American CEOs An American Problem

In the February 2009 issue of Conde Nast "Portfolio" Matthew Cooper quotes Jack Welch as being apoplectic, "If business leaders are not aware of this terrible piece of legislation, they should be. It would hurt us dramatically in our ability to be competitive globally."

Mr. Welch was referring to Employee Free Choice Act (EFSA) which would make it simpler for employees to unionize. And his ire is obviously directed at employees who wish to unionize, organizations like Service Employees International Union (S.E.I.U) which are encouraging workers to join unions as a way to safeguard their interests, and the President who per Mr. Cooper was a sponsor of the EFSA bill.

With Mr. Welch implying that the interests of Corporate America are at odds with the interests of the American worker, and Mr. Jim Owen of Caterpillar reportedly against Buy American provisions of President Obama's stimulus plan its fairly obvious that the shining lights of American business are at loggerheads with what the President and those who elected him think are in the best interest of a common American.

Somewhere along time the interests of Corporate America have become contrary to the interests of America as a nation, where nation includes living, working common people, raising the question if the health of a company is more important than the health of the country, and what is the definition of patriotism on Wall Street. The stock market has not been a true mirror of the American society for decades as the middle class has eroded with the closing of small businesses and factories, and now corporate titans resisting the messianic efforts of the President to help America seem nothing short of villains who continue to push down American standard of living by denying American workers decent wages, exporting jobs and importing workers for jobs for which local talent is available.

If this selling out to foreign countries with cheap labor doesn't stop what comes next? Common Americans sending their parents to Indian and Chinese retirement homes? And getting treatment in Indian and Chinese hospitals?

In the land of the free and the brave muzzling unions is trampling on the spirit of this land, and

• America needs to be globally competitive and at the same time pay top quality salary and benefits to American workers
  
• Ban products and services from countries with lower worker salaries and befits until they raise those levels to match US/ European/ Japanese standards, creating level competition based on quality and innovation instead of the current competition from producers and providers of cheap products and services subsidized by their governments
  
• And if these leaders have determined that a well paid American worker is not in the best interest of the American company then the first job to be outsourced is the CEOs as that job costs the company the most money; and since a CEO's job is cost cutting, receiving huge bonuses and when losing to foreign competition fire American workers, that job could be done by a foreign contracted CEO at a much lower cost.
  

Revolutions are a normal course of history when one class of people preys on another class too long and the oppressed rebel. A CEO who cannot create a product and a market without slaughtering the interest of his American staff is like the old Aristocracy whose time has come. We fought a war in 1776 now its time to free ourselves again.

Off with their heads - fire them, and along with them rid ourselves of those intellectuals who support these anti-American CEOs like court jesters and poets supported their ill willed Kings.