The "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality and short-termism has been festering for decades at many American institutions, such as for-profit companies. Openly selling the country short for personal benefit is just one small step after many hundreds of them to get where we are.
I'd say prior to Financialization, i.e. before the "greed is good" zeitgeist of the 1980s. When wages and salaries grew in tandem with increases in productivity.
Bell Labs was cool, but it was more or less just a part of AT&T wasn't it? The company that spent about a century with a near-monopoly on all telecommunications at great expense to basically everyone in America, and even eventually led to them being broken up into a few dozen separate companies.
