CAPITALISM

This is not unique to me: At its core, capitalism=greed.  To be clear, I'm not talking about the mom-and-pop stores, or small businesses.  Rather, businesses who trade on the stock exchanges.  Their sole raison d’être is to maximize profit.  Business 101.  I first noticed this about forty years ago, but it was probably going on long before that.  Rather than be happy with making a healthy profit, businesses started moving their operations overseas, mainly to China.  Corporate raiders and hedge fund managers are involved but not part of this basic narrative.  CEOs were evaluated on maximizing profit and stock prices.  Investors were prized more than employees, to the detriment of employees.

The counter to this corporate greed were unions and government.  Unions have their own demons (corruption, violence) but they acted as a check on the businesses.  They demanded a piece of the pie, so to speak.  Paid vacations and sick leave, among others, came about in business because of union pressure.  Non-union companies had to offer these in order to attract qualified applicants.  Middle-class thrived.  But corporations didn't give up and with a combination of anti-union laws and the unions own failings, unions became less dominant. 

The worker also had the government to give them help, passing laws to protect them, setting safety standards for instance.  But the corporations then pressured or seduced lawmakers into passing laws favorable to business (unfavorable to employees).  A tsunami of out-sourcing washed lots of jobs overseas or to Mexico, and judicial decisions were handed down that further went against employees. 

And that is where we are now, with the country being run by an unethical narcissist businessman surrounded by incompetent sycophants that do his every bidding.  We are on a slippery slope and need either unions or government, or both, to bring the corporations back to valuing their employees.  

One more spurious thought just wandered through my mind: I can't understand why a CEO who bankrupts his company can be awarded millions of dollars in severance when the board of directors has finally had enough.  Similarly, why does a board award a bonus when the business shows a profit by not paying their employees a decent wage?