Archive for the 'Private-Sector Boondoggles' Category
Saturday, November 13th, 2010
They’re Vilifying Tobacco Entrepeneurs!
You see? You see what government does (unless you purchase it)?
It VILIFIES tobacco corporations! From today’s NYT:
But Philip Morris International, the separate company spun out of Altria in 2008 to expand the company’s presence in foreign markets, has been especially aggressive in fighting new restrictions overseas.
It has not only sued Uruguay, but also Brazil, arguing that images the government wants to put on cigarette packages do not accurately depict the health effects of smoking and “vilify” tobacco companies. The pictures depict more grotesque health effects than the smaller labels recommended in the United States, including one showing a fetus with the warning that smoking can cause spontaneous abortion.
What next? Calling fire inflammatory?
Roger Quarles, that fine upstanding Kentucky entrepreneur and leader, however, is onto this sinister plot:
Horrors!
Meanwhile, for those keeping score, one might note here yet another example of the namby-pamby jokes that pass for “anti-tobacco” campaigns back in the US of A.
Friday, October 29th, 2010
American Math: Where 74 = 19,000,000
In the United States in 2009, there were 151 million people who received wages. As reporter David Cay Johnston has begun to explain, there is a rather amazing collection of statistics being kept in this crucial area by the Social Security Administration.
Johnston explains some of the shocking, if not at all surprising, facts revealed by a bit of analysis:
[These statistics] do give us a stunning picture of what’s happening at the very top of the compensation ladder in America.
The number of Americans making $50 million or more, the top income category in the data, fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 last year. But that’s only part of the story.
The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!
You read that right. In the Great Recession year of 2009 (officially just the first half of the year), the average pay of the very highest-income Americans was more than five times their average wages and bonuses in 2008. And even though their numbers shrank by 43 percent, this group’s total compensation was 3.2 times larger in 2009 than in 2008, accounting for 0.6 percent of all pay. These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.
And remember: This comparison includes federally taxable wages only. It says nothing about stock options, expense accounts, or benefits.
And single-year wage data also say nothing about wealth distribution, which, in a capitalist paradise like the United States, is far more unequal than the income structure.
Finally, I would invite people to just goggle these stats. Contemplate, for instance, the pyramidal structure of the wage system. By far the most densely populated wage segments lie at the low end of the scale. And the slots get almost precisely less-filled as they ascend into the unconscionable stratosphere.
Likewise, one might examine these numbers and ask “our” politicians why the fuck they never shut up about the so-called “middle class.” Aren’t the bottom and the top really the overwhelmingly important issues? And, even without knowing the facts Johnston discusses, aren’t people thirsty for some leadership and meaningful choice in this area?
Alas, few topics are more off-the-table in our market totalitarian society. The mass media are owned by corporate capitalists who enrich themselves by serving the other corporate capitalists who are the sponsors of their fare. The ruling (R) v. (D) junta, the money-grubbing Business Party duo-mono-poly, a.k.a. our “serious” policians? The same.
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
Idiot Wind
Even among greens, wind power is almost universally accepted as a viable solution to Peak Oil. Alas, wind power is greenwash.
Two items:
None of this stops energy capitalists from spreading and exploiting the shit out of the naive assumptions that rule the roost on this crucial topic.
The fact of the matter is that the laws of physics are real, and they dictate that it always costs some energy to get energy. As explained by Kevin Phillips, wind power’s regime had its heyday in the 17th century. It is not capable of powering the 21st, unless we get very radically small.
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…
_____
*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.”
