It’s time to take the gloves off! As a former CEO, I’m ashamed of the juvenile whining of CEO’s like JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, General Electric’s Jeffrey Immelt, Coca Cola’s Muhtar Kent, Intel’s Paul Otellini and Forbes Magazine’s Steve Forbes . Like taunting insecure bullies on a playground, they call President Obama names and compare him to Hitler. They allege that more regulations and more taxes are anti-business, as if they were entitled to freely plunder, pollute and corrupt their companies and society. If they were entrepreneurs, or even capable leaders, they would be breaking new ground and seizing new opportunities instead of characterizing themselves as potential victims of big bad government.
I’m not surprised that they behave like teenagers railing against adult supervision. It’s taken decades of benign neglect to wind up with this self-indulgent crop of executives. Men who bleat like this are the natural consequences of broken processes for selecting and supervising CEOs, lenient treatment for the last 30 years by Federal and State governments, inherited wealth, and a public mesmerized by money and power.
Instead of entrepreneurs, leaders or even managers, we have a crop of bureaucratic administrators capable only of using their powers of potentates to tip toe along safe, traditional paths of size and domination while expecting the public and governments to subserviently make it easier for them. Instead of embracing and using uncertainty to competitive advantage, they fear it and expect the rest of us to sacrifice ourselves in order to make it more certain for them to plunder their companies with exorbitant compensations and golden parachutes while bloating their egos with unwarranted respect and adulation.
It’s time for adult supervision; let them cry, whine, quit and get fired. Those things, like the tantrums of spoiled children required to behave like mature adults or the painful screams of a heroin addicts withdrawing cold-turkey, will be signs that we’ve begun a necessary recovery process for their corporations and for our economy.
What constitutes adult supervision? It begins with tough business regulations enforced by empowered and honest regulators and supported by education, appropriate taxes on corporations and executive compensations, accountability to independent Boards of Directors selected and elected by empowered stockholders and no golden parachutes. (No self-respecting entrepreneur would require a golden parachute, only Bureaucrats demand them.) What we have today are subservient Boards selected and controlled by CEO’s, executive compensation which is out of control and under taxed, large corporations which receive benefits of government far in excess of what they pay for them and weak regulations poorly enforced by underfunded and often compromised regulatory agencies.
Our long standing social indulgences are partly due to the corrupting use of money and power by these CEOs and their predecessors; both through lobbyists manipulating governments and through compliant media spokesmen manipulating the public. When we coddle behemoth corporations or their executives we don’t help our nation or the competitiveness of our businesses. In fact, a good case could be made that laissez faire politics has been the primary cause of the economic malaise in which we find ourselves; just as a drug addiction undermines the competence, productivity and health of an addict and those involved with him.
Ed Lee
Gene:
Good question to which I don’t have an answer. In my opinion most of the “corporate welfare” isn’t of the obvious kind. For example, an effective and safe transportation system enables corporations to ship products to large markets and receive raw materials from around the world. An effective education system supplies competent, and workday broken (i.e. school days structure trains for workday structure) employees. A legal system, enforced by government, enables companies to safely store, buy and sell property. All of these things, and many more cost money to support, but are not paid for by the corporations which benefit from them. Neither are they fully paid for by us as individuals… so we’re all welfare recipients, living off ever increasing sums of borrowed money. Check out my earlier post Corporate Executives Thrive on Lavish Welfare. These executives are not different from anyone else receiving welfare, they rationalize that it is there due for some reason or other, and trash reason to maintain their illusions.
Ed Lee
Please Help….What is the most comprehensive website providing detailed and accurate information on corporate welfare.( Specifically, government subsidies).
Cheers, Gene