OTOT (this post has nothing to do with QCOM)--huey, the thing that bothers me most about certain corporate scumbags who walk off with gazillions by foisting their hype stocks on the public isn't the money they get away with, but rather the way it is slowly tearing down our entire capitalist system.
this issue is a lot bigger than any individual company or individual. it is about the "American Way of Life".
as i mentioned before, certain CEOs have expropriated over $1 trillion from the American public over the past decade. at some point, these numbers cause a qualitative change, a perversion if you will, in the nature of our system. no longer are many corporations run for the benefit of shareholders, nor even of stakeholders like regular employees. (indeed, stakeholders like employees have been given the shaft as much as shareholders have, if not more.)
there are but feeble attempts to represent certain corporations as real investments that can pay a decent return to individuals without relying on the greater fool theory--i.e., paying a decent dividend on par with historical norms.
many cos still rely on pro forma earnings and most avoid options expensing. many older cos with pension obligations make absurdly unrealistic assumptions on pension returns while minimizing discussions of OPEB obligations (these have provided some good shorting opportunities for me).
where is the honor? where is the sense of shame? i can't find it.
top execs that used to get by on a few hundred K a year in the 70s and 80s are now commanding 50 to 100 million a year--an absurd sum which is totally at odds with shareholder value. unfortunately, the shareholders don't decide the compensation; that's done by the compensation committee, which is often handpicked by the people whose compensation they are determining. moreoever, these director scumbags are often paid in stock options, and in between golf rounds they are often the CEO of some other corporation. so they are all for absurdly high salaries.
this kind of garbage could not exist at a rational corporation run by a sole owner, or even a public corporation owned by somebody honorable, like Buffett.
but alas, the scumbags are numerous, and their "worst practices" have infested boardrooms across the country.
imho they are destroying the capitalist system, and this will have grave implications for our society.
i used to be rather conservative in my politics, but it is now clear to me that the Republicans have been totally coopted by the klepto-plutocrats. they don't care no capitalism. they just want to steal money from average people via the stock market.
many public cos are now are run for the benefit of a few top insiders. i have seen this happen at many top cos i am familiar with. i consider it on par with the theft of Russian assets which occurred following the collapse of the Soviet Union. unfortunately, our case is almost worse, because the Russians didn't pervert an existing and functional (and beneficial to the general populus) capitalist system in the process of their thefts.
in contrast, certain insiders of corporate America are destroying capitalism as we know it. already there has been a drop in confidence among investors, but i suspect it will get more severe. eventually, they will wise up and realize they are being robbed. they will stop giving their capital to US cos, and US cos will stop forming. the end of capitalism.
simultaneously, our population is getting older and will soon have a record net reliance on the state (for healthcare and social security). so obviously the govt will start taking more resources from productive members of society to transfer them to older people (baby boomers).
this will further crimp corporate profits as a percentage of GDP due to a rise in taxation, which must also hit corporations as well as income earners.
10 or 15 years from now, all the robber barrons of the 1990s will be ensconsced in their starter castles with armored guards behind electrified fences in gated communities. meanwhile, 99% of the population will have to live with the aftermath of a ruined capitalist system.
we will become more socialist and stop growing, like Europe. at the same time, we will become grayer, like Japan. again at the same time, income disparities and poor social services will lead the rich kleptocratic scumbags to further separate themselves from hoi polloi, making us more like Brazil.
the result is not likely to be pretty.
America would have had a tough time anyway in 2015, but now, thanks to rich scumbags who have destroyed our capitalist system, we will have a harder time yet.
it took a long time to create our great country, and so it will probably take a long time to destroy it. but thanks to corporate america, they are moving the job along at breakneck speed.
perhaps counterintuitively, i now think the best chance for capitalism is to get a very left-leaning socialist into the White House and Congress.
while this may seem illogical, it follows the logic of a vaccine: introduce a controlled dose of a virulent element to stimulate the body's immune system.
in this case, the socialist movement is the vaccine and the response is that we get a little sick (become more socialistic) but activate our "capitalist-core-values" immunoresponse system so as to restore the core strengths of capitalism.
such a person (socialist president and congress) would fight for workers rights and probably curb some of the worst excesses of the scumbag centimillionaire CEOs that infest our land. (these things are needed anyway, and a large portion of the population demands them.) of course, this is unfriendly to capitalism on the face of it, but by being more friendly to workers and cutting the knees off the corporate insiders, our stock market would probably get shellacked. (when you get right down to it, cos don't make enough money to pay workers a fair wage, investors a fair return, and scumbag insiders $100 million a year. therefore the scumbag insiders have to go.)
this could send the DOW back to 3000 or so where it belongs. the SPX could pay a real dividend yield again. and the Nasdaq would go down to 300 where it belongs.
the upshot would be that options wouldn't work anymore. so insiders could not so easily steal a trillion dollars from regular Americans. capital would become dear and honest, honorable CEO sightings would occur in some other cities besides Omaha.
as a result, slowly but surely capitalism as a rational system would reassert itself. |
