It’s Good to Be Boss
R.J. Scaringe – the CEO of Rivian – is being rewarded to the tune of $4.6 billion just weeks after the EV manufacturer fired 600 workers due to declining demand for its battery powered devices. This is the degenerate parody of capitalism that’s going to turn America red – and not in the Republican way.
It seems there are not only no consequences for failure – and worse – in corporate America, failure is rewarded. Scaringe is hardly unique. GM and Ford’s CEOs (as well as the last CEO of the Stellantis combine that owns Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram) have all presided over billion-dollar losses while being rewarded double-digit millions.
Annually.
The chieftans take in (earning would be a debasement of the language) more over the course of a few weeks than most of us will ever be paid over the course of our entire working lives. This is not a criticism of “the rich.” There is nothing wrong with having money, including a lot of it.
It is a warning about the consequences of screwing people who work into poverty for the unearned benefit of people who become rich thereby. The distinction matters. It certainly matters if you would like to see the country red, white and blue – rather than just red. It is certain to become the latter if this insufferable farting-in-our-faces continues for much longer. The recent blowout election of reds in Virginia and New York City is a wake-up-and-smell-the-fart call. Mamdami (in New York City) rode into the mayorship because so many New Yorkers, young ones especially, feel – with cause – that “capitalism” is an obscenity. It’s the same in Virginia. The under-30s are tired of being told about how they must be responsible, work hard and earn their place and pay their bills when it is so awfully obvious these dictums do not apply to the high-placed.
Trump has pardoned many of his friends and supporters, most recently Rudy Giuliani. Some deserved it, perhaps – having been persecuted by the previous regime. But who has been prosecuted? Not one of the “COVID” criminals, including Dr. Fauci – who served as de facto president for several months of the last year of Trump’s first term. Rochelle Walensky is free to do whatever – after having done a lot to us. Dr. Bourla of Pfizer is a “great businessman.” Jeffrey Epstein is off the radar – pushed into news oblivion by whatever Trump has ordered blown up today.
He has pitched 50 year mortgage indentures. He claims there’s “no inflation” – a hurricane fart-gust right in the faces of every American standing at a supermarket checkout line paying for a couple of small plastic bags of groceries with a $100 bill. His tariff/taxes have added thousands to the cost of a new car, which more and more Americans can no longer afford to buy. But – here comes another really mephitic fart, cheeks spread wide – he’s going to have the government cut us all a small check at some vague distant point in the future. By the time we get it, it will probably not be worth the paper it’s written on.
“Stimulus” feeding the inflation that doesn’t exist.
Back to R.J. Scaringe – whose name sounds like a villain in an Ayn Rand novel. He could be Wesley Mouch’s colleague. Rand portrayed capitalists as super heroes and capitalism as the ne plus ultra of economic morality. But the premise (as she would have put it) of both portrayals is that of value for value (once again as she would have put it). To put it another way, of mutually beneficial free exchange. Not a zero sum exchange, which is what the degenerated parody of capitalism we suffer under is characterized by, at the R.J. Scaringe level.
Rand’s heroes were producers. They created things of value for which there was a market. The R.J. Scaringes and Elon Musks rely on forced markets that reward the production of that which the market does not value – and are rewarded fulsomely for exploiting the leverage – Rand called it “pull” – that is the engine of degenerate “capitalism.” It is rotten from top to bottom but at the top, rottenness is richly rewarded. Neither Rivian nor Tesla would exist were it not for “pull.” They are both creations of government and rely on it for their sustenance. Now that some of that IV drip (the federal $7,500 tax rebate given to people who buy EVs paid for by people who do not buy them) has ended, someone has got to pay.
Naturally, it won’t be R.J. Scaringe.
It will be the ordinary workers who used to work for Rivian, plus all the other assorted economic casualties down the line. Same over at GM and Ford, where the billions lost on EV malinvestment will not come out of CEO pay packages but be paid for by the fired workers who had nothing to do with it. How do you suppose the 3,400 workers at GM’s Vision Zero battery/battery-powered vehicle plant are feeling? Do you think they are feeling a little . . . red?
A future-time oriented person might see all of this farting-in-our-faces as dangerous. But it is hard to see it when you are taking in more over the course of a few weeks than most of the “little people” – as Leona Helmsley styled them – will ever earn over the course of an entire lifetime of working.
Lenin was an evil son of a bitch but he wasn’t stupid. His dictum about capitalists selling the rope that will be used to hang them was spot on.
He just left out the part about them selling us out along the way.
https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2025/11/10/its-good-to-be-boss