The Ascendancy of the Corporate Elite

Abstract

Beginning with the Reagan and Thatcher eras, corporate executives grew profits—and their personal income—by shifting to short-termism: encouraging employee layoffs, moving companies to low-wage states or countries, evading corporate taxes in the name of greater profitability, acquiring other companies to raise market share and corporate revenues, and using share buybacks to (artificially) raise share value, which was then linked to executive compensation. By moving employees into short-term or part-time work, or simply calling them self-employed, the wealth of the corporate super-rich was vastly enhanced. Corporations have also repressed the wages of workers by shifting production—in the USA—to right-to-work states, which are difficult to organize, or by shifting production abroad, made easier by trade agreements mostly favorable to corporations, which in fact helped to write those agreements.