CEOs excel at two things - grabbing money, and screwing things up as they do

With 40 years of tax cuts for the rich and corporate, we've gotten a culture of CEO that believes his (almost always his) own hype, and cares more about making their numbers and grabbing what they can over having any kind of concern over quality or injury that this mentality might cause.

David Roth has an excellent column in Defector where he notes that most Americans seethe at this reality, yet try to muddle past the sociopathy and mediocrity that exists in corporate boardrooms.

But then there's a point when everyday CEO arrogance, neglect and greed can't be ignored any more. Roth points out that it is no coincidence that more Boeing planes are falling apart when its corporate executives decided that "profit by any means necessary" was going to be the rule they lived by.

As someone who has been on four different Boeing-made airplanes in the last week, I can attest to the limits of this fantasy [of retribution against executives] in the face of the prospect that a door on your airplane — the production of which was outsourced and subcontracted by a flub-prone duopoly to save some money; the installation and inspection of which was overseen by an overworked and multiply pressured person working in a conflicted and careless system, also to save some money — might blow off at altitude. There are some problems an individual is not equipped to fix, and "airplane now has moonroof" is one of the classics, there. More to the point, the bad people enabling or actively authoring those problems can seem not merely out of reach but safely within a parallel reality that is, if not any less brutish or ugly or stupid, notably better insulated. You think less of mounting a Jack Reacher-style offensive on Boeing's executive suite, in that situation, and more about how strong an airplane seat belt is, really, and I guess also how reliable the subcontractor that produced that seatbelt was, and how carefully that was inspected.

There's a bit in Maureen Tkacik's comprehensively damning 2019 feature about Boeing in The New Republic that I keep coming back to, both here and in general. The central tension of that story is about how, as a former Boeing physicist told Tkacik, "a long and proud 'safety culture' was rapidly being replaced... with 'a culture of financial bullshit.'" The supplanting of that purpose — of any purpose, really, at just about any business in just about any industry you can think of — with the blank nihilism of financial capitalism's profit-driven imperatives is familiar by now; management's quest to see how much more cheaply an increasingly poor product can be sold at the same price and under the same name as what came before is, at bottom, the story of basically every industry or institution currently in decline or collapse.

If it was always foolish to expect the free market to make things better, it feels more fanciful by the day to imagine a future in which the cynics and sociopaths in charge of that market do anything but continue to make it worse; they've evinced no capacity for that, but also no interest in it. Whether this deterioration is the result of buccaneering libertarian delusion or just a bloodless calculation that concepts like "safety" and "quality" are more nice-to-have's than need-to-have's, it appears to be the only idea that any of these people have. As this slips further into abstraction — if those mishaps-at-altitude don't really ding the stock price enough to bother any of the parties capable of doing something about them — the problem compounds and compounds. In the case of my industry, there is the sense that the business dipshits smashing up various institutions and lives simply care more about their divine right to smash things up than they do about anything else; something new can be built around the ruins they make, but the needless, ugly, colossal waste of it all is offensive all the same. Also none of us know how to make airplanes.

These "business leaders" don't create anything, besides maybe more schemes to extract funds from companies without any need to work harder or do anything better.

As Roth alludes to, the recent blood-lettings in print and online journalism are yet another exampe where hedge funders don't care about the importance and consumer experience of the product, and will bleed those publications dry without caring about the consequences to the public when it comes to losing quality writing and reporting.

I was wondering “how do you fuck up Sports Illustrated!?” But it’s unfuckupable unless your intention is to destroy it which is what all hedge fund bullshit companies do. They create nothing they just take good things, squeeze every penny from it, & kick its corpse in a ditch

— Chris Calogero (@RealChrisCal) January 19, 2024

LA Times’ billionaire owner ⁦@DrPatSoonShiong⁩ sought to kill a story on another LA billionaire doctor.

It added to tension with executive editor who then resigned as Soon-shiong planned layoff of 115 journalists. https://t.co/iLeofqcW1r

— Margot Roosevelt (@margotroosevelt) January 27, 2024

The @nytimes is hiring engineers and editors for a new team that will experiment with generative AI, and journalists will still write, edit, and report the news. https://t.co/OEJqStJhGI

— Nieman Lab (@NiemanLab) January 30, 2024

After 17.5 years, I (along with about 240 other colleagues) decided to take a buyout and leave The Washington Post at the end of 2023. It was the hardest decision I've ever made.

— Whitney Shefte (@whitneyshefte) January 3, 2024

Now Some of those that are laid off will land on their feet in the industry (the great Greg Sargent quickly moved from WaPo to the New Republic, for example). But it's still going to be a net loss in the long run, as it becomes harder for a shrinking number of publications to not only look after national matters, but local day-to-day news that is more likely to have an immediate effect on readers' lives.

And I don't think it's any coincidence that CEOs have become more publicly obnoxious and uncaring after the 2017 GOP Tax Scam cut tax rates for the rich and corporate, and increased the incentive to hoard profits over paying workers or investing in improving the product. And if they can screw over everyday consumers over by using their market power to raise prices while misdirecting the blame, all the better.

“Prices rose by 3.4% over the past year, but input costs for producers increased by just 1%.”
Half of recent US inflation due to corporate greed | The Guardian https://t.co/98G7wpFYBD

— Esther Kaplan (@estherbrooklyn) January 25, 2024

The report’s authors scoured corporate earnings calls and found executives bragging to shareholders about keeping prices high and widening profit margins as input costs come down.

The findings come as the Federal Reserve has hiked interest rates to their highest point in 20 years. The report casts serious doubt on the need for further interest rate hikes, and instead calls for stronger policies to rein in “corporate profiteering”.

Prices rose in 2021 as labor costs jumped and supply chain shocks from the pandemic and the Ukraine war snarled shipping traffic and left energy supplies in question. But those issues have in many cases been fully sorted out or are easing, and the labor market has stabilized. Many commodities and services producers’ prices have actually decreased, the report notes.

This type of greed and "get mine" mentality brings us back to Roth and his reflections on Boeing's cost-cutting, and how expendable these "leaders" think anyone outside of their Club is.

The physicist who talked to Tkacik about the "culture of financial bullshit" told her, too, about his attempts to get through to Wall Street types that shareholders were at much greater risk from that recklessness than they were by the deliberateness and expense of the old, dying "safety culture" that it was replacing. He tells Tkacik about a Wall Street analyst telling him: "'Look, I get it. What you’re telling me is that your business is different. That you’re special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different

At some level, this is just one of the asshole capitalists who are wrecking the world talking like the sort of asshole capitalist who would wreck the world. But there is a threat only barely latent in it, too. It's an inversion of the way in which ideas like "everybody is the same" have traditionally been used in the culture; where that has typically been deployed, always rhetorically and usually insincerely, as a politician's shorthand for the belief that every life has value and every person's dignity is meaningful, it is here an assertion that every life — that every line of work and every person working in it, and every concern that those people have — is equally valueless and equally insignificant. It is, in its way, a statement of purpose: not just the assurance that every person, place, and thing is now or will become food for its rightful devourers, but that those doing the eating also think of it as junk food.

These a-holes think it's all a game, and just some numbers on a balance sheet. They are not our friend, and should only be trusted to try to take as much as they can, if they can.

Every Dem running in 2024 should identify these oligarch scumbags, call out their influence over our media and political system, and tell Americans their free ride is over. Our economy may be good, and this country and its people is better off than they were in 2019. But our society still needs to improve more, and remove the cloud of corporatism that hangs over much of America today.

Make those mediocre pricks pay taxes like it's 1975 (or at least 2017) and do more to break up their oligopolies and actively support and/or force competition. Sure, it takes a lot of time, money and effort, but the alternative is to have this country go down the drain into oligarchy for good, and have even more people give up on trying to succeed through legitimate means and hard work.

If we do fall into Third-World Oligarchy, we become much more likely to have even more "disruption". Not just for people with real jobs, but also for the greedhead mediocrities at the top.