American CEOs rail against populist political moment, appear to miss obvious causes

Chief executives at large U.S. corporations aren't feeling the Bern or enjoying Donald Trump's populist tirades, The Wall Street Journal reports, and "concerns are mounting in boardrooms and corner offices that antibusiness rhetoric may solidify even after the November election." Many "corporate chiefs" are giving up on the next president and instead trying to elect friendly candidates to Congress, The Journal says, and they "fault Democrats for ignoring tax treatment that puts U.S. firms at a disadvantage and chide Republicans for neglecting investments in education, infrastructure, and workforce training that could help workers who have been left behind in a globalized economy."

After blaming government for not giving them enough tax breaks or spending enough taxpayer money, some CEOs expressed bafflement that government relations are poor. GE chief executive Jeff Immelt, a frequent target of Sen. Bernie Sanders, told investors in February that ties between big business and government are "the worst I have ever seen," and he says his peers overseas — where, surely, citizens are covered by government-run health care and pay little for college, as Sanders proposes — are bewildered by the direction of American politics.

"The center has collapsed," one technology CEO tells The Journal. "Sanders and Trump will go away, but their supporters won't." Economically, the center has shrunk, if not collapsed, and if the CEOs want to understand why populism is on the rise, they could read Nelson D. Schwartz's article in The New York Times over the weekend about the "money-based caste system" being created in America, focusing on the cruise industry. The Journal ascribes America's populist anger to "the bailouts of 2008 and an economy that has produced little shared growth." Here's Schwartz:

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Read more about "the velvet rope economy," and remarkably tone-deaf quotes from people like recent Norwegian Cruise Line CEO Kevin Sheehan, at The New York Times.