CEO's Are As Spineless As GOP Congress About Trump

Much has been written and discussed about the cowardice of congressional Republicans, who refuse to stand up to Donald Trump no matter how outrageous his behavior. But they are not alone in their cowardice. Corporate CEO's, who fund the Republican Party, are also silent about Trump's outrages.

Here's part of a post by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

Congressional Republicans would be more willing to stand up to Trump if their major financial backers – big business and Wall Street – had more backbone.

Ever since 1971, when the then future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell urged corporations to mobilize politically, corporate money has flooded Washington – most of it into Republican coffers. 

Today, big corporations and Wall Street essentially own the Republican Party. In the 2016 campaign cycle, they contributed $34 to candidates from both parties for every $1 donated by labor unions and all public interest organizations combined.

They donate far more to Republicans than do extremists like the Koch brothers, and have far more influence over the GOP than does the Tea Party. 

Which means the CEOs of America’s largest firms have the power to constrain the most dangerous, divisive, and anti-democratic president ever to occupy the Oval Office. 

So why don’t they? What explains their silence? . . .

One obvious explanation is found in the money rolling in from the GOP’s new tax law and Trump’s frenzy of deregulation. Profits have soared at JP Morgan and at other big banks and corporations. Compensation for Dimon and other CEOs has exploded. 

Never underestimate the power of a fat compensation package to buy up scruples. From the perspective of Dimon and other CEOs, what’s not to like about Trump and the GOP?

It turns out, plenty. As the Republican Party moves toward Trump’s looniness – his xenophobia, isolationism, attacks on the press and on truth, conflicts of interest, anti-Muslim and racist provocations, climate-change denials, proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, and evisceration of the constitutional divide between church and state – Jamie Dimon and his ilk could come out big losers. 

Let them try to sustain corporate profits as America slides towards authoritarianism. Try to maintain comfortable lifestyles as America descends into angry populist tribalism. . . .

I’m old enough to recall a time when CEOs were thought of as “corporate statesman” with duties to the nation. As one prominent executive told Time Magazine in the 1950s, Americans “regard business management as a stewardship,” acting “for the benefit of all the people.” 

CEOs of that era formed the Committee for Economic Development to champion such causes as universal pre-kindergarten and campaign-finance reform.

Today’s CEOs finance a larger part of our political system, yet they won’t take a stand to save it. 

The socially-conscious Committee for Economic Development has withered, while the profit-obsessed Business Roundtable (and its louder cousin, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) have become dominant. . . .

If the leaders of American business remain silent about what Trump’s is doing to American democracy, they will be complicit in its demise.