white bus on road near in high rise building during daytime

Who Is Driving The Bus?

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Do you know who is driving the bus? By this I mean, who is leading our societies and who is making the important decisions that we all follow? It is not the obvious candidates and by this I refer to the politicians. Business leaders make the decisions which effect our lives and livelihoods. These profit driven CEOs are laser focused on the bottom line for their companies and shareholders. A major shift has occurred over the last 35 years, where workers and consumers have been shunted to the back of the queue and shareholders have become everything to companies under the guidance of their boards and CEOs.

The Rich Men Driving The Corporate Buses

How do we know this? A simple measurement is what we pay the various stake holders. The rate of pay for CEOs has increased at an astonishing rate of over 1000% in America over the last 45 years.

“The average fixed remuneration of a CEO at an ASX200 listed company was $1.37m this financial year, up from $1.14m in 2022-23. Some executives at large listed companies earned much more than the published fixed salaries – with bonuses often doubling take-home pay.”

“The pay for chief executives at major companies in the United States increased by an astonishing 1,085% from 1978 to 2023, while the typical worker’s earnings rose by only 24%, as reported by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.”

These mainly men and a few women who make up the CEO ranks are paid millions of dollars. Most are equipped with Masters of Business degrees, which involve studying ways to make more money, effect greater profitability and reduce overheads, for their companies. Boards of company directors, which are made up of successful business people, reward their chosen CEOs with lucrative renumeration packages that usually include generous stock options. These select individuals are making the big decisions which determine how we live and what our lifestyles look like.

The Capital Wheel at National Harbor, Maryland (US)
The Capital Wheel at National Harbor, Maryland (US) by Nicholas Garofalo is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

The Consolidation Of Corporate Power

Over the last three decades there had been a huge consolidation of corporate power and market share through mergers and takeovers. This has happened globally in the West. Monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies have formed in every sector of markets. The effect of this has been to dilute consumer power by reducing competition. Capitalism and the free marker economy has been gamed by these corporate players. Markets have been manipulated to serve corporate and shareholder interests at the expense of consumers and workers. The anti-trust and competition watchdogs have been revealed to be docile toothless tigers. This has been achieved via the revolving door from regulatory agencies into well paid jobs within these corporate behemoths themselves. The imbalance of power between small government bodies and giant multinationals makes their failures  a fait accompli. The ineffectiveness of politicians and public servants in this regard shows who is driving the bus in our modern world.

Neoliberalism Driving Our Bus

The neoliberal economic movement of the last four decades, begun with Thatcher and Reagan, has seen a huge shrinkage of publicly owned government assets.

“By the end of the 1980s, sales of state enterprises worldwide had reached a total of over $185 billion—with no signs of a slowdown. In 1990 alone, the world’s governments sold off $25 billion in state-owned enterprises—with continents vying to see who could claim the privatization title. The largest single sale occurred in Britain, where investors paid over $10 billion for 12 regional electricity companies. New Zealand sold more than 7 state-owned companies, including the government’s telecommunications company and printing office, for a price that topped $3 billion.”

This is how oligarchs were created around the world and most visibly in places like Russia. Hugely valuable assets were sold off way too cheaply to private interests. Neoliberalism has directly created a new Gilded Age and driven massive wealth inequality to levels never before seen around the world. John Howard, the former PM downunder, has done more to set Australia on a course of runaway property prices making home ownership unaffordable for a large swathe of the adult population. The capital gains tax discount and negative gearing together have had the effect of making buying a home in Australia cost around 13 times the annual income of a working adult. It was x6 when he came to power in the early 1990s. Investors have thrived whilst Australians wanting a home to live in have had to pay through the nose. The banks have made tens of billions on the back of these prices over decades. A 2 speed economy has emerged and the divide between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ is split down the property owning demarcation.

rocket on display in kennedy space center
Photo by Daniel Dzejak on Pexels.com

Driving The Bus Into The Ground

Today’s generation of politicians and government bureaucrats have grown up believing that private enterprise is better at running things. This makes them bystanders and media hounds rather than real leaders driving the bus. Respect for politicians around the globe has plummeted in tandem with their withdrawal from running entities in the marketplace. Having drunk the neoliberal kool aid the electorate sees them as leeches on the public purse and consciousness. During the pandemic when we could not get all the things that China makes for us and the realisation of our dependence came home to roost many of these politicians suddenly woke up to their predicament. For the first time in 30 years there was talk of resurrecting a manufacturing sector downunder. These were the same politicians who had killed off the car industry previously. This idea that you can run a country with no reserves and depend upon global freight to feather your nest is naïve. The neoliberal economic model siphons off all the profits to investors and runs the business in this manner. Australia has left itself with bugger all manufacturing and a diminished intellectual property (IP) in so many important areas. Companies are now run like this, as they devalue their labour by screwing workers down on wages over years via labour hire firms. Qantas is the clearest example of this under the guidance of CEO Alan Joyce. He ran down the brand over decades and damaged it in return for quick profits.

Who is driving the bus? The Big Tech bros are influencing our world to a never before seen level. Making hundreds of billions of dollars whilst we struggle to make ends meets. Global high inflation has made all of us much poorer and the super wealthy oligarchs much, much more wealthy. Everything we do in this rentier economy costs us money. We pay a subscription for everything and own nothing. These CEOs are celebrated for the financialization of everything. They are actively making all aspects of life into commodities, not for sale but for rent. One of the reasons why productivity is down is that these companies operate as landlords in a rentier economic model – they extract revenue whether businesses are highly productive or not.

2015-2838
2015-2838 by NASAKennedy is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

What Can We Do?

What can we do about all of this? We have to turn around the BS about neoliberalism being a better economic model for running everything. Governments need to be encouraged to get back into the game of running things on our behalf. We need to get back some of the assets that have been scammed out of our ownership. It is not totalitarian governments we need to fear right now, it is totalitarian corporations that already exist and are just getting ever bigger. It is no accident that both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in the space exploration business. These oligarchs are extending their reach beyond our earth. Rockets to flood space with satellites has via Starlink made Musk even more globally powerful. Individuals should not have this much wealth and power. We all need to wake up to this before it’s too late. Private armies and militias are happening. Democracy is pointless if government is a puppet show. This is where we are heading fast. America has shown itself to be lost in lies and misinformation. The people are so out of touch with what is happening and the ramifications of that oligarchic power it is bewildering to observe. We have to get back behind the wheel of our own bus. CEOs of companies and corporations hell bent on ever greater profitability for shareholders are not going to save us. They have no interest in this, as it is beyond their short term goals. Technology is not going to save us, as many believe. Technology is just as likely to kill us as save us. Many think that revolution is coming to America because of the failure of leaders to arrest the profit driven direction in which their society is heading. The murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, is seen as an extreme sign of things to come. If business is killing Americans whilst generating hundreds of billions in revenue something is seriously wrong.

You have a select class of people, CEOs, being paid many millions of dollars and totally focused on narrow visions. Investors and boards set the renumeration for this class of human beings. People and organisations so intent on making money that they disown their responsibilities in many important aspects of human life. This is a major failure of all of us who have allowed this to go on for such a long time. This must be stopped. Capitalism has been manipulated to serve the greed of those involved in this and not the whole. A few are exploiting the many. It is time to put a stop to this.

Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.

©MidasWord

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