Corporations gonna corporate

 Corporations are people. More than that, corporations are completely amoral people with no loyalty except to themselves.

Upper management forms the brains of the beast, but they are programmed to maximize corporate income in the reality of the moment. If they try to exert influence on the future, it will invariably seek to improve the stock price of the company. This may be by increasing income and profits, or through stock buybacks, and always through favorable laws and regulations. It will never be to improve environmental quality or the well-being of the population in general, unless they can see a clear financial benefit from it. If major shareholders are happy, CEO keeps his cushy job. If they expel him (it's almost always a him), he will have arranged for a severance package that would finance most small towns in America for a year or more.

Tim Cook's golden tribute to the current occupant of the Oval Office fits this model of corporations looking out for their own interests while the country at large suffers greatly. Altruistic bullshit like liberty and justice for all makes nifty patriotic commercials to keep the rabble from storming your offices and burning your mansions, but corporations can thrive in totalitarian regimes. Just ask Audi, Bayer, BMW, IBM, Volkswagen, Standard Oil, and many others that either existed in Nazi Germany or did business with the Nazis for some portion of the runup or even the duration of World War II. Look at the American corporations that operate their production facilities in China and other countries vilified by the right wing, but patronized heavily by their top donors.

The bottom line is all that matters to them. Your interests are buried far below that.

For a few decades, the rich played along with the idea that paying the help better turned them from serfs into customers. Henry Ford famously staved off unionization in his plants by paying the help enough to be able to afford one of his cars. He also priced the Model T so that ordinary working folks could enjoy the blessings of motorized transportation, increasing not only his own corporate income, but that of his pals in the oil companies, rubber companies, and a host of other ancillary industries. The surge in middle class lifestyle masked the downsides of increased petroleum consumption, tailpipe emissions, and sprawl development. A privileged lifestyle became the norm. National euphoria after World War II supercharged it for about 30 years

By the late 1990s, the top one percent had figured out that they did not need a thriving middle class. They've been chopping away at the ladder ever since.

What happens next could play out in either of two ways. And actually the second way kind of grows out of the first one.  Corporations that have decided to stop funding the American middle class because it's increasingly expensive to feed will shift to more grateful consumers among the rising economies financed by the jobs exported from here. Lifestyles will improve in the countries that have received the jobs, as they deteriorate in the country laid off en masse by Corporate America.

 Because people keep making more people, the population will continue to rise here, creating a conveniently desperate labor pool willing to work itself to death for the mirage of a better life for their kids. This would create a de facto standard of affordable labor pricing for corporations worldwide. Big money will still occupy the top spot, as always. Income inequality will become a global norm. The range will probably stabilize with little to no upward mobility. A few scions of the wealthy will always tumble from the nest to crash on the rocks below. But a well managed corporation lives forever.

Even people who live outside of the corporate consumerist economy as much as they can are herded by it. Only its complete collapse would allow society to reinvent itself. This is not only unlikely, but what follows might not be any more humane than anything was before. "Peak humane" probably hit somewhere between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. After September 11, 2001, tolerance for diversity in the United States started diving steeply. Legislation advanced rights and freedoms, but the backlash in general society grew exponentially stronger. Corporations see this as neither good nor bad, only as something to exploit for profit or manage to reduce loss. Profit is defended by kissing up and kicking down.