Sick American Corporate Culture
Since the 1980s the way big companies in the United States do business has poisoned the well for the rest of us. The sick American corporate culture ruthlessly focusses on shareholder returns in return for enriching the executive to obscene levels. Stock options and company stock buybacks have become key ingredients in the billionaire factory churning out the super wealthy. This manipulation of the fabric of how companies do business has come at the expense of other stake holders like employees, consumers and the nations where these corporations do business. Downsizing, outsourcing, and profit shifting are all means by which companies have increased profits, reduced costs and avoided paying their fair share of tax. At the same time, these actions have reduced community engagement and care in return for outlandish levels of wealth for a few at the expense of the many.
US Companies Doing Business The Wrong Way
Milton Friedman was the economic theorist who provided the blue print and Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric in 1981, was the first man to practically apply it in the US. President Ronald Reagan changed the laws to facilitate neoliberalism as the new way of doing business in America; and then, it spread around the world. In Australia, like so many other countries, we copy the Americans, especially in regard to how they do business. We have employed their CEOs and many of our own business leaders get their MBAs in the States. You can observe the arrogance of these corporate executives via how during the recent cost of living crisis they engaged in price gouging and declared record profits. There were no practical concerns for how their community was doing only a laser focus on shareholder returns and their own excessive renumeration. This is the new normal and has been for some time. The legacy media business reporters accept this ruthlessness as the status quo, as they are bottom feeders within the loop.
American Corporate Greed
The sick American corporate culture has seen tens of millions of jobs head offshore over the decades, as CEOs chase greater profits at the expense of retrenched workers and communities get destroyed. The Trump regime is introducing tariffs on imports into the States and some say this is partly in an attempt to encourage the return of manufacturing to American cities. Whether this will work is a moot point and it will take many years if it does. Downsizing and offshoring were corporate techniques begun under Republican administrations; along with the change to laws allowing stock buybacks by companies. These things were a kick in the face for workers, consumers and their communities. These dirty tactics created the Elon Musk’s’ worth hundreds of billions of dollars. This is not something to be celebrated, as their extreme wealth takes from millions of ordinary folk.
“ “Neutron Jack,” as he became known,had a practice of ranking employees and automatically firing the bottom 10 percent every year; in Welch’s first few years of leadership he fired more than 100,000 people in a series of mass layoffs and factory closures.
“Up until this point, people who had a job at a company like GE or IBM basically figured that they had a job for life. But he explicitly said that this notion was going to be a thing of the past under his watch,” Gelles says.”
Rewarding The Wealthy At The Expense Of The Poor
There needs to be a de-Americanisation process in the business world. These recently established practices, which aggrandize CEOs and the executive, are, in actual fact, anathema to the wellbeing of the rest of us. The huge growth in wealth inequality and the divide between the 1% and the rest are a direct result of this sick American corporate culture. Private equity is another less transparent disease sickening the world as a whole. Social Darwinism is back with us under the guise of ‘greed is good’ capitalism. The Trump regime’s, recently passed, big bill is an abomination that takes from the poor and needy and enriches the already very wealthy. It will cost lives, some say around 50, 000 lives each year in America as a result of the cuts to Medicaid. The wealthy in America have been telling themselves for years that they don’t need to pay taxes and that they deserve to keep all of their rapidly growing wealth. You know, in the 1960s the top income tax rate in the States was in the 90% range and it is now down around 37%. Company tax rates have plunged, also, leaving the US in a debt hole of some $37 trillion. The sick American corporate culture and the related attitudes of billionaires and oligarchs are destroying this once vibrant democracy.
American Multinationals Not Paying Fair Share Of Tax
American multinationals like Google (Alphabet), Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Pepsi, Amazon, and Big Pharma do not pay their fair share of tax. These US companies employ creative accounting to shift profits to low tax places like Ireland, the Virgin and Cayman Islands and similar locales. These corporate giants come in and generate billions in revenue globally but pay little tax on the enormous profits. They screw the nations out of their tax revenue. America is on the nose via Donald Trump but really the sick American corporate culture should have been called out long ago. It is time to rethink whether you really want to be doing business with these companies.
“In the land of billionaires and oligarchs did the wealthy really need another tax cut? White supremacist sons of slavers are hell bent on rewarding themselves at the expense of the rest of us poor schmucks. Ordinary decent folk are getting shafted by Trump and his henchmen. “
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters and America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
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