[P2P-F] Fwd: Corporate Leadership Ethics

Sat Sep 19 11:06:14 CEST 2015

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bob Reuschlein <bobreuschlein at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 6:27 AM
Subject: Corporate Leadership Ethics
To:

Link to send or tweet to others by:

https://bobreuschlein.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/corporate-leadership-ethics/

*Corporate Leadership Ethics*

By Professor Robert Reuschlein

*Leadership Responsibilities*

 “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from
the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke
12:48 <http://biblia.com/bible/esv/Luke%2012.48>).

Some time around 1990 boards of directors of major corporations changed
their hiring practices for CEOs, chief executive officers.  Instead of
looking around and determining fair pay levels like in previous practice,
they began paying an extra 20% in an effort to hire the very best.
Unfortunately this began an upward spiral in executive salaries that took
pay levels from 120 times the average employee in 1980 to 700 times the
average employee around the year 2000.  In fact, Bill Moyers reported back
then that the average Fortune 500 CEO was making $37 million to the average
employee of $38,000 in those companies, approximately 1000 to 1.  Ever
since then the average top 1% income person had widened the gap from the
other 99% considerably, consuming almost 100% of all income increases since
the 2008 recession.  In fact it truly is the 99% who are being exploited by
the top 1%:  when you look at the average top 5% income in 1979 and compare
it to the top 5% minus the top 1% in 2007, the average for the next 4% in
2007 is lower than the top 5% average in 1979.  So the elites are
exploiting even the near elites.

*History*

Ever since the 1981 Reagan tax cuts richly rewarded the top 1% much more
than the average person by cutting the top income tax rate from 70% down to
28%, income inequality has been steadily getting worse in America.  One
economist, Justin Farley, had found than the top tax rate does robustly
inversely correlate with income inequality in America over the last
century.  While the average Reagan income tax cut was 25%, this 60% tax cut
for the rich meant the average person got a much smaller tax rate cut than
25% since the rich pay nearly half the income tax revenue.  Since the
seventies, average people have experienced no net income increases, while
the top 1% has seen their incomes quadruple from 1979 to 2007 according to
the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.  And it has gotten worse since
then.  Reagan was a lobbyist for General Electric, the number one nuclear
weapons contractor during the Cold War; hence the heavy shadow of empire
and the military industrial complex has to take the major blame for our
current circumstances (see Infact report circa 1980s for details then).
The new debt of the twelve years of Reagan Bush was equal to the military
spending of those years, three trillion dollars each by my own calculations
(not adjusted for inflation since 1992).

*Ethics*

The failure of the corporate elite to check themselves in this period
represents an abdication of their fiduciary responsibility to their
shareholders, as most CEOs recommend who should be added to the boards of
directors of large corporations.  It is in fact an example of crony
capitalism.  Unlike the current corrupt Supreme Court and judiciary, an
honest judiciary might well find in favor of a class action lawsuit that
addressed these CEOs and their boards to retake this extorted income and
restore the shareholders of these corporations who have been systematically
exploited by this large scale class warfare against the rest of us by these
CEOs and their cronies.  In the major banks, this lack of ethical
responsibility lead to loan officers giving mortgages out to poor risks in
the housing boom of the Bush years.  The greatest housing booms were in the
same states with the greatest military buildups.  These same states are the
most corrupt in the country, because high military spending increases crime
nationally and regionally.  Hence the military buildup multiplied the
conditions for the 2008 banking implosion that resulted from lack of
oversight by the regulatory agencies.

Empires create crime and power corrupts, with alienation and low ethics as
explained here:

https://www.academia.edu/4862977/CRIME_and_the_Military_1989-1999_3p._1999

Professor Robert Reuschlein, Dr. Peace,

Real Economy Institute, Madison,Wisconsin
CONTACT: bobreuschlein at gmail.com
INFO: www.realeconomy.com

MESSAGE: 608-230-6640

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