Harold Meyerson says America’s leading corporations have found a way to thrive even if the American economy doesn’t recover — and this is very, very bad news.
When he was CEO of General Electric, in 1998, Jack Welch pithily summarized his vision for corporate America: “Ideally, you’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy.”
Since then, corporations have discovered that they don’t need barges in order to unmoor themselves from the American economy. As corporate profits skyrocket, even as the economy remains stalled in a deep recession, Americans confront a grim new reality: Our corporations don’t need us anymore. Half their revenues come from abroad. Their products, increasingly, come from abroad as well.
Consider, for example, the crucial role that a company called Foxconn plays in the American economy. Scarcely any Americans had heard of Foxconn until a wave of worker suicides shook its immense factory complex in China’s city of Shenzhen last spring. Within the space of a few months, 10 workers inside the company’s walled-off Longhua industrial village, a 1.2-square-mile development where 400,000 employees live and work, killed themselves.
