SEP 23, 2019
There's No Chance Corporate
Elites Will Fix Inequality
Jim Hightower
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote
of being leery of a fast-talking huckster who visited his home: “The louder he
talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,” Emerson exclaimed.
Likewise, today’s workaday
families should do a mass inventory of their silverware, for the
fast-talking CEOs of 181 union-busting, tax-cheating,
environment-contaminating, consumer-gouging corporations are asking us to
believe that they stand with us in the fight against … well, against them.
From Wall Street banksters to
Big Oil polluters, these profiteers are suddenly trumpeting their future
intentions to serve not just their own greed, but every “stakeholder” (which is
what they call employees, customers, suppliers, et al).
But vague proclamations are
cheap, and it’s worth noting that these new champions of the common good
propose no specifics — no actual sacrifices by them or benefits for us.
A few media observers have
mildly objected, saying it’s “an open question” whether any of the corporate
proclaimers will change how they do business. But it’s not an open question at
all. They won’t.
They won’t support full
collective bargaining power for workers, won’t join the public’s push to get
Medicare for All, won’t stop using monopoly power to squeeze out small
competitors and gouge consumers, won’t support measures to stop climate change,
and won’t back reforms to get their corrupt corporate money out of our
politics.
All told, they won’t embrace
any of the big structural changes necessary to reverse the raw economic and
political inequality that has enthroned their plutocratic rule.
In fact, their empty
proclamation is what West Texas cowboys might call “bovine excrement,” meant to
fend off the actual changes that real reformers are advancing. Corporate elites
won’t fix inequality for us — they’re the ones doing it to us.
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