These “shortsighted companies” are registering record profits, not despite but becausethey’re shortchanging tomorrow. The dollars they could be investing in making enterprises more effective and efficient over the long haul are instead going for high-finance gimmicks like share buybacks, a maneuver designed to artificially jack up corporate stock prices and enrich corporate execs in the process.

Many of these same executives have been busy pushing the mergers that the “Better Deal” so rightfully denounces. And still other top execs, those who lord over the pharmaceutical industry, have been pushing the unconscionable prescription drug price hikes the “Better Deal” also blasts.

But the “Better Deal” never links all these phenomena, never zeroes in on the greed grab of our corporate executive class that’s driving corporations to squeeze working Americans at every turn, be that squeezing come via disinvestment in training or job-killing mergers or outrageous price gouging.

This corporate executive class is, in effect, waging class war against working Americans, and this class war offensive is, if anything, intensifying. Working Americans are understandably hungering for a politics daring enough to launch a counter-offensive. The architects of the “Better Deal” haven’t delivered that politics.

What would that sort of politics propose on the policy front? One example: We’ve learned again and again over recent decades that outrageously generous rewards for top corporate executives only serve to give these top execs an incentive to behave outrageously. These execs will do virtually anything to pump up their share prices and inflate their own personal compensation. They’ll merge and purge. They’ll gouge consumers. They’ll underinvest.

Over in the UK, the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn has awakened to this new corporate reality. Labour is now calling for a new 2.5 percent corporate tax on any executive pay that runs over 20 times the national living wage and a 5 percent tax on executive pay that runs over 20 times the national median wage.

The Labour Party also wants to deny government contracts to companies that pay their top execs over 20 times what their lowest-paid workers are making.

Bold proposals like these helped propel the Labour Party to an unexpectedly strong and robust finish in this past spring’s national parliamentary elections. In the UK, the buzz — the excitement — has clearly shifted to the Labour side of the aisle.

Could the Democratic Party ever become so bold? Only if the party feels enough pressure to do better than the “Better Deal.”