I started a software company with a couple other folks. It went public. We made plenty of money. And I thought it was this incredible mission, but in fact, we sold software to Haliburton; we sold software to Frito-Lay and Pepsi and all these companies that didn't necessarily do good things.
The Republicans have received a clear mandate to govern the country in the interest of business expansion.
I think I understand the relationships between different people within the company: people who are straightforward employees, people who can impact the bottom line, and people who share in the bottom line. I don't think you can understand inequality in America unless you understand what's driving profitability.
More than half the world's largest 100 economies are corporations. They have no loyalties to place or citizens.
Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But, looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss.
I think there's a big difference between the impact of trade agreements on corporate America and the impact on Mr. and Mrs. America. Corporate America has adjusted to them by investing lots of capital offshore... What we're doing is we're exporting jobs and importing products instead of exporting products and keeping jobs.
I believe business news is general news.
One can be in business and pursue bad profit. That is, by practicing cronyism—rigging the system to undermine competition, innovation and opportunity, making others worse off. Good profit should lead you to improve your ability to help others improve their lives. But that’s not how many businesses act today.
The American multinational companies made millions and millions of dollars from globalization.
You hear entertainers all the time, saying, 'If I couldn't get paid for this, I'd do it for free.' When's the last time you ever heard a business person say, 'If I couldn't get paid for being chairman of British Petroleum, I'd do it for free'?
The insurance companies make about $15 billion a year. They have doubled their profit margin under Obamacare. And so now we're going to take a lot of this and call it a stabilization fund, but really it's a bailout of insurance companies. And I just think that's wrong. I just can't see why ordinary, average taxpayers would be giving money to very, very wealthy corporations. An analogous situation would be this: We all complain that new cars cost too much. Why don't we have a new car stabilization fund and give $130 billion to car companies?
People talk about Wall Street greed, but one of the things many people don't understand is that there are a lot of organizations that have been the recipient of largess from the same Wall Street.
Let’s put common decency ahead of corporate profits.
The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don't invest, their holding too much money. We haven't heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody's afraid of the government and there's no need soft peddling it, it's the truth. It is the truth.
Corporate share prices should not be driven by political tax games. Profits, not Washington shenanigans, should be the mother's milk of stocks. And this shouldn't be a partisan political issue.
Corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of these large companies, are making tens or hundreds of billions of dollars off of monetising people's data.
With less competition to fear, companies are emboldened to raise their mark-ups and profits. That lifts share prices and thus the wealth of already wealthy shareholders.
I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from the base-line - their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit - profits extracted at the cost of life.
Executive pay has skyrocketed for many reasons - including the prevalence of overly cozy boards and changing cultural norms about pay - but increasing scale, competition, and innovation have all played major roles.
Bain also asked Kansas City for a $3 million tax break. The Bain executives were taking home $36 million in borrowed funds and were asking Kansas City to forfeit $3 million in public money for police officers, roads and schools? More free stuff!
Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.
Even fairly serious moviegoers can't shake this shadow of the corporate world.
But in the past, US companies have been able to increase their profits through downsizing in the US, through colonizing other people's resources, and through the increase of globalization.
What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high, people who have jobs see their incomes go up, businesses make big profits. But they're learned to do more with less, and so they don't hire.
So if you want to know how Exxon Mobil can make $10 billion profit in 90 days, just look around. The whole world was built for them.
