R.K.: So this is against the interest of the big multi-national corporations?
PCR: Oh yeah. Sure. But so is jobs offshoring, but it doesn't stop them. You see, look, what they don't realize is it's against their interest because the CEOs are short-term. You don't have a CEO who comes into office when he's thirty years old and stays till he's sixty five and he's thinking about decade after decade. You've got a guy who comes in and he's sixty, he's going to be out when he's sixty five. He may not come in until he's sixty-two and he'll be out in three years. What is he going to do? He is maximizing his short run profits because he's only got a short run time.
And how do they do that? Well, we do that by destroying our own consumer market. We fire all of our workers so they don't have any income and we hire Chinese and the labor costs go down, the profits go up, my bonus is mushroomed. Well, he is better off and the shareholders are better off.
But what happens down the road is what happened to the buying power of the American people. They were working here in this manufacturing plant making twenty-five dollars an hour, now they're unemployed or they're hospital orderlies at seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour or fast food workers or they're stocking shelves at Walmart or Home Depot or they are waitresses and bartenders.
R.K.: So let me just jump in again. So, I started off this second part of the conversation talking about psychopaths and we've gone in different directions with this and it's kind of shocking to me that even the biggest corporations are going to be hurt by the actions of the United States here. Do you think that psychopaths have a role in this in terms of being in government or in corporations?
PCR: No, it's what I have said. Corporations are basically hurt by their own actions because they have a short term time horizon. There are very few exceptions to this. One I think is Monsanto. I think Monsanto has long term... which is we're going to take over the seed production in the world and there are not going to be any other seeds but ours. See, right now they use their power with the US Government to force other countries to accept their GMO seeds. Right now, El Salvador is getting a three hundred million dollar loan and, at Monsanto's urging, Washington is telling El Salvador government, okay, you're going to get this loan, but you know what you've really got to do if you really want to get it. You've got to stop relying on all the seeds that are native that your farmers have and buy instead from Monsanto. So, Monsanto is an exception to the rule that I laid down.
But the manufacturing companies and the high-tech knowledge skilled companies, you know software engineering, that type of thing, they are all destroying their future American consumer market because they're laying off their workers and hiring Chinese and other people and so, in the short run, they do well because the profits go up, the bonuses go up. The shareholders are happy because they've got capital gains, but after a decade or two of this you've destroyed the income of American consumers and they can't buy.
And that's what we're seeing now. We see all of these reports, Rob, you can read them. No growth in American medium family income for several decades and so they made up the lack of income growth by going deeper into debt. But now they're so deep into debt they can't take any more debt. So there's no way to expand American consumer spending and that's why there's no real recovery. That's why the economy can't get off its butt. It can't get on its feet because there's no income growth to drive it.
R.K.: Okay, so I want to transition to another topic now and that's economics, capitalism, wealth inequality. These are big issues that don't have simple answers, but... and also globalization. I want to throw that in, too. We've got major problems there and it seems to me and a growing number of people that the answer is not capitalism as we've known it. What are you thinking about that?
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