Not that they require fascism, but they’re OK with it:
David Zaslav, the CEO of CNN’s parent company, at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on Tuesday:
Asked about the upcoming Presidential election, Zaslav said it mattered less to him which party wins, so long as the next president was friendly to business.
“We just need an opportunity for deregulation, so companies can consolidate and do what we need to be even better.”
One of the few things Biden has been good on is anti-trust, so this means Trump.
In a similar vein:
The pull quote:
“France’s corporate bosses are racing to build contacts with Marine Le Pen’s far right after recoiling from the radical tax-and-spend agenda of the rival leftwing alliance in the country’s snap parliamentary elections”.
The left, and real left, not the so-called “Center Left” will always be opposed by corporations, just as most of them opposed FDR. They want to get bigger and richer, whether that’s good for the country or not. High marginal tax rates, vigorous anti-trust and high corporate tax rates with laws forbidding stock options and other nonsense produced America and Western Europe’s best economy in history—the post-war states from 45 on.
Of course, during that time period the CEO/Worker pay ratio tended towards 30/1 or so.
But, as we all know, workers made enough so that a single wage-earner could support a family, and as for GDP growth rates, well:
These charts are pretty clear. Consolidation and deregulation do not lead to higher GDP growth, and that’s leaving aside redistribution.
This is important because the argument for deregulation and allowing consolidation was that it would make growth better and that there would be a “trickle down” which would leave everyone better off even if inequality soared.
Well, we did get trickled on, I suppose
david lamy
Looks like the ignition for high ceo pay got lit during the Reagan I, II, and George H W Bush I administrations. Liftoff occurred under William J Clinton I and II.
For quite some time I have thought that quality of life peaked in the U.S from ’68-’71 which were my high school years. I think the graph of the ratio of ceo pay to workers bears that out.
The assassination of JFK has paid dividends for the perpetrators and their ideological descendants. We have perpetual war and a society with a wealth distribution the robber barons of the 1890’s desired but could not achieve.
Jan Wiklund
According to “the doyen of American business historians”, Alfred D Chandler, everything changed in the 60s. According to the end chapter in his book Scale and scope (about how Big Business became big), the economies of scale had then become so efficient that there were no people to buy all the produce. And those big corporations, that successfully had weathered the 30s – and concerning the German big corporation weathered the loss of two world wars – suddenly lost faith in their own capacities, and began to eat themselves:
– Instead of producing better products with better methods, they began buying profitable businesses in other lines and let their own specialities rot
– They began to sell their own parts and buy others to make spectacular mergers, with no observable positive effects on their business
– They fired the technicians that had managed the corporations during 80 successful years and rely on economists that only understood numbers – but not what the numbers related to.
Chandler doesn’t say, the book was written rather close to the era, but others have pointed to the fact that because of the overproduction and diminishing returns, the corporations couldn’t use their own profits for necessary investments. They had to appeal to the money market. And the money market wanted quick returns. It had no patience for long-term profitability. Hence the shortsightedness, the “eat your own limbs to survive” syndrome.
The capitalists today, and by extension the CEOs installed by the capitalists, aren’t organizers of production, they are rentiers. They live off their wealth. That’s the only thing they are interested in.
Oakchair
the CEO of CNN
——-
The key point is that the oligarchs own the media, even the “left-wing media”. They control and dictate what is said and allowed to be said in the newspapers, on the TV, on the radio, in social media, and what shows up in search engines.
Those “left-wing” news outlets and journalists are controlled opposition. Their purpose is to be the “good cops” and despite the “good cops” being nicer they are still out to screw you over good and hard.
John9
The Chinese and Russian governments appear to have their oligarchs controlled to the extent that their economies are still somewhat purpose driven to benefit their people. Thus their people still get “nice things” and their lives improve. The American hegemon and it’s vassals are mostly profit driven and benefits to the people are spiraling down. The China and Russia anxiety of American overlords is a product of their own greed driven self imposed handicap.
marku52
Can they at least make the trains run on time? That’d be useful.
somecomputerguy
“able to support a family” severely understates the contrast.
As a factory worker at GM, Michael Moore’s father made enough money to pay off his mortgage in five years. He did that while buying a new car every two years, which was the norm. And he raised a family.
Certainly he had a union health plan on top of that, but if he didn’t, he would have signed up for his states’ Blue Cross/Blue Shield, state-level single-payer, that insured all comers for the same low, flat rate, as my parents did.
As a veteran, he would have been paid to go to college, if he chose. Not ‘helped’, paid. The Governor of California, Pat Brown, set out to build the finest system of higher education in the world, and pretty much succeeded. Tuition nominal. Yes there were fees, but those didn’t become a weaseled tuition until much later.
The price? You agreed that as a member of that society you personally would never make more that about $1.6m a year. If you did, you could give it to charity or Uncle Sam would do that for you.
Being a banker was a middle class job. Stock brokers drove cabs in their off hours to make ends meet. Finance generally was so highly regulated that it might as well have been socialized.
When you have a maximum wage for the wealthy, and they have no choice but to give it to someone else or have it taxed away, you generate an amazing amount of wealth.
But when it came down to it, if government wanted, not needed, wanted to build something, they didn’t spend a nanosecond worrying about what markets would think. The Depression and WWII amply demonstrated that markets would do as they were told.
Sam
Not sure why Trump is any more of a fascist threat than we are living with under Biden. Can’t see Trump being any worse on the genocidal foreign policy front, and the Dems never actually did much to stop any of Trump/Republican domestic polices. They subjected everyone to Russiagate instead, a blackhole from which our country may never climb out.
I’m no fan of Trump or Republicans and would never vote for them, but I’m not sure their mania for tax cuts for the rich quite rises to the level of fascism. And abortion? I am strictly pro-choice, but the Dems had 50 years to codify Roe v. Wade and did nothing. 50 years is a long time, even Obama stated “it is not a priority,” and they deserve a chunk of the blame for so many decades of inaction. If they had made it law would we even be an issue now? One thing for certain is Dems would have one less issue to raise money over.
I will admit temporarily disappearing BLM protesters from the streets of Portland in 2020 is certainly right up there, but then again it was the Democratic Saint Obama who gave us unilateral assassination of US citizens, which is definitely fascism.
So in other words the Democrats have their own fascism problem, and CEOs who support it is nothing new. Of course they are willing to support fascism, is that something new? Hitler would never have been appointed Chancellor if the heads of the major German conglomerates hasn’t lobbied for it.
So all this hand wringing over fascism? I don’t like Trump but I don’t think he is any more guilty of the charge than anyone who the Dems will allow on their ticket. If Dems are unwilling to clean up their own house, let alone listen to any criticism of it (isn’t it all “disinformation” they are desperate to keep from American ears?), then I am unwilling to listen to their fearmongering over Trump.
mago
There’s no difference among the ruling class
They’re gonna kick your ass
Kick your butt no matter what
Pull down your pants
You ain’t got a chance
Got no voice
Got no choice
Roll over rover and kiss your ass goodbye
Going up to that spirit in the sky
Willy
At least under Biden we get to bitch and moan together in plain sight. Under fascist CEO backed Trump, we’re all on our own, at best scurrying about between hidey holes like cockroaches.
bruce wilder
To be a fascist, would he have to also a nationalist?
GM
@somecomputerguy
The other, and in fact primary reason all of that was possible, in addition to redistribution policies, was that the 1950s and 1960s were the peak of the oil age.
Production was booming, giant new oil fields were being discovered all around the world, and it was the easy to pump out sweet crude with very high net energy returns.
So there was a lot of surplus in real energy terms to be redistributed.
Fast forward and what do you have?
You have a tripling of global population, conventional oil in the US peaked in the early 1970s, and globally in the 2000s, and now we are subsisting on a mixture of fracking, deepwater oil, and scraping the bottom of the barrel from the supergiant fields discovered many decades ago. Net energy returns have decreased dramatically.
You mix that with the abandonment of redistributive policies, and there isn’t much left for the common man once the oligarchy has taken its ever increasing share of the shrinking pie.
The reason the above has to always be kept in mind is that this:
Was in fact not a good thing at all. It is how we got in this mess to begin with.
Michael Moore’s father should not have ever been allowed to buy a new car every two years working for GM, in fact he should not have been working for GM to begin with because GM should not have existed, and neither should have the option to buy a private car (and thus the car industry as we know it). Yes, you read that right — no car industry making private cars. Only buses, trucks, heavy machinery and rail equipment, all transportation should have been public, cities should have been built dense and walkable, certainly absolutely no suburbia, etc.
If we were to survive as a species.
But almost nobody understands the need for that to this day, so of course the correct path was not chosen.
And you see it in this thread — we are bemoaning the abandonment of redistributive policies and the subsequent concentration of wealth, but if you bring back redistributive policies and still maintain the same ecologically suicidal economic system and physical organization of society, you end up in the same state of collapse eventually.
Redistribution is a necessary condition for achieving something approaching sustainability. But it alone is not sufficient.
bruce wilder
@GM
The New Deal was confronted with some very serious economic problems and, yes, the country chose, post-war, petroleum and suburban bliss and that turned out to be less than sustainable, less than blissful and altogether, imho, not very pretty or conducive to happy lives.
Such collective short-sightedness, however, is the political rule. We simply don’t know until we try and pretty much everything we try turns sour in time. We cannot pave a straight path to nirvana.
The assembling of collective will that allowed the New Deal to vigorously counter concentrations of wealth and power owed a lot to the precedents of the Progressive Era, a widespread consciousness of class warfare that encouraged the formation of industrial labor unions, the public spiritedness that guided industrial mobilization for WWII and the possibilities and imperatives of a huge national debt raised in part from popular bond drives.
The turning sour part was driven by a lot of subversive right-wing bull excretions combined with complacent stupidity and hostility to populism and principle from the liberal centre. (See Milton Friedman, surely the most influential economist of the 20th Century.) Nixon and Reagan turned the ship of state and Obama sank the best opportunity to reverse course.
What would be necessary to substantially mitigate the consequences of resource depletion and climate change would be extremely difficult to organize globally, given prior generations accepting the norms of successive Industrial Revolutions. A hard ceiling on the wealth and resource squandering of 0.1 % surely seems necessary, but good luck prying power out of their dead hands, short of a crisis of general collapse. So, I guess we are going to have a general collapse and maybe posterity, if there is one, will see how much survives and whether what emerges is in any wise, benign.