Britain native Louise Gorsuch, wife of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, has written a magnificent short essay entitled "Why I Became An American Citizen." Don't worry, there's not a syllable of saccharine boilerplate in it. It's authentic, bits of it are funny, and the observations are keen.
Check out the before-and-after photos that show the transformation of a Los Angeles homeless camp after activist Scott Pressler and his team donned hazmat suits and removed 50 tons of garbage in nine hours.
This essay is actually from May 2018, but I came across it somewhere yesterday and it's far and away the most helpful, in terms of speaking to my biggest challenge as a faith-walk pilgrim, thing I've read in ages. It's by theology student Ethan Roe, and it's entitled "Is It Okay If I Don't Feel God?"
When Elizabeth Warren and her people use the term "accountable capitalism," understand that it is raw tyranny. One creepy thing to consider is that if she's - God forbid - in a position to implement it, she'll have the acquiescence of the Business Roundtable, which has already resolved that the long-standing understanding that a company's only responsibility is to show a profit to its shareholders has somehow been rendered obsolete.
Mass protests by Christians across Ethiopia to protest the spike in church burnings.
Maximizing shareholder value is the brainchild of Neutron Jack Welch at GE only very recently in the 80s and the elitest MBAers ran hard with it. It arguably led to the decline that spawned the demagoguery of Making America Great Again. Now in progress is the RPA* Wave--a potential windfall for stakeholders but a tsunami for the huddled masses. Gordon Gecko Forever! *Robotic Process Automation
ReplyDeleteMilton Friedman was asserting it before Welch. Plus, it's self-evident.
ReplyDeleteYou're correct, Welch was Friedman's exemplar as Lennon was to Marx. The self evidence of Friedman's ethos is in our ravaged small towns and rural areas nearly everywhere in post-America, but I hear tell we're coming back through trickle down redux. Talk to ya after the next big meltdown amd there are indeed signs it is coming. Of course you will yawn and cite cyclicality and even blame the wicked left again.
ReplyDeleteErratum: Lenin
ReplyDeleteNo one has a right to a job. A business organization must place its operations where they can be carried out in the most cost-effective manner.
ReplyDeleteThat said, in a lot of industries, it behooves management to foster loyalty - because it can maximize the organization's financial health.
And what Warren is proposing - government telling private organizations what their priorities should be and how to allocate resources - is tyranny.
ReplyDeleteYou do realize that you actually agree with Trump on this business of offshoring, don't you? America First and bring the jobs back and all that stuff that shows he has no understanding of the free market.
ReplyDeleteAlso self-evident is the erosion of employer-paid health and dental insurance benefits, pensions and oftentimes reasonable work weeks sans overtime, and even an employee's personal freedoms while off the clock. Employers monitor your every move telemetrically which I suppose is merely a prelude to full blown AI. Also self-evident is the rise of the gig economy whose participants, having some need to eat, get not even work comp or unemployment benefits. Yessiree, that's progress, all hail Professor Friedman. But join the army. Be socialist to fight socialism globally. Winning!
ReplyDeleteAs Uchitelle explains in The Disposable American, from the 1890s through the 1970s, mass layoffs were rare, perceived as “a sign of corporate failure and a violation of acceptable business behavior.” This was the era of the company man, in which workers could reasonably expect to remain employed by the same organization for the bulk of their careers.The prevailing view in the US through the mid-20th century held that government had a responsibility to ensure full employment, with federal spending on infrastructure as a way to fill in gaps when the job opportunities in the private sector were insufficient. Though this expectation began to fade in the aftermath of World War II, Uchitelle explains, the economic boom of the next few decades nonetheless served to ensure that workers remained in popular demand, while unions and the regulation of the airline, banking, trucking, telephone, railroad, and utilities industries served as further backstops for workers.
ReplyDeleteBut the deregulation of those industries under the administration of former US president Jimmy Carter, championed by free-market advocates who sought to bring about greater competition and lower consumer prices, created an environment in which thousands of jobs could disappear in an instant. As Uchitelle writes, the “pattern of using mergers and acquisitions to chase higher and higher profits while closing or shrinking or selling less promising operations spread widely in corporate America, and layoffs greased the way.” The labor movement simultaneously weakened, and with it the job protections that unions had afforded to workers, cemented by the union-busting tactics employed by the Reagan administration during the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike.
By the early 1980s, General Electric chairman Jack Welch was popularizing the idea of layoffs as a sign of corporate competitiveness. The man nicknamed “Neutron Jack” was
responsible for eliminating the jobs of one out of every four GE employees between 1980 and 1985, with 118,000 casualties, according to Uchitelle. Welch in turn paved the way for executives like Robert Allen, the CEO of AT&T who made headlines in the 1990s for getting a substantial raise, from $6.7 million to a salary package worth $16 million, shortly after laying off nearly 50,000 employees. (“I feel no pain in accepting the compensation,” he said at AT&T’s annual meeting.)"
https://qz.com/work/1663731/mass-layoffs-a-history-of-cost-cuts-and-psychological-tolls/
I stated that "maximizing shareholder value arguably led to the decline that spawned the demogoguery of Making America Great Again. While I detest Trump I do not always disagree with him. Clearly Americans have endured going on 4 decades of economic and consequent economic strain since we began guaging our economic health by how much value the stock market maximizes for its shareholders andhe Donald still trumpets that too. I also agree with Trump's reluctance to give the Muslims what they want--all out war. We are in enough pain and conflict with eachother under the watch of he who would unite us through patriotism and he likely knows it. As for Neutron Jack, you know what his autobio was titled don't you? 'Winning.'
ReplyDeleteWell, this Uchitelle's framework is complete shit from the get-go. He seems fine with this "prevailing view" that the "government had a responsibility to ensure full employment, with federal spending on infrastructure as a way to fill in gaps when the job opportunities in the private sector were insufficient."
ReplyDeleteThat may or may not have been the prevailing view - I guess it was at certain points; this country elected FDR four times - but it's shit. The government is not to have any such role in a truly American - Madisonian - understanding.
Government is not supposed to have any role at all - any role at all - in orchestrating business trends in this country. That starts encroaching on private-sector freedom real fast.
And the presumption that it's good for "workers" (which is a really limiting way of looking at individual human beings, each with his our her own aspirations and dreams) to "reasonably expect to remain employed by the same organization for the bulk of their careers" is the basis for turning those individual human beings into the cattle-masses.
I know there's a whole body of literature - Studs Terkel and such - that reduces groups - classes? - of people to some kind of working stiffs who just want to graduate high school, marry their sweethearts, raise a couple of kids, and retire to a life of going fishing, and portrays it as something noble, but at its root it's a collectivist way of looking at people. And it also ignores Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction. It was short-sighted to ever depend on one business to stay the same throughout one's working life.
The average lifespan of US corporations keeps getting shorter.
That's just how it is.
Government has no role in that.
No one - neither the government nor your employer at any particular point in your life - owes you a nice, secure, financially predictable future.
ReplyDeleteLife in America changed for the worse in the 80s at least partly because stockholderus maximus became cock of the rock. Many towns are still digging out of the rubble. If this is what your philosphy wrought, many of us want no part of it. As if there is some virtue in a country run like a casino. Baah!
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ReplyDeleteRe: Terkel's 1974 oral history Working. Pray tell where the reduction of human beings to working stiffs occurs? Perhaps it is to be found in some of his other books. Please link. Good read for you though to open your angry eyes is 2017s 'Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All American Town.'Poor slobs kind of expecting their town to sorta remain stable after the Wall Street raiders with absolutely no stake or interest invaded their primary employer and left enriched. This picture was painted over and over again in America as we paid the price for maximizing stockholder value. Proof is in the pudding.
ReplyDeleteAll I'm saying is that a privately owned business organization will put the various functions it needs to have performed in locations where those functions can be performed in the most cost-effective manner. They're not morally obligated to do otherwise.
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ReplyDeleteIn its more corrosive application — the one that is inculcated in business schools, enforced by corporate lawyers and demanded by activist investors and Wall Street analysts — maximizing shareholder value has meant doing whatever is necessary to boost the share price this quarter and the next. Over the years, it has been used to justify bamboozling customers, squeezing workers and suppliers, avoiding taxes and lavishing stock options on executives. Most of what people find so distasteful about American capitalism — the ruthlessness, the greed, the inequality — has its roots in this misguided notion about what business is all about.
The result? By 2019, maximizing shareholder value has come to be seen as leading to a toxic mix of soaring short-term corporate profits, astronomic executive pay, along with stagnant median incomes, growing inequality, periodic massive financial crashes, declining corporate life expectancy, slowing productivity, declining rates of return on assets and overall, a widening distrust in business.
Nowthe BRT has recognized that a sole focus on profits for shareholders is no longer defensible and has seen fit to redefine business purpose. As Pearlstein explains:
In the Roundtable’s new formulation of corporate purpose, delivering value to customers, investing in employees, dealing fairly and honestly with suppliers, supporting communities and protecting the environment all have equal billing with generating long-term value for shareholders. The statement rejects the whole idea of “maximizing” one value to the exclusion of all the others. Instead, it acknowledges the need for balance and compromise in serving all of a company’s stakeholders.
It’s good news that major corporations have recognized that a sole focus on shareholders is financially, socially and economically wrong. Even Jack Welch himself—the idea’s leading exponent—in 2009 had come to call it “the dumbest idea in the world.” Shareholder value is the result, not the goal of a corporation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2019/08/19/why-maximizing-shareholder-value-is-finally-dying/#4ffbbc8b6746
The Business Roundtable did not provide specifics on how it would carry out its newly stated ideals, offering more of a mission statement than a plan of action. But the companies pledged to compensate employees fairly and provide “important benefits,” as well as training and education. They also vowed to “protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses” and “foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.”It was an explicit rebuke of the notion that the role of the corporation is to maximize profits at all costs — the philosophy that has held sway on Wall Street and in the boardroom for 50 years. Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist who is the doctrine’s most revered figure, famously wrote in The New York Times in 1970 that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”
ReplyDeleteThis mind-set informed the corporate raiders of the 1980s and contributed to an unswerving focus on quarterly earnings reports. It found its way into pop culture, when in the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” Gordon Gekko declared, Greed is good. More recently, it inspired a new generation of activist investors who pushed companies to slash jobs as a way to enrich themselves.
“The ideology of shareholder primacy has contributed to the economic inequality we see today in America,” Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation and a Pepsi board member, said in an interview. “The Chicago school of economics is so embedded in the psyche of investors and legal theory and the C.E.O. mind-set. Overcoming that won’t be easy.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/business/business-roundtable-ceos-corporations.html
Look no further than our military for the baah baah blacksheep. Get brainwashed, follow orders blindly, get it all handed to you. Then we thank you for your service and still have to chip in for homeless vets, the USO, Wounded Warriors, et al and watch them collect their discounts at the check-out. The few, the proud, the hand-out!
ReplyDeleteAnd you are way way off base lambasting working slobs in America my man. Very dickheadish of you!
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