Billionaires, CEOs, "corporations", and capitalism- Are things really different, or is it propaganda?

Great Debates
1

So around here, on Reddit, and elsewhere online, there seems to be a persistent refrain about the current state of things, and how it’s generally due to four things that are huge problems. Namely, billionaires, CEOs, “corporations”, and capitalism. That triumvirate is blamed for every ill of the nation, from income inequality to jock itch.

Now I’m not arguing that any of these things are ideal. Far from it. But the commonality of the message coming from people online raises my eyebrows a bit- it’s too consistent and recent, and there aren’t really solutions being proffered in conjunction with them- when you ask, you get a weirdly incoherent mishmash of wealth taxation, UBI, “I don’t know”, and crazier stuff, depending on who and when you ask. And a lot of the time, there’s a lot of confusion on the part of the people parroting the triumivrate as the root of all evils about what they actually are, especially asking them to clarify what capitalism is and what corporations are. (they typically confuse free market economies with capitalism, and they usually have a really vague notion of “corporations”, as being something smaller than Fortune 500, but not small businesses either.).

What is most puzzling is that until maybe the past 5-10 years, none of this was really there. I mean, people weren’t wild about “corporations”, but that was mostly due to the idea that for-profit companies’ primary obligation was to make profit, and that some were so bent on profit that they’d engage in shady and outright unethical stuff. But they weren’t viewed as inherently evil. Nor were capitalism, billionaires, and CEOs seen as inherently evil. Individual super wealthy people were looked at askance, but there wasn’t this pervasive notion that the super wealthy were inherently evil, or that they necessarily did shady stuff to get where they’re at.

Hell, the guy in this thread was basically viewed as a crank here 16 years ago, yet he’s saying basically what I’m talking about now.

Across the entire World… - The BBQ Pit - Straight Dope Message Board

Anyway, it seems to me like maybe this is part of online propaganda and bot messaging from US adversaries (Russia, Iran, China, etc…) meant to poison discourse and introduce friction where there was none. The timing and messages just seem too convenient, considering that it goes in the face of a lot of what the country’s held dear for decades.

2

Sure it was. Throughout history there have been robber barons with their own enforcement arms, and those trying to fight against them.

What has happened in the last period of time is the expansion of reach of the mega corporations including into portions of the economy that had not previously been under mega corporations control, with consolidation both vertically and horizontally, with wealth and power increasingly concentrated into few and fewer hands.

3

I meant none of the messaging was there, not that the super wealthy didn’t exist, or mega coroprations didn’t exist, etc…

4

But again … it was. In my grandparents’ generation it was expressed by trying to organize for labor rights (Workmen’s Circle and many other organizations). … maybe you weren’t paying attention to it, or weren’t getting fed it by virtue of your news algorithms, but it was there … big time.

5

I feel these things are too easy scapegoats (billionaires, CEOs, Russia, media, etc.) Sure, they cause lots of trouble. But the ordinary commonfolk are perfectly capable of bigotry, racism, wild thinking, sexism, greed, exploitation, prejudice on their own. Take away billionaires and the glowing coals of bad human nature are still there.

My parents would have been very conspiratorial and right-wing on their own even without Fox News.

6

It’s billionaires. Nearly everything can be blamed on the billionaires (and their corporate allies). Why is it so hard to fight climate change? Billionaires. Why don’t we have universal health care? Billionaires. Why do we have such a huge deficit? Billionaires. Why are wages stagnant and rent/home prices so high? Billionaires. Why is the AI/data center insanity skyrocketing and creating all kinds of new wealth imbalances? Billionaires.

Sure, there are other obstacles to progress. But billionaires are overwhelmingly the biggest and most powerful. Take away billionaire interests and the above would all be much, much easier to solve. Even racism/bigotry/homophobia/transphobia is partially due to billionaires finding it a very useful wedge to divide the people against each other, so they don’t unite against their real enemies (billionaires!).

This is not Russian propaganda. Russia’s predations are also largely due to billionaires (Putin and his oligarch allies).

7

This is just not true. Just in my recent memory I’ve seen criticism of major corporations going back several decades. I was recently reminded of Roger & Me which I saw in 2001. People have been criticizing the wealthy corporations since time immemorial. (Where do you think the term “Luddite” came from? Have you read The Jungle?) Because wealthy corporations have been doing some fucked up shit since time immemorial. Over the last several decades we’ve witnessed wage suppression in the face of climbing productivity, but most notably, a significant decline in the ability of people to change their circumstances.

What people really seem to have a problem with right now is not capitalism but oligarchy, or as Cory Doctorow calls them, the cartels. When Amazon owns everything and has complete regulatory capture to actually weaponize anti-trust laws against the competition, we’ve got a system in which true business competition no longer exists, and employees have no recourse but to accept dangerous and demoralizing jobs. There is increasingly no “somewhere else” to work. Likewise there is no meaningful consumer choice. Cartels are not interested in the customer experience because they get to unilaterally decide what our experience is going to be. And with environmental and food safety regulation now being destroyed by the Trump administration, we’re in for an even wilder ride. Given the significant decline in meat quality I’ve seen already, we may well be going back to the Jungle.

The real problem is people who somehow still believe, against all evidence, that oligarchs will do the right thing out of the kindness of their hearts. No, they will pillage, rape and destroy as long as it makes them more money. This has always been the case. And as long as that’s been happening, people have been speaking out about it.

I am a capitalist. But I despise oligarchs. And I see no benefit, not even to the consumer, to their existence.

8

The messaging is getting stronger because the robber barons have been chipping away at regulations and limitations for 40 years, and it’s coming to a head. The boomer utopia that that generation remembers so fondly was partly created by unions, high taxes, government spending and strong regulations.

9

I believe it was Anthropic recently crying out for government regulation, so that their poor helpless executives could stop developing all this dangerous technology. What the company was most likely trying to do was encourage regulation that would make it harder for start-ups to compete. It worked so well for other tech cartels.

10

Yup. Every Republican tax law change starting with Reagan has been making wealth stratification worse. CEOs are making many more times the average salary of the average grunt than they used to.

Stratification keeps getting worse, even at the highest levels – the 0.1 are pulling away from the 1% and the 0.01% are pulling away even faster from the 0.1%.

Couple that with the relatively recent SCOTUS decisions on campaign finance and you have billionaires buying politicians in ways they couldn’t do twenty or thirty years ago.

This gilded age is worse than the previous gilded age and it really only happened relatively recently, which is why you’re seeing more and more commentary on it.

ETA: This Krugman substack article lays it out very well, but it might only be for paid subscribers:

Maybe someone with better Board skills than me can post the chart on how the 0.01% are pulling away.

ETA 2: This Krugman article has some of the same charts and should be free to view, and it also lays out how the chief oligarch (Musk) is pouring so much money into this election:

11

I want to add that things really have gotten worse in terms of wealth stratification, income distribution, campaign contributions, capital vs. labor returns (capital returns have increased much faster than labor returns).

It’s sort of like asking why climate change is mentioned much more now when talking about big weather events – the earth really is heating up and the effects of climate change really are upon us.

Similarly, the effects of 50 years of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, unlimited campaign contributions, dismantling the regulatory regime, wealth concentration due to AI and other tech monopolies, are being felt more and more throughout society.

12

That anyone thinks this is new stuff is baffling to me. It ebbs and flows throughout history because the regulation of big business ebbs and flows. We’re in a regulatory ebb, so naturally it’s going to be present more so than usual. Things are so starkly unequal right now that more people are getting mad about it.

But communism was originally a response to capitalism, was it not? These are old ideas.

We have seen a rise in socialism recently, for the same reason. Where inequality grows, radical ideas will follow.

I don’t think we’re ever going back to the Boomer utopia though. Regulation is only one piece of this. Another is government spending and I don’t see where that money is going to come from. I’m no expert in economics but it seems like that was a certain time and a certain place unlikely to repeat itself. I’m beginning to see the post WW2 boom as an anomaly whereas a lot of people took it to be the new normal. So one answer to “Why can’t it be like that anymore?” might be, “Because it was a fluke.”

But I don’t have a long enough view of history to make that determination. Were there broad eras of prosperity before that?

13

We’ve been here before. The current political/labor/economic environment would be familiar to someone in the 1880s, 1920s, and 1930s.

14

I am not a historian, so I don’t have a great comparison to times before I started paying attention. That being said, I’ve been ranting about living in an oligarchy (a government of the few, by the few, and for the few) since the 90s. Even at the time, I considered United the worst Supreme Court decision ever.

No, “corporations” are not evil in and of themselves. However, the “greed is good” mentality forces publicly traded companies to cater to the whims of Wall Street, who have a “what have you done for me lately?” mentality. I know there were exposes out on mega-corporations before (I remember Citizen GE), and certainly US law and the labor unions removed many of the abuses of corporations, but they have been slowly chipping away at the rules for years. When conservatives are nostalgic for the 50s, I think a lot of that comes from fewer mega-corporations, and Joe’s Widget Plant of Peoria was happy making a decent profit and proud of creating good jobs for his community. That has been lost.

Yeah, the screams about CEOs have been growing, but that is because of the explosion of CEO pay. And the discrepancy is not new. The most famous counter-example is Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. It was already enough of a problem in 1978 that those two hippies had a policy that no employee would make more than 5x the wage of a starting employee, including Ben and/or Jerry. There was a big kerfuffle when they sold to Unilever, and that policy was removed.

I think you hear more complaints about “billionaires” because the wealth discrepancy has exploded. There’s more billionaires, more poor, and far fewer middle class, and they’ve got to blame someone.

I (personally) haven’t heard too much bitching about capitalism or free-market-economy here in the US - that’s practically a national religion in itself!

15

Exactly this.

I think what has changed recently is that people who are generally in favor of capitalism and free enterprise are realizing that the system isn’t working for them. Billionaires and their mega-corporations are using increasingly more resources, while starving small and even medium-sized business. And the benefits of the economy are being funneled to increasingly fewer people.

The U.S. economy outside of billionaire control is doing terrible. That is why people feel like the economy is miserable, because it is terrible for them. But because most people only consume news from billionaire-controlled media, they don’t understand the source of the problem.

I highly recommend Paul Krugman’s substack. He’s no leftie and it’s hard to argue with what the numbers are showing: billionaires are controlling the economy and destroying everything outside their control.

16

That would be quadrumvirate. I mean, you list four.

You obviously missed Occupy Wall Street [2011]. Or that “Eat the Rich” originated - supposedly - during the French Revolution[1789].

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

17

It was there before, oh 2015. It’s been there since humans first stopped being hunter gatherers. The difference is that between roughly the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the first election of Trump, those forces weren’t as strong. What changed in 2015 / 2016 isn’t that these things became new. It’s that they gained more overt power than they had in many decades. You’d have to go back to the Herbert Hoover years to find another similar time, and I doubt that there is more than a tiny handful of living Americans that can remember that far back. Therefor it seems new to those relying on “what I can personally remember”.

18

Somebody was complaining about all this in 1905:
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor through an economic organization of the working class… Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.” It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown."

That was the preamble to the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, or the Wobblies. Eugene Debs was at its founding convention, and received over 400,000 votes in the 1908 election, and more than double than in 1912, capturing about 6% of the popular vote. Given the strategic nature of voting, it is fair to assume that Debs and socialism were more popular and better-known than the polling numbers. So it’s nothing new.

Heck, you can read Thomas More’s Utopia for critiques of the rich and powerful in the Anglo tradition.

19

@Spice_Weasel said it all much better than I could possibly could, but this is just a bizarre statement.

Marx wrote in, what, the mid to late 1800s? And the Cold War was a little longer ago than 5-10 years :slight_smile: Occupy and Bernie etc. stoked the flames, but the underlying sentiment was there long before. Even in the US, this is cyclical for us… slave owners, railroad era, steel barons, the various Wall Street scares, etc.

Is it possible you’ve been lucky enough to have been shielded from the the resentment for much of your life, until recently? Most of my friends are working-class, and this was the common sentiment for as long as I can remember (I’m 40ish). I’ve only ever actually met one person who liked capitalism and was a proud supporter of it.

20

And yet Ben and Jerry are each worth around $150 million

And the fact is, the only reasons corporations exist in the first place is that they provide some product or service that the people demand and are willing to pay for.

The problem with people who tend to be anti-billionaire/CEO/corporations/and capitalism is

  1. they often know Jack shit about economics or business
  2. they don’t really have anything better to replace the system

For all its problems and flaws, capitalism and large corporations have contributed to the high standard of living people around the world. Without large megacorporations, who would build your cars, your tech, power your cities, deliver any product to you within days or hours, fly you around the world to relax in their giant amusement parks?

And a lot of these companies were created by people who weren’t billionaires before they founded them.

That said, a billion dollars is an insanely large amount of money for a person to have.