Garbage People: Part 3

Identifying the most useless, destructive segment of our society isn't difficult. Just follow the money.

One of the craziest, most unfounded myths in American history is the myth of the brilliant founder and that lucky goober’s “right” to reap all of the rewards of the company(s) that he or she pretends to have “created.” I have worked, as an engineer, for three small companies; two were startups and one was fairly established but had yet to become successful. The origins of both startups were “founded” by engineers who sold their business to a “holding company.” One of the two walked away with a pile of cash and his name was wiped from the company’s history and the other ended up taking back his company after receiving a small portion of the contracted purchase price.

The two startups were bought by a company owned by a trio of nepo babies (like Musk) who knew little-to-nothing about their company’s products, were totally unskilled at management of any sort, produced laughable marketing materials, and were desperately hoping to find someone to buy their company, or bits of it, before it collapsed around their empty heads. The company actually “owned” four very different product lines that were all sinking the boys’ inheritance faster than a Trump venture; before Trump had a whole country to sell out. Part of the scam was, also Trump-like, in that there was a significant deficiency in the money that was supposed to have changed hands as part of the original companies’ purchase.

For 100 years, from the Robber Baron days of the late 1800s to Reagan’s “Greed Is Good” 1980s, corporations and their resources (and employees and customers) were at risk from hostile takeovers executed through stock manipulations. In the 80s and 90s, partially thanks to some ruthless tax law changes during the Reagan recession and several foolish tax law changes during the Clinton Administration, stockholders were forced to pay insane salaries to their top executives to keep them from simply being bought out by the corporate raiders and betraying stockholders to the highest bidder. Of course, that tactic didn’t work for long, if ever, because it only upped the CEO bidding war to today’s insane levels. Today, CEOs are paid 300-600 times the average worker’s salary. It did not create some kind of moral obligation for the executives to refuse double-dipping from both their employer and the hedge funds. CEOs (and CFOs, CCOs, etc) aren’t paid that money because they are worth it. It’s simply a bribe to attempt to keep them from sabotaging their own company to aid a hostile takeover. Now that’s leadership!

I also worked for two Fortune 100 corporations and sat in conference rooms with grossly overpaid executives, listening to their clueless “ideas” and marveling at their incapability. And yet they were making millions of dollars, in salary, and millions more in stock options every year. Both companies crashed and burned from executive corruption and outright stupidity. Hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue disappeared in less than a year, both times, and the remains of the companies were sold for a small fraction of their previous annual income.

This cycle has been repeated thousands of times in the past 50 years and, as vulture capitalism takes over our national financial and industrial system, it will happen a lot more often. A lot quicker than anyone, including “stock market experts,” imagines, this cycle will result in foreign ownership of the copyrights, patents, assets, and brand names of every once-powerful American company. Recent examples are Budweiser (AB InBev, Belgium), Chrysler (Stellantis, Netherlands/Italy), 7-Eleven (Seven & I Holdings, Japan), U.S. Steel (Nippon Steel Corporation, Japan), Firestone (Bridgestone, Japan), Burger King and Popeyes (Restaurant Brands International, UK), Trader Joe’s (Aldi Nord, Germany), Lucky Strike (British American Tobacco, UK), Ben and Jerry’s (Unilever, UK), IBM (PC Business belongs to Lenvo, China), and GE Appliances (Haier, China). The list is a lot longer than that, but I think that makes my point.

The “garbage people” in this group are the billionaires who take advantage of the tax breaks given to what used to be called “unearned income” (dividends, interest, and capital gains income), before Reagan’s 1981 tax “cut” moved idle income into a tax bracket that is much lower than income from useful work (under the false “double taxation” argument). From that bit of successful propaganda, we spawned a herd of useless, unproductive, politically powerful billionaires who are shredding the country and the Constitution, bit by bit, every few milliseconds. As a result, we have millionaires and billionaires who pay less taxes than the average skilled laborer, sometimes no taxes at all. At the beginning of 1981, before Reagan took office, the national debt was between $908 billion to $930 billion. In 1993, at the end of the Reagan/Bush economic recession, the national debt was approximately $4.065 trillion and, for the first time in American history, about 25% of the national debt was held by foreign investors. Reagan’s “economic miracle” was a fraud, unless you consider shifting the majority of the nation’s wealth from working, middle-class Americans to the idle 1% to be miraculous?

For at least 50 years, I have had a simple formula to evaluate the “worth” of various occupations (or whatever you call banksters and vulture capitalists). It’s a mental exercise that even a Republican might be able to manage. If you imagine every person “employed” in a particular activity vanishing from the planet, what would be the consequence? Let’s start with a fairly obvious example: doctors. If every medical practitioner in the country died tomorrow, what would be the consequences? Mortality, for one, would fall like a brick. As pitiful and embarrassing as our current life expectancy is, 78.4 years, I’d be willing to bet that a doctor-less USA would be a very “young” country within a year or two. You could expect similar dramatic effects if nurses and physicians’ assistants, engineers, mechanics, electricians, plumbers, construction workers, and a few other critically skilled professionals vanished.

Now, for the garbage people, like Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Page, Brin, Ballmer, the Waltons, the Kochs, the Mars, and even Gates, Huang, and Buffett. If everyone of those mission-defective billionaire zombies all got a fatal case of gout and croaked overnight, who would notice? As the “ultimate computer” answering the “ultimate question,” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, asked a pair of philosophers when they threatened to go on strike, “Who would that inconvenience?” None of those overpaid, incredibly lucky boys contribute a single useful thing to the companies that made them rich. Most of them NEVER contributed anything noticeable and some, like Musk, screwed up every time they made a product or business decision. They are useless garbage people who are dragging the country, and world, down to their useless level. Garbage people who are totally replaceable, if there was a reason to replace them with more deadbeat idle rich assholes.