I found the following comment on HN fairly insightful:
That's why my guess was going to be: "financialization" ... buy the company, profit like crazy by selling it assets and taking on debt, cut R&D budgets, cut marketing, provide fat compensation for C-suite and board... bankruptcy ~5 years later after someone else is holding the bag. The playbook is practically as American as baseball these days. Even more so when tax payers get to pay for the bail out.
I've seen it happen first hand, not all the way to bankruptcy, fortunately...
It's depressing to me how parasitic executives have become in American business. I think we need to bolster our laws to further make it illegal to drive businesses into the ground in this way. Cap how much executives can profit off of our system. As it is, something clearly needs to change. The current way of things is infinite growth prioritizing short term gains at the expense of long term stability to the point of failure at which point the business crumbles and c suite execs jump out with their golden parachutes. Then those execs can go on to run other newer healthier companies into the ground as well. It's all so flagrant too. We all see it happening but nothing can be done until our government steps up to the plate.
The answer is that we need to put a hard cap on how many people that corporation can employ and after a certain size of company/corporation, it need to be forcibly converted to Worker Cooperatives. Basically in worker cooperatives, the workers are the shareholders, not the leecher and workers can also vote in people to lead the company as well as dismissing that boss if something happen.
Wish that people explore Worker Cooperatives more, it's an alternative that works.
I found the following comment on HN fairly insightful:
I've seen it happen first hand, not all the way to bankruptcy, fortunately...
It's depressing to me how parasitic executives have become in American business. I think we need to bolster our laws to further make it illegal to drive businesses into the ground in this way. Cap how much executives can profit off of our system. As it is, something clearly needs to change. The current way of things is infinite growth prioritizing short term gains at the expense of long term stability to the point of failure at which point the business crumbles and c suite execs jump out with their golden parachutes. Then those execs can go on to run other newer healthier companies into the ground as well. It's all so flagrant too. We all see it happening but nothing can be done until our government steps up to the plate.
The answer is that we need to put a hard cap on how many people that corporation can employ and after a certain size of company/corporation, it need to be forcibly converted to Worker Cooperatives. Basically in worker cooperatives, the workers are the shareholders, not the leecher and workers can also vote in people to lead the company as well as dismissing that boss if something happen.
Wish that people explore Worker Cooperatives more, it's an alternative that works.