The CEO of 3M said increasing price hikes would serve as a “tailwind”

April 4, 2022 12:52 PM

End corporate profiteering. Economic justice advocates at the Groundwork Collaborative have compiled corporate bragging about profits and how they are rewarding investors on the backs of consumers. Chevron: Our record free cash flow enabled us to address all our financial priorities in 2021: a higher dividend for the 34th consecutive year; significant debt paydown, and another year of share buybacks, our 14th out of the past 18 years.”
posted by spamandkimchi (16 comments total)

Corporate Profits After Tax 2011 - 2021

up 30% 2020-21. Tailwind indeed.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 12:59 PM on April 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Until we stop this current New Gilded Age, our society is going to continue to be lost more and more.
posted by hippybear at 1:11 PM on April 4, 2022 [12 favorites]

So in the fable, after the scorpion stings the frog that's carrying it across the river, they both drown, right? Like, the scorpion doesn't skip to the other bank and scuttle away, unharmed?
posted by wenestvedt at 1:38 PM on April 4, 2022 [10 favorites]

Are you suggesting that the 99.9% are the scorpion and that taxation of the frog will sting it and cause us both to drown?

Because I don't understand your bringing this up otherwise, and I think in this case, that's a fallacy.
posted by hippybear at 1:45 PM on April 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

The scorpion in the parable wasn't considered too big to fail.
posted by mhoye at 1:50 PM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Share buybacks, of course, are the most "tax efficient" way to reward investors, which is why they do it that way, as if avoiding your responsibilities is a moral imperative.
posted by clawsoon at 1:52 PM on April 4, 2022

Surprised this didn't mention the leaked email a few weeks back from an Applebee's executive crowing that current high gas prices and inflation means that their target workforce pool (who he explicitly notes lives paycheck to paycheck) will be desperate and forced to take accept less pay.
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:09 PM on April 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

clearly the frog is everybody and everything we've all achieved, to this point in history, to allow for the same rapacious capitalism (scorpion) that will then "sting" us with its endless appetite for profit margins that long ago stopped making sense, and we will all die of it. louder now, for the ones in the back row
posted by elkevelvet at 2:20 PM on April 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Mod note: please contribute positively and don't just fill space
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 3:46 PM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Are B-corps the businesses that aren't so profit-motivated? I wonder why there aren't more of them, as the awareness of income inequality grows...unless it's the fact that you need capital to start a business, and funders would recoil from a business plan that didn't focus on eternal growth.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:07 PM on April 4, 2022

We have a major political party and a major media empire dedicated to pushing the propaganda that the robber barons are actually “job creators” and that the people trying to make society equitable for everyone are evil socialists out to destroy the country.

They are working 24/7 to convince the country that price increases are due to the malice and incompetence of folks who just want the poor to get access to the voting franchise and justice under the law and affordable health care and housing, and not due to the forever-insatiable greed of the obscenely rich.

And they’ve so neatly tied these messages to the conservative cultural identities of half of the voting public that reality or truth or data are almost irrelevant, anymore.

I’m not really sure how a society breaks out of this cycle and avoids becoming a Bladerunner future…
posted by darkstar at 5:24 PM on April 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

What exactly is corporate profiteering? Bragging about profits? Rewarding investors on the backs of consumers? Raising prices as much as possible?

This is just... really naive. And pretty weak sauce. Is any of this any different than the way things have been done, like, forever? I'm as annoyed as anyone to see a CEO twirling his mustache, but these revelations are just entirely ordinary. Even that "tailwind" comment sounds... not very terrible in context. It sounds like 3M is hoping demand for their goods will at least remain flat despite the price increases, because they've been underperforming overall. That isn't really much of a brag. It's actually a hint of desperation. Maybe if these companies were monopolies, but the examples given are nowhere close. I mean, am I really supposed to get angry because what Best Buy and Chipotle are doing?
posted by 2N2222 at 6:27 PM on April 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Is any of this any different than the way things have been done, like, forever?

Just because the fight against gross inequality will never end doesn't mean that it's unimportant or not worth being passionate about.
posted by clawsoon at 6:51 PM on April 4, 2022 [11 favorites]

While it seems to me self evident that we are headed in the wrong direction equity wise, (and have been for 40 years,) you have to bear in mind that this kind of earnings call bullshit is just that. A corporation can be essentially insolvent and you would never no it from the presentations that are given to investors.
posted by Pembquist at 7:20 PM on April 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Stock buybacks are evil.
posted by Gadarene at 9:47 PM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is just... really naive. And pretty weak sauce. Is any of this any different than the way things have been done, like, forever?

The combination of large-scale corporate consolidation, particularly at the regional level, and a Bureau of Competition that's been thoroughly de-fanged effectively means that the market forces that are supposed to drive prices downward towards some sort of competitive equilibrium, that invisible hand people kept talking about, no longer exist.

So in answer to your question, yes. This is different.
posted by mhoye at 7:05 AM on April 5, 2022 [6 favorites]