Just in Case you Forgot about the Arrogance of the Wealthy

[glasseye]

Uh oh. The black helicopters will be tracking Chloe this summer.

[Amskeptic]

Uh oh. The black helicopters will be tracking Chloe this summer.

. . . until they see me taking in some badly needed sunshine in some desert wasteland.
"Permission to abort mission! Over!"
"What's wrong, soldier, over?"
"I can't, I can't say! Over!"
"Well then, stay on course, over".
"Oh my God, no!"

[hippiewannabe]

Take the Krispy Koch Brothers, for example, please:

Koch Brothers Takes $88 Million in Corporate Welfare

Entitled “Subsidizing the Corporate One Percent,” a report from the taxpayer watchdog group Good Jobs First shows that the world’s largest companies aren’t models of self-sufficiency and unbridled capitalism. To the contrary, they’re propped up by billions of dollars in welfare payments from state and local governments.

Such subsidies might be a bit more defensible if they were being doled out in a way that promoted upstart entrepreneurialism. But as the study also shows, a full “three-quarters of all the economic development dollars awarded and disclosed by state and local governments have gone to just 965 large corporations”—not to the small businesses and startups that politicians so often pretend to care about.

In dollar figures, that’s a whopping $110 billion going to big companies. Fortune 500 firms alone receive more than 16,000 subsidies at a total cost of $63 billion.

We can also for the first time identify which companies have received the most cumulative awards, both in dollar terms and number of awards. In dollar terms, the biggest recipient by far is Boeing, with a total of more than $13 billion, reflecting the giant deals it has gotten in Washington and South Carolina as well as more than 130 smaller deals around the country. The others at the top of the cumulative subsidy dollar list are: Alcoa ($5.6 billion), Intel ($3.9 billion), General Motors ($3.5 billion) and Ford Motor ($2.5 billion).

The company with the largest number of awards is Dow Chemical, with 416. Following it are Berkshire Hathaway (310), General Motors (307), Wal-Mart Stores (261), General Electric (255), Walgreen (225) and FedEx (222). Forty eight companies have received more than 100 individual awards.

It's a stretch to equate tax abatement, the relief of a cost, with welfare, an actual payment. That said, these incentives are a market distortion and a bad idea. They usually don't increase overall economic activity and employment, they just shift it from one location to another. Companies have a fiduciary responsibility to take the best deal for their shareholders, so they just plug the numbers in to their spreadsheet and go where they can make the most money. Liberal New York has been flooding CNBC with ads promising ten year tax holidays for companies starting up or relocating there. The logic is that they wouldn't get the tax revenue anyway if the company didn't relocate there, so they aren't losing anything, and they gain the benefit of employee income taxes and trickle-down spin-off employment. But those companies would have paid taxes in Michigan or wherever, so it's a net reduction in resources available to government. Don't blame the companies for accepting free money, blame those offering the bribes.

[Amskeptic]

Don't blame the companies for accepting free money, blame those offering the bribes.

Funny thing happened on the way TO the bribe . . . the companies send out "feelers" to some sad sack municipality and subsequent dreams of raisin plums and sugar fairies dance in the imaginations of these municipal managers. All across the country, municipalities have been *screwed* by major corporations who misrepresent their "ties" to the local community they are about to exploit.

I was living in the Rochester area, hippiewannabee, I saw with my own eyes families getting blown up by liars who promised jobs that did not materialize, but they got their "enterprise zone" write-offs ANYWAY. Don't even, don't even try to give me the ol "hey, it was offered". WalMart EXTRACTED tax relief and environmental easements from Brockport NY, and now their underpaid associates are eating up local social welfare budgets because they need food stamps and medicaid AND WalMart has their tax breaks so the local budget is strained anew. It is immoral.
ColinWhere'sMyPitchfrokDammit?

[hippiewannabe]

Don't blame the companies for accepting free money, blame those offering the bribes.

Funny thing happened on the way TO the bribe . . . the companies send out "feelers" to some sad sack municipality and subsequent dreams of raisin plums and sugar fairies dance in the imaginations of these municipal managers. All across the country, municipalities have been *screwed* by major corporations who misrepresent their "ties" to the local community they are about to exploit.

I was living in the Rochester area, hippiewannabee, I saw with my own eyes families getting blown up by liars who promised jobs that did not materialize, but they got their "enterprise zone" write-offs ANYWAY. Don't even, don't even try to give me the ol "hey, it was offered". WalMart EXTRACTED easements from Brockport NY, and now their underpaid associates are eating up local social welfare budgets because they need food stamps and medicaid AND WalMart has their tax breaks so the local budget is strained anew. It is immoral.
ColinWhere'sMyPitchfrokDammit?

I don't know what you mean by "easement"; that could be the right to cut across a park to access a road, running a pipe underground through a farm to connect to the sewr, whatever. In any case, a community would have to be really stupid to go out of their way to attract Walmart, let alone give them free money. At least a case can be made for the spin-off benefits of a research facility or some kind of high-tech manufacturing, but a Walmart is no great prize, and they should pay full price.

[Amskeptic]

I don't know what you mean by "easement";

Drainage easements.

In any case, a community would have to be really stupid to go out of their way to attract Walmart, let alone give them free money. and they should pay full price.

Yeah Brockport sure is a stupid community, like thousands of others who were gyped by WalMart's promises, here's a link, see if you can read it, unlike Matt Taibbi whose muckraking skills you choose to avoid:

http://www.ufcw21.org/sites/default/fil ... report.pdf

In any case, a community would have to be really stupid to go out of their way to attract Walmart, let alone give them free money. and they should pay full price.

Are we prejudiced against the stupid? Does God like smart people better?

I pray for the day that you and get to share the same awakening to the savage sociopathic anti-human corporate mindset that is running roughshod over millions of us.

[Jivermo]

And now, I just heard that Jeb Bush is considering a run for the presidency. He and his fellow South Florida schemers have certainly milked our state...I guess he has set his eye on the national main chance...

[Amskeptic]

And now, I just heard that Jeb Bush is considering a run for the presidency. He and his fellow South Florida schemers have certainly milked our state...I guess he has set his eye on the national main chance...

I am going to post an article from the The Atlantic here. It is for the perusal of our very own hippiewannabee, who I think may be closer to seeing the costs of capitalism than he lets on . . .

Is Capitalism in Trouble?
CEOs are growing nervous. Can they help save our system from its worst excesses?

Chrystia Freeland
Managing Director and Editor of Consumer News at Thomson Reuters

December 2013
The Atlantic

On a Wednesday in mid-September, some 30 entrepreneurs from around the world put on boots and blue jeans and spent four hours digging out Namaste Solar, a solar-power company in Boulder, Colorado, from under three feet of mud.

The international cleanup crew was in town for the annual conference of B Lab, a global organization of for-profit businesses (known as B Corps) that choose to legally bind themselves to meeting social and environmental objectives. Namaste Solar is one of the world’s 830 certified B Corps, and after flooding of near-Biblical proportions, some assembled peers decided to lend a hand.

“As we were leaving, we got on the bus pulling away, and we saw six or seven Namaste employees having a team hug,” Andrew Kassoy, a co-founder of B Lab and one of the diggers, told me. “People said, ‘That’s what this community is about—it is about businesses taking collective action to serve society.’ ”

We are well into the age of Oprah, so there is nothing too remarkable about corporate group hugs, particularly if your company has namaste in its name. Nor is there anything too special about groups of businesspeople building team spirit through volunteer work and assertions of the social value their labors provide.

But the B Corp community is genuinely ambitious. And it is part of a wider international movement of CEOs, investors, and business-school professors who hope to transform the way business is done, creating a more “sustainable” system of capitalism. Parts of the movement are familiar. Environmentally friendly business practices have long been mainstream, particularly when they create a brand advantage, as with organic foods. Humane treatment of the developing-world workers who sew our clothes or build our iPads isn’t quite as popular a brand promise, but it is hardly novel.

What is newer is the worry about the Western middle class and the fear that capitalism as it currently operates isn’t delivering for that broad swath of society. In summing up the Colorado retreat, the B Lab team emphasized this idea, touting the “higher-quality jobs” that B Corps provide relative even to other socially minded businesses that have subjected themselves to a review of their social impact: employees are 45 percent more likely to be paid bonuses than people at those firms, and 55 percent more likely to have at least some of their health-care costs paid. B Corps are also 18 percent more likely to choose suppliers from low-income communities.

“We are going through a shift,” said Marcello Palazzi, one of the leaders of the B Corp movement in Europe. “Society as a whole is realizing the capitalist system itself is quite dysfunctional. We have created an economy and corporations that in many ways have become unethical. One response is to go out on the streets, like Occupy Wall Street. Another is the B Corp movement.”

In Western capitalism circa 2013, fear that the market economy has become dysfunctional is not limited to a few entrepreneurs in Boulder. It is being publicly expressed, with increasing frequency, by some of the people who occupy the commanding heights of the global economy.

Dominic Barton, the global managing director at McKinsey, is one critic: “Capitalism, even 150 years ago, was more inclusive; there was more of a sense of social responsibility,” he told me. Today, trust in business is declining. “The system doesn’t seem to be as fair or as inclusive. It doesn’t seem to be helping broader society.”

Barton’s concern is shared by David Blood, a former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, who co-founded the investment firm Generation Investment Management with former Vice President Al Gore a decade ago. “Some people say income inequality doesn’t matter. I disagree,” Blood said. “We are creating a situation in which only the elite of the elite can be successful—and that is not sustainable.”

Both men worry that if capitalism doesn’t deliver for the middle class, then the middle class will eventually opt for something else. Business needs what Barton calls “a license to operate,” and without a new approach, he fears, it risks losing that license. “If we don’t do something to change the trajectory” of the economy, "we will experience significant social upheaval.” (emphasis mine - Colin)

“We have so many people who are suffering,” says Kurt Landgraf, the former president and CEO of DuPont Merck, and now the CEO of ETS, the nonprofit educational-testing company, where he is championing an ambitious new project to study and try to reverse declines in economic opportunity. (I consulted on the project.) “If we don’t change these people will eventually become advocates for more-extreme change,” and “we as a country will experience significant social upheaval.” Landgraf told me that most of the corporate executives and board members he knows are beginning to share this concern.

Chief executives have been among the biggest financial beneficiaries of “unsustainable” capitalism. But according to Roger Martin, the head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto (where I am a fellow), and a strategy consultant to CEOs, including Procter & Gamble’s A. G. Lafley, their lavish pay doesn’t fully compensate for being part of a dysfunctional system. Too many CEOs, Martin said, “focus on the short-term, pump up stock prices, make a bundle, and leave the company before it all comes crashing down. That is not an ethical life, that is a miserable life. And its lack of inherent rewards," he told me, "is itself one reason why many CEOs don’t stay long in their positions."

For those CEOs who aren’t quite so troubled by leading an unethical life, the sustainable capitalists have another argument—that their approach is a better way to make money over the long term. At least some evidence exists that companies that look beyond quarterly earnings, and that make exceptional efforts to treat workers as “stakeholders,” weather crises better and see higher long-term profits. “People ask, ‘What is the cost of being sustainable to your portfolio?’ well, zero,” Blood said. “Actually, we think that by being sustainable, it gives us a better chance of delivering returns to our clients.”

Intellectual champions of this view now include Barton; Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter, the father of the theory of national competitive advantage; and Mohamed El-Erian, the CEO of PIMCO, a $2 trillion global investment-management company.

Barton precisely dates the moment Western capitalism started to go off the rails:
(emphasis mine - Colin)
it was 1970, when Milton Friedman first advocated maximizing shareholder value as the paramount duty of the chief executive. That notion—which reduced issues like employee well-being to “externalities” that shouldn’t concern a company’s manager—helped catalyze a divorce of business from society.
As Friedman said, the job of business was business, and that was it.

What made it possible to sell this version of capitalism to society was the promise that if business were allowed to simply get on with the job, all of us would be better off. Businesses were, as Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign had it, “job creators”; burdening them with additional responsibilities would be self-defeating.

It is easy to forget that this black-and-white view of the role of companies replaced a very different philosophy. In the 1950s and ’60s, America’s business leaders widely believed they were responsible to the community as a whole, not just shareholders. They led their companies in a time when their workers’ wages increased faster than their own salaries. And they collectively advocated policies—like higher taxes—that went against their immediate class interests.

That era, of course, had roots in a messier period that recalls our own. Business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was red in tooth and claw, and inequality surged. One consequence was tremendous innovation. Two others were periodic financial crises and violent social upheaval—including the rise of communism. By the end of the Second World War, smart capitalists throughout the West realized they had to serve society as a whole, or be devoured by it. The communist specter no longer haunts Europe, of course, but the leaders of the sustainable-capitalism movement believe we are approaching a similar tipping point in the relationship between business and society.

It is unclear to what extent “sustainable business” can solve the big problems its leaders have set out to address. Treating workers decently and paying them better would help ease the middle-class squeeze and, within limits, might ultimately improve the bottom line. But those limits, presumably, would be reached fairly quickly: Most businesses are constrained by the way their competitors operate. The decisions of individual CEOs won’t stop what’s new about capitalism in the 21st century—the job-hollowing impact of technological change and globalization.

The sustainable capitalists don’t claim to have all the answers to these challenges. But one measure of their concern is the newfound openness some of them have toward a greater role for the state. They want the government to help them, and their rivals, do the right thing, like raise wages or repatriate taxable profits. “If the rules were changed, everyone would have to behave differently," Kurt Landgraf told me. “If they believe that those changes are in the interests of society, I don’t think American CEOs and boards would go into a massive revolt.”

Of course, global markets and global competition constrain even national action today, in a way they didn’t in the 1950s. Solutions to the problems of the middle class are neither obvious nor easy. But if corporate culture is genuinely beginning to shift, that would doubtless open new opportunities, and make room for new ideas—as well as some old ones. What one increasingly hears in Western boardrooms and corner offices is a twist on Saint Augustine: Lord, make me good, but make my competitors and my investors good, too.

[krivaswesty]

WalMart EXTRACTED tax relief and environmental easements from Brockport NY, and now their underpaid associates are eating up local social welfare budgets because they need food stamps and medicaid AND WalMart has their tax breaks so the local budget is strained anew. It is immoral.

Watching this happen in my neighborhood. All the bored rich people happy because they're bringing a movie theater with them. Half tempted to move further out and live in the Westy.

[Amskeptic]

All the bored rich people happy because they're bringing a movie theater with them.

Can you explain?
Texas is a beautiful state for the homeless Volkswagen owner . . .

viewtopic.php?f=58&t=8734

[Spezialist]

Yep, the Internet is populated with flatlanders.

Yeah, yeah, the banker took the plumber's money to pay off the kidnappers. Very ironic.

Just because you obscure your point behind layers of bullshit doesn't make it any more valid or entertaining.

irony is coincidence, actually real life planning and events are not bullshit.
the theme of this thread is the bullshit, lumping all wealthy people as arrogant is total horses shit and it come from the idiots of the sixties, threyre so angry now.
do you fuckers really spend all day going from one website to another repostting shit to jack off to?
ask yourself one question, when you are mad at me, <what am I a slave to?>
when you can honestly answer that question to yourself you can thank me. by smiling.

colin,
goahead and bann me again
the experiment is complete.
sockpuppet websites everywhere is all i see.
money invested in this crap is money lost forever.
you can keep your five dollar logic,
the reality is this shit is no better than the rants any day, EB rules, even if you guys hate him.

[hippiewannabe]

...the reality is this shit is no better than the rants any day, EB rules, even if you guys hate him.

Um, "the rants" is gone, so "no better" is a pretty low bar. I understand why he killed it, a reasonable business decision. It's hypocrisy I hate, not reasonable business decisions.

[Amskeptic]

the theme of this thread is the bullshit, lumping all wealthy people as arrogant is total horses shit and it come from the idiots of the sixties, threyre so angry now.
do you fuckers really spend all day going from one website to another repostting shit to jack off to?
ask yourself one question, when you are mad at me, <what am I a slave to?>
when you can honestly answer that question to yourself you can thank me. by smiling.

Having a rough day? The Atlantic article I posted above was thoughtful, with contributions from actual wealthy people who are expressing concerns about the trajectory.

"You fuckers"? "repostting shit to jack off to"? I think in actuality it is you who is coarsening the dialogue and turning a conversation into some mindless internet rant.

goahead and bann me again the experiment is complete. sockpuppet websites everywhere is all i see. money invested in this crap is money lost forever. you can keep your five dollar logic,
the reality is this shit is no better than the rants any day, EB rules, even if you guys hate him.

What are you talking about? Who hates who?
Settle down.
Colin