a lot to ask of a group that has so far seen nothing of the big picture, but it is definitely a must. The corporate culture isn’t going to suddenly become altruistic, but rich as they are, they are still a minority of the voters. Now it’s the job of the American people to shut out the lies and vote in their own financial, health and educational interests, to vote for those issues that are naturally accepted as human rights in most of the civilized countries in the world; to make an already great America, the best possible America.