WHAT'S WRONG WITH AMERICA? CORPORATE GREED AND POWER

WHILE MOST AMERICAN CONSUMERS ARE STRAPPED, THE STOCK MARKET IS HITTING RECORD HIGHS AND CORPORATIONS SEEM TO BE PRINTING MONEY AS THEIR PROFITS SOAR TO ALL-TIME HIGHS.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
WHAT'S REALLY WRONG WITH AMERICA?

THE AMERICAN WORKER HAS BECOME A SERF!
AND CORPORATIONS REALIZE WHAT POWER THIS GIVES THEM.

CORPORATE GREED PLUS CORPORATE POWER OVER THE GOVERNMENT, OVER ITS LAWS, OVER ITS TAXATION OF CORPORATIONS, OVER TRADE REGULATIONS HAS JUST ABOUT BROUGHT AMERICA TO ITS KNEES.
ONE MORE GOOD ROUND OF THE SELL-OUTS IN CONGRESS GIVING CORPORATIONS MORE WAYS TO "SAVE" SHOULD BANKRUPT THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS.

SOME OF THE GREATEST ECONOMIC MINDS IN AMERICA AGREE, AND SOME OF THE MOST NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES RUN BY TOP AMERICAN ECONOMISTS ARE BEGINNING TO BLOW THE WHISTLE... AT LAST!

"In America today, we have 3 Million Overlords And 300 Million Serfs"
That's what's wrong with the American economy right now.
The serfs are tapped out.
The overlords are responding by firing more serfs, to increase profits.
[AND THE TERRIFIED SERFS WILL DO MORE WORK FOR LESS PAY AND FEWER BENEFITS JUST TO KEEP THEIR JOBS!]  
You see, corporations "costs" include American workers' "wages," making the corporations resort to some very ugly tactics to cut costs!

What to do?

Well, if you own a company, you pay the wretched serfs just enough to keep them from rioting, keep the "American Dream" fantasy alive, and distract the workers from recognizing the fact that they have become serfs.

The real problem is that American corporations, which are richer and more profitable than they have ever been in history , have become so obsessed with "maximizing short-term profits" that they are no longer investing in their future, their people, and the country.  

CORPORATIONS CAN ALWAYS FIND CHEAPER SERFS!
THEY LIKE TO CALL THEIR ABILITY TO FIND CHEAP LABOR "FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS"...MORE ON THIS A BIT LATER IN THIS BLOG.

CALL IT WHAT IT IS...CORPORATE GREED

This short-term greed can be seen in many aspects of corporate behavior, from scrimping on investment to obsessing about quarterly earnings to fretting about daily fluctuations in stock prices. But it is most visible in the general cultural attitude toward average employees.

The video found at the link below explains things a little, but not well enough, perhaps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhxrqrViw3Y

It’s PAST Time to Start Asking, What’s Wrong With America Today?

WHY ARE WE ACCEPTING WHAT CORPORATIONS ARE DOING?

The U.S. economy is in dire straits. Americans can tell something is wrong, but they can’t put their finger on what the problem is. Our country was once a leader in productive manufacturing, but now we have been relegated to a “service economy” where we make nothing of value.  How did we get ourselves in this position? What has caused us to become so helpless?

Our leaders have no plan to stop this.
They talk about small savings like cutting PBS or farm subsidies while ignoring the big issues.
America is no longer a democracy; it is a plutocracy – run by the rich for the rich.
The interests of average Americans are no longer taken into account when making policy decisions.

How can we expect to have a vibrant, growing economy when our workers lose their jobs to overseas competition, leaving them without money to buy even the cheap imports that flood this country?

“Free Trade” policies and the World Trade Organization have put us in this disadvantageous position.
These policies have gutted our manufacturing base and made it advantageous for companies to pick up and move overseas rather than produce in the United States.
They are pushed for by the outsourcers who are getting rich off the deals.

These individuals and corporations fund the campaigns of our leaders in Washington, and get what they want in return – more “free trade.”

We need to reverse this course or in only a few short years we may not recognize America any longer. We need to reform the way our elections are run by repealing Citizens United and getting money out of politics.

We must stop all free trade agreements and establish fair trading relationships that work for the American people, not a few special interests. These things are crucial, and must be done as soon as possible if we want America to be the great country it once was.  

Some Americans have been able to maintain their former standard of living, but our whole nation is living on the back of mounting debt. This is unsustainable and will ultimately lead to the total collapse of our economy if nothing is done to stop it. The debt is not even the problem as much as what we are spending our money on: endless wars, cheap imports and massive amounts of foreign oil.

"American companies are making more money and more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. 

(Remarkably, some people are still saying that the problem with our economy is that companies are suffering from "too much regulation" and "too many taxes." Maybe little companies are, but big ones certainly aren't. What they're suffering from is a myopic obsession with short-term profits at the expense of long-term investment and value creation).

[NOTE: THIS WEBSITE, LINKED ABOVE, ( businessinsider.com) HAS SOME VERY EASY TO UNDERSTAND CHARTS THAT YOU MAY WANT TO SEE.]

Wages as a percent of the American economy are at all-time low.

Why are corporate profits so high?
One reason is that companies are paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP. 

And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak: Those "wages" represent spending power for American consumers. 

LOW WAGES, NO SPENDING POWER!

FEWER WORKERS ARE DOING MORE WORK!

Another reason corporations are so profitable is that they don't employ as many Americans as they used to. This is in part because companies today regard employees as "costs" and "inputs" instead of human beings who are dedicating their lives to the organizations that, in turn, are supporting them and their families.   

As a result of frantic firing in the name of "efficiency" and "competitiveness" and "return on capital," the U.S. employment-to-population ratio has collapsed. We're back at 1970s-1980s levels now. 

The share of our national income that is going to the people who do the work  ("labor") is at an all-time low.  The rest of the income, naturally, is going to business owners ("capital"), who have it better today than they have EVER had it before.

In short, the NEW RELIGION of "maximizing profits" that has developed in America over the past 30 years has created a business culture in which executives dance to the tune of short-term traders and quarterly financial reports, instead of investing aggressively on behalf of employees, customers, and long-term owners.

AND CONGRESS DANCES TO THE TUNE OF MEGA-CORPORATIONS THAT DONATE MOST TO THEIR POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS!

"Mainstream Media Is Distracting Americans From Our Economic Disaster"

IF AMERICANS REALLY REALIZED WHAT'S GOING ON, THEY'D BE HITTING THE STREETS IN HUGE NUMBERS, PROTESTING TO THEIR ELECTED OFFICIALS, DEMANDING A REAL SOLUTION!

Back in 1983, media was controlled by more than 50 different companies. Today power and control over the mainstream media has been condensed to a mere 5 giant corporations working behind the scenes to distract Americans from our country’s real problems!

The alarming reality we live in TODAY is that 5 corporations — News Corp, Disney, Viacom, CBS, and Comcast — decide what news is delivered to the public, and what level of truth is behind that news. 

They control everything we watch, read, and hear in regards to the news.

This is a troubling problem because it’s creating a country filled with uninformed citizens. Some are suggesting that by constantly feeding us biased news carefully crafted by these corporations, the public is becoming brainwashed to think the way they want us to think. We’re being brainwashed to only care and discuss the topics they want us to care about and discuss.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that there’s been little discussion about the damaging effects “free trade” has on our economy. Instead, news agencies are reporting on issues not relevant to our economy. 

Instead of telling us that due to “free trade” we have lost over 1 million jobs to NAFTA, they talk about royal babies, missing planes and celebrities. During this election, no one is talking about what matters most: our failing economy.

There are so many things wrong with America, in Congress and with our presidential administration that the media simply isn’t reporting because if they did, the U.S. public would be protesting in the streets and questioning the economic decisions of our leaders. Many have suggested that greedy corporations don’t want that.  

Even though roughly 70 percent of Americans are against “free trade,” corporations support the government and their quest for “free trade” because they make a lot of money from “free trade” agreements while the rest of the country suffers.

THAT'S why the media doesn’t report when Americans gather to protest “free trade” agreements, why they make sure YOU simply ignore it. They feed you, the public, a slew of distractions to direct attention off of the real problems.

The media does this on purpose, because having an electorate mindlessly following them is exactly what our ... elected leaders, lobbyists and multinational corporations want. Having an oblivious public means those currently causing America harm with “free trade” agreements can continue to suck the life from this great country while simultaneously selling away the wealth of future generations to countries like China.

"The Real Cost Of “Free Trade” Is Too Great For Americans to Bear"

“Free trade” would more accurately be called “freedom for other countries to undercut and destroy American domestic production” because in practice that is what is happening. 

America’s competitiveness was the first freedom “free trade” destroyed, but it will not be the last. The social fabric of our society – which starts with the opportunity to earn a good living – is being eroded as more of our well-paying jobs leave this country.

If things do not change dramatically and quickly, “free trade” will destroy the American freedom to have a prosperous, secure and independent future.

WHAT'S WRONG IN AMERICA?

American society is devoting an ever-growing share of its resources to financial wheeling and dealing, while getting little or nothing in return.  

We're giving huge sums to the financial industry while receiving little or nothing in return.

Specifically, the share of gross domestic product accruing to bankers, traders, and so on has nearly doubled since 1980, when we started dismantling the system of financial regulation created as a response to the Great Depression.

WASTEFUL SPENDING 

How much waste are we talking about?
A paper by Thomas Philippon of New York University puts it at several hundred billion dollars a year.

Philippon shows that the financial industry has grown much faster than either the flow of savings it channels or the assets it manages. Defenders of modern finance like to argue that it does the economy a great service by allocating capital to its most productive uses - but that's a hard argument to sustain after a decade in which Wall Street's crowning achievement involved directing hundreds of billions of dollars into subprime mortgages.

But if our supersized financial sector isn't making us either safer or more productive, what is it doing? 

One answer is that it's playing small investors for suckers, causing them to waste huge sums in a vain effort to beat the market. 

Don't take my word for it - that's what the president of the American Finance Association declared in 2008. 

Another answer is that a lot of money is going to speculative activities that are privately profitable but socially unproductive.  

So never mind the debate about exactly how much damage high-frequency trading does. It's the whole financial industry, not just that piece, that's undermining our economy and our society.

What's Wrong With America?

The Huffington Post offers the following answer:

According to a British critic, "the rottenness of modern Washington makes outsiders gasp. The pomposity of its architecture can no longer dignify the log-rolling, the gerrymandering, the lobbyists' egregious power, the money sloshing everywhere and the partisan polarization that drips from every news program."

The Chinese news agency, somewhat oddly when you consider the value of their dollar holdings, argued for a "de-Americanized world" that would include a "new international reserve currency that is to be created to replace the dominant U.S. dollar."

I suspect the answer to the question of what's gone wrong has many answers. My readers know mine: it's the result of the toxic, and uniquely American, cocktail of concentrated wealth and money in politics. That combination blocks the policy set that would begin to address the challenges we face and promotes the ones you see around you: constant fiscal squabbles powered by rhetorical obsession with public debts and deficits that has (a) nothing to do with our actual fiscal challenges (ones that Obamacare-type changes may actually be helping us to meet) and (b) is "rhetorical" in the sense that it's not about real solutions as about reducing taxes and shrinking government.

The U.S. economy has left large swaths of people behind.
History shows that such periods are ripe for demagogues, and here again, deep pockets buy not only the policy set that protects them, but the "think tanks," research results, and media presence that foments the polarization that insulates them further.

Meanwhile, the alleged political representatives of the rest of us do not offer much of a counter-narrative.
At the highest levels of political and policy power, the inequality, immobility, wage stagnation, sticky poverty rates, persistently slack labor markets are written off to the benign forces of technology and globalization. Other than some redistribution, even progressive leaders CLAIM they don't really know what to do to address these trends.

If you think that all sounds too pat, ask yourself: why, after the debacle we've just been through, the policy debate did not move at all toward that critical list of economic issues noted just above, but instead to... deficits and debt? 

Imagine a platform based not on deficit reduction but on the realization that lots more people need jobs that pay living wages, which means higher minimum wages, work supports, manufacturing/trade policy, full employment fiscal and monetary policy, direct job creation, and work sharing.  

I can easily see why the world is deeply nervous about where America is and where we're headed.
But I'm not convinced our electorate is so polarized that we can't change course. We've just got to give people a better choice.

ALL THE ABOVE-LINKED WEBSITES, ALL THE ECONOMIC EXPERTS WHO WROTE WHAT THEY WROTE ARE FINALLY LETTING YOU IN ON A FEW SECRETS, AMERICANS.
YOU'VE BEEN SUCKERED, HAD, DUPED, LIED TO, LED ON....
AND THEY'RE ALL SHOWING YOU WHAT HAS TO BE CHANGED...BUT ONLY AMERICAN VOTERS, AMERICAN WORKERS, AMERICAN TAXPAYERS WHO NEED RELIEF CAN DEMAND THE CHANGES NECESSARY TO SEE AMERICA THROUGH THIS CURRENT CRISIS.

IF WE CONTINUE TO DO NOTHING, JUST SIT AND COMPLAIN, SIT AND WONDER WHO'S GOING TO DO SOMETHING, THEN NOTHING WILL CHANGE!

DOING NOTHING MEANS NOTHING GETS DONE!  

CONGRESS IS NO HELP.
WE NEED TO FIRE ALL THOSE GUYS ON THE HILL, ALL OF THEM.
WE NEED TO SHOW THEM THEY CAN BE FIRED!

WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO?
BECOME MORE SELF-SUFFICIENT...NEED LESS FROM OVERSEAS, STOP DEPENDING SO MUCH ON OIL, DEVELOP CHEAPER WAYS TO SUPPLY OUR ENERGY NEEDS.
THOSE WHO FUND CONGRESSMEN WON'T LIKE THAT!

MAYBE WE SHOULD RETURN TO LOCAL "MOM-AND-POP" STORES, SMALLER COMPANIES, START BUYING MORE FROM OUR NEAREST 'NEIGHBORS', LOCAL GROWERS, LOCAL FARMERS, LOCAL MANUFACTURERS , LOCAL CRAFTSMEN.
WHEN AMERICA WAS IN ITS "BOOM", THE 1950s, IT WAS MAINLY SMALLER COMPANIES THAT GOT US IMAGINING WE REALLY COULD LIVE THE AMERICAN DREAM....HOMETOWN BUSINESSES WERE ACCOMPLISHING IT!

WE CAN BUY BETTER-MADE...STOP BUYING THE CHEAP STUFF THAT WEARS OUT OR BREAKS IN A FEW WEEKS OR, AT BEST, A FEW MONTHS.
IN THE LONG RUN, CHEAP IS NOT CHEAP WHEN YOU HAVE TO KEEP REPLACING IT!

WE CAN BUY AMERICAN-MADE PRODUCTS, STOP BUYING "MADE IN CHINA/INDIA/MEXICO", AND SHOW THE BIG CORPORATIONS HOW WE FEEL ABOUT THEIR TAKING AMERICAN JOBS OVERSEAS!
IF THEY WANT TO GIVE AMERICAN JOBS TO FOREIGNERS, THEN LET THEM SELL THEIR PRODUCTS TO FOREIGNERS ONLY!

LIKE I SAID AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS, THERE ARE 300 MILLION "SERFS", AND WE OUTNUMBER THE "OVERLORDS".

WE DON'T HAVE TO BE SERFS!
WE DON'T HAVE TO "OWE OUR SOULS TO THE COMPANY STORE" AS THE OLD SONG SAID!

ONE HUGE PROBLEM WE FACE IS THAT THE "OVERLORDS" HAVE TURNED US AGAINST EACH OTHER!
THEY HAVE PUSHED THE "CORPORATE MINDSET" DOWN NON-CORPORATE THROATS WITH THE SUBTLETY OF THE MEDIA...
THEY HAVE MADE THE AMERICA WORKER ALMOST LOATHE...AMERICAN WORKERS!
THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE DEMONSTRATES THIS QUITE WELL:

"This One Tweet Reveals What's Wrong With American Business"

They regard the human beings they work with--the human beings who create the value that pays their salaries--as "costs" to be reduced to create "maximized earnings." Because "maximized earnings," it is now frequently said, is the only thing that any business owner or manager should care about.

American corporations can afford to pay their employees better, hire more employees, and invest more in their future and the country's future.

But American corporations aren't doing that.

There is no capitalist law that says companies have to view employees as "costs" and pay them as little as possible.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH AMERICA CAN BE CHANGED, BUT IT WILL TAKE THE MAJORITY OF US TO MAKE THOSE CHANGES.
A HANDFUL CAN'T.

WHO IS TO BLAME FOR OUR SORRY SITUATION?
IT IS NOT AMERICAN CONSUMERS!
IT IS NOT AMERICAN WORKERS!
IT IS AMERICAN CORPORATIONS AND A CONGRESS THAT REFUSES TO END ITS DEPENDENCY ON CORPORATE MONEY TO WIN ELECTIONS!

CORPORATIONS SHOULD NOT HOLD THE POWER OF THE GOVERNMENT IN THEIR GREEDY HANDS!

THE U.S. CONSTITUTION WAS WRITTEN SO "WE, THE PEOPLE" HAVE THAT POWER...GOVERNMENT OF, FOR AND BY THE PEOPLE!
THAT'S US!