Archive for the 'Private-Sector Boondoggles' Category
Friday, August 6th, 2010
The March of Marketing Surveillance
Neither recession nor depression shall slow the spread of corporate marketing’s Census-dwarfing surveillance on American households.
For those tracking this inexorable totalitarian phenomenon, The Wall Street Journal has been running a useful series. For those who know the institutional reasons, the main pattern is entirely unsurprising:
Unauthorized placement of spyware is large:
The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred.
It is also increasingly powerful:
Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.
“It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”
Interestingly, it is also another very powerful argument in favor of public enterprise and nationalization of our communications infrastructure. Wikipedia, a non-profit, somehow manages to thrive without planting any spy code.
Monday, July 12th, 2010
Dispatch from the Commanding Heights
The July 12-July 18 edition of Bloomberg Business Week, a general business magazine tellingly swallowed recently by a speculator’s news wire, is running a multiply useful story on the ongoing hoarding of cash among the overclass.
Flush with more cash than they have had stashed in at least a half-century, it seems the investing stratum faces the harrowing prospects of only getting investment returns “in the low single digits” and, due to Great Depression III, is “as confused as the rest of us”* about how they’re going to escape that fate.
See? We really are all in this together. Doesn’t this situation sound oh so familiar, fellow Joe and Jane Sixpacks? We have record amounts of money on hand right now, don’t we, but face the prospect that it might only grow slowly, if we just sit around and do nothing. Right? Thank God we don’t have classes in America!
Meanwhile, in case you were needing a confirmation straight from the horse’s mouth, this BBW article also includes a quote from a hedge fund manager on what exactly hedge funds and Wall Street brokerages do:
Max Trautman, a former Goldman Sachs proprietary trader who co-founded London-based Stoneworks Asset Management in 2006, is now paring his $460 million fund’s market exposure. “We’re trying to reduce risk by downsizing our trades,” he says. “It’s not that we have stopped taking views, but we’re just putting less risk in them.”
So… “taking views” expressed with money on “risk.” In my house, that’s called a wager.
And this is the system that claims it is the best of all possible ways of allocating scarce resources…
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*It might be suggested that not everybody is confused. Some of us, perhaps even most of us, might merely be excluded and ignored. As a reggae band named for a British unemployment benefits form once sang,
As always you were wrong again
To us a little seems a lot
Don’t turn your back on desperate men
Cause we can see how much you’ve got…
Friday, July 9th, 2010
A Headline Worth 1,000 Words
“U.S. Firms Build Up Record Cash Piles“
Under that headline, The Wall Street Journal reports this:
U.S. companies are holding more cash in the bank than at any point on record, underscoring persistent worries about financial markets and about the sustainability of the economic recovery.
The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that nonfinancial companies had socked away $1.84 trillion in cash and other liquid assets as of the end of March, up 26% from a year earlier and the largest-ever increase in records going back to 1952. Cash made up about 7% of all company assets, including factories and financial investments, the highest level since 1963.
And, of course, this:
The comfort of having cash on hand, though, comes at a high price companies may not be willing to pay for much longer. They are earning almost no interest on their holdings of cash, making it more difficult for them to achieve the returns shareholders typically expect from them. That will put pressure on companies to pare down the cash holdings eventually.
“Stockholders don’t want them to keep sitting on cash at a zero return,” said Paul Kasriel, an economist at Northern Trust. “They’re going to use it,” either to increase hiring and investment or to make payouts to shareholders in the form of dividends or share buybacks, he said.
Wanna bet which one it’ll be? Didn’t think so:
Earlier this week, retailer Target Corp. raised its quarterly dividend to 25 cents a share from 17 cents, saying that the company’s cash holdings were “well above the amount needed for optimal reinvestment in our core business.”
How fortunate for everybody that we love free markets and don’t begrudge people getting rich! And that we have a president who knows how things work, and that “Ultimately, true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector.”
Saturday, May 29th, 2010
Private Enterprise and Its “Regulation”
The New York Times is having one of its better days. Two separate stories expose the same simple but unmentionable truth: capitalists, with the quiet cooperation of the nominally public political structures they dominate, kill and despoil for money.
Story One: “Obviously, we’re all oil industry.”
Monday, May 24th, 2010
Even Carville Sees It
Black Reagan prefers the preservation of market fundamentalist tenets to execution of the laws and the most elementary kind of ecological concern, as David Pettit very usefully explains.
In fact, as Pettit notes, Zerobama’s now gotten so obvious and odious that it’s started to bother even the professional trickster James Carville, who correctly observes that Obummer is “risking everything” to keep the capitalists happy:
I think they actually believe that BP has some kind of a good motivation here.’ They’re naive! BP is trying to save money, save everything they can… They won’t tell us anything, and oddly enough, the government seems to be going along with it!
The 2008 Marketer of the Year would have to get massively better just to rise up to Epic Fail status. As it stands, he’s every bit as destructive as was his immediate predecessor.
Sunday, May 16th, 2010
Tort Abortion
Guess what, kids? That’s right: Our laws were written to relieve corporate capitalists from paying for the true damages they cause.
Section 1004 of the Oil Pollution Act, passed by our lovely Congresspeople in 1990 as a strengthening of then-existing rules reads as follows:
That means that, by law, British Petroleum is not only able to enjoy all the rights of the “fictitious individual” while not risking actual individuals’ bodily punishment exposures, but the maximum it can be required to pay for the ongoing Deepwater Horizon eco-tastrophe is $75 million — less than 5% of its 2009 reported net income; 0.3% of its total assets. As a financial punishment, this is a traffic ticket, literally.
And the official response of the liberal stylists among our allegedly concerned corporate politicians? To eliminate the cap on such damages and force giant for-profit operators to face the risk of being liable, like you and me and everybody else who can’t afford a legal dream team, for what they actually do?
Nope. Of course not. Not on the table.
