You can thank a lot of people, unfortunately, including many business ‘leaders’.
IMHO there has been little vision in the US business community for way too long. Instead of ‘where will we be in 5years or 10 years?’, and ‘how can we shape the future?, it's been ‘how can we make our numbers look good next quarter?’. The ‘instant gratification’ approach by day traders and ‘get rich quick’ investors in the markets has contributed to this emphasis on ‘the next quarter’, and has left us without a creative longer term strategy.
For too long now we have been living in a society in which too many think ‘how can I get mine before it all falls apart?’, and this includes some workers, those who don't work because they don't want to (and are gaming the system), and those on the higher rungs of the food chain who have no loyalty to anything other than what they perceive will benefit them. It's a cancerous attitude that has pervaded our culture.
We owe our children better.
“IMHO there has been little vision in the US business community for way too long”
Up to the mid 1960’s the route to the CEO suite in US corporations was through customer oriented functions (sales and marketing) or operations (manufacturing, product development, and logistics). These were the executives who either had to generate sales by serving customers or actually product the product. Their accomplishments were direct and measurable. They were producers, not beancounters.
By the late 1960’s the bean counters (financial MBA’s and lawyers) were wresting control of corporations from the producer executives. In the 1970’s and 1980’s cost cutting and financial manipulation (LBO’s, outsourcing) became the route to the top. Product quality was cheapened, capital investment slowed. As a result by the early 1990’s US factories were inefficient, products were poorly designed and corporate America was facing huge investment to recapitalize US industry by buying the modern equipment needed to bring the US industrial infrastructure of the 1950’s and 1960’s up to the standards and capabilities of the approaching 21st century.
Instead of making investing multi billions of dollars in modernizing neglected and inefficient factories to give US workers the modern tools to compete globally, the bean counters running US corporations decided instead to further disinvest by moving capital out of the US and contracting to foreign companies their manufacturing operations. Beginning with the George H.W Bush administration, tariffs were lowered and quotas eliminated allowing products produced in third world countries, by newly built modern factories, compete with US workers saddled with and aging or obsolete inefficient capital infrastructure. As the new factories were built overseas, often with development money from multinational organizations funded by the US government, the inefficient and uncompetitive US factories were not cost competitive and were closed. The bean counters heading up US companies poured what should have been funds invested in productive infrastructure into stock buybacks, private equity takeovers, ill conceived acquisitions and other financial exercises that did nothing to build long term value for shareholders but did result in manipulation of financial results to maximize executive bonuses. In twenty five years what was the greatest industrial infrastructure on the planet has been almost completely gutted. Entire industries, supply chains supporting those industries, and the millions of middle class production related jobs supporting those industries and supply chains are gone.
It is ironic the “robber barons” of the 19th century became incredibly wealthy investing in productive assets inside the USA that employed American workers. These men were producers, developing better mousetraps and selling those mousetraps to the workers they employed creating more opportunities and wealth for both the industrialists and the people they employed, not to mention the nation as a whole. In contrast today’s robber barons are vultures. Colluding with politicians, foreign nationals, and rapacious bankers they have stripped the engines of the US economy bare, enriching themselves and industrialists in other nations and leaving the US worker with a declining standard of living and condemning the children and grandchildren of what is left of today’s middle class to a life of third world poverty and likely servitude to foreign masters.
Yes, the bean counters took over US industry built by visionary builders, stripped it bare, and sold off the carcass to accumulate personal wealth unimaginable a century before. Even the bankers of yesteryear, such as JP Morgan, financed the ships, airplanes, and factories of his day, employing capital to build assets that would produce value for decades. Instead of investing in productive assets with long term value for the nation, today’s bankers, fully backed by the US government so they take no personal risk, speculate with depositor money engaging in high frequency trading in pieces of paper (derivatives, junk bonds) which will produce no products, transport no goods, and employ no middle class assembly line workers. For producing nothing of long term value they skim billions of dollars in transaction costs to become elite members of what we today call the wealthy 1%. Unlike the entrepreneurs of previous generations, or the true investment bankers such as JP Morgan, these banker aristocrats have no skin in the game because as the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated, if they fail the government will bail them out by stealing from the taxpayer.
In the days when CEO’s worked their way up from the factory floor or the sales organization, the average CEO made 10-15 times the salary of the average production worker. Today’s bean counter MBA CEO’s, who have never worked in a job actually producing a product or a sales to a customer, are paying themselves 150 times or more the salary of the average worker. At the same time they are destroying the US economy.
The mainstream press isn’t reporting it but China is carefully and methodically signing trade deals around the planet that eliminate the US dollar as the currency in which transactions are denominated. The day is soon coming when the dollar will no longer be the world’s reserve currency and the trillions of dollars printed by the Federal Reserve to fund the irresponsible federal deficits of the current and previous administration will become worthless. Since year 2000, less than 20 years ago, the nation has increased its total debt from $5 billion to $18 billion.
We are technically bankrupt and thanks to the decision to go “free trade” in the 1990’s, instead of rebuilding our industrial infrastructure, our productive capacity is an empty shell. This nation does not have the production capability or capacity to refight World War II, or beat the Chinese manufacturing economy of today in a protracted conventional war, much less 10 years from now. We won WWII because our second to none industrial infrastructure allowed us to outproduce our enemies in weapons and supplies. How would we clothe our soldiers and population if our ports were blockaded in 2020? There is virtually no textile industry so we cannot put clothes on our people if we don’t have access to Chinese textile mills. How would we build our smart bombs and missiles when the computer chips that make them work are produced by the enemy bombing our cities? How would we make the steel to produce tanks, trucks, ships, and guns when the steel mills no longer exist? When China is able to take out our aircraft carriers and submarines in a conventional war China can choke a US economy dependent on global supply chains the same way the industrial North choked off the import dependent agricultural South during the Civil War. Face it, service economies are not self sufficient nor can they domestically produce the weapons of war necessary for self defense. We have also learned service economies will not produce enough decent paying jobs to support an upwardly mobile middle class.
Yes we owe our children better. Cleaning out the corruption in the system means more than replacing the politicians. American’s boardrooms also need a housecleaning to sweep out the parasites and put in place people who actually know how to create and produce items of real value.