Jack Welch, the Man Who Broke Capitalism (2022)

Basically, the same with some global corporations, which literally suck society dry (infrastructure, resources, education, labour, health system) and give almost nothing back (except for a few workers and too few taxes). I think the American dream is over. It's an empty shell that's all about making a nice life for yourself at the expense of others.

“The reason they call it The American Dream is that you have to be asleep to believe it.”

—George Carlin (1937 - 2008)

There is just not any real accountability to the next generation of stock holders its classic optimizing toward the local minimum and is why some many private equity firms annihilate companies and sell them for parts. We use to have unions than Regan eliminate tons of union power and bars the governments union's from arguing. We have structural barriers in existing laws against sector wide unions, so the remaining unions have no incentive to build competitive sectors just competitive wages without respect to economics.

I think companies have just pushed and pushed for labor laws that favor larger companies and players. That hollowing of the rule set has dropped a bomb in companies optimization functions. You cannot choose not to do stock buy backs now because the stock holders complain and leave for a someone more willing to inflate assets. If you want the clearest picture look at Intel they spent tremendously on stock buy backs because it was good for investors and let there RnD budget cratered when compared to its competitors. They basically aren't a respectable company anymore but those stock investors aren't destroyed they moved to Nvidia and Apple.

But again… a lot of these images American prosperity of the 80s were caused by marketing, and corporate structures like Jack Welch’s, which were ultimately unsustainable (per the whole conversation here).

Basically: Soviet citizens saw we could have bananas year round. But they never saw the conditions of people living in banana republics, or really even of the American poor of the time.