“On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world” — Jack Welch, 2009. As GE’s CEO in the 80s, however, Welch championed corporate focus on shareholder returns. “Converts to the creed”, the Economist
summarizes, “had little time for other ‘stakeholders’: customers, employees, suppliers, society at large and so forth.” What went wrong? Steve Denning
describes how such a stance is counterproductive, creates turmoil in capitalism and fosters an environment in which “CEOs and their top managers have massive incentives to focus most of their attentions on the expectations market, rather than the real job of running the company producing real products and services.”
posted by the mad poster!
on Dec 27, 2011 -
38 comments
"You're going nowhere, son. Just you, me ad the walls. So wipe that bloody grin off before it's shot off, and don't slouch. You toe rag. You bin
. Pay attention when I break you. And break you I will, boy. You're in my manor, now." Buck up! It's Terry Finch's
THE REPRISALIZER! Follow
Bob Shuter, whose mission of reprisal against his brother's killers, their families, associates, progeny and property takes him across the desolate wasteland of 70s Britain, primarily Kent AKA
FINCHLAND. Finch, writer of The Reprisalizer and
DRAW!, the cowboy whose name means death, is soon to be the subject of
a major motion picture from Matthew Holness, creator of
Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.
posted by Artw
on Dec 13, 2011 -
15 comments
ALEC Exposed is a wiki site set up by The Center for Media and Democracy which posts and chronicles leaked documents including more than 800 model bills drafted and approved by corporations during ALEC meetings. The documents have been analyzed and
marked-up for clarity. Journalists along with the general public are invited to
download the documents and sift through the
bills in order to help map the connections back to their own state legislation and legislators.
[more inside]
posted by stagewhisper
on Jul 14, 2011 -
22 comments
We have explained that the matching funds provision substantially burdens the speech of privately financed candidates and independent groups. ... We have explained that those burdens cannot be justified by a desire to “level the playing field.” In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has
struck down an Arizona law that provided public funds to candidates who have been outspent by either private funding or independent spending.
Link to PDF of full decision. [more inside]
posted by gerryblog
on Jun 27, 2011 -
105 comments
One year after the
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which, overturning over 100 years of precedent, opened a floodgate of corporate money into election campaigns, Virginia Lyons (D-VT), has introduced
legislation (full text of bill not yet available, articles
here and
here) in the Vermont State Senate to amend the United States Constitution to explicitly state that corporations are
not persons.
This would overturn the controversial notion of
corporate personhood which was established in the 1800s. Controversial not only for the unequal distribution of rights and responsibilities among humans and corporations, some, like
Thom Hartmann (
previously), have claimed that the notion of corporate personhood was established as an
intentional misinterpretation of the decision as recorded by court reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh & New York Railway Co.
[more inside]
posted by laminarial
on Jan 24, 2011 -
102 comments
Right Wing astroturfing A non-scientific analysis of the patterns in forum board discussions on a variety of topics. The gist: discussions of issues in which there's money at stake (like
climate change,
public health and corporate
tax avoidance) are often characterised by amazing levels of abuse and disruption by rightwing libertarians who are pro-corporate, anti-tax, anti-regulation. Discussions of issues in which there's little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilised than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions.
posted by novenator
on Dec 20, 2010 -
79 comments
The latest attempt to mitigate the impact of the
Citizens United decision has failed, with an attempt to pass transparency rules for corporations funding political advertising failing to reach
cloture. Obama comments on this vote in his
most recent weekly address.
Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (2010) held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment.
[more inside]
posted by lucien_reeve
on Sep 24, 2010 -
44 comments
Merchants of Doubt is a new book that reports how a small group of scientists committed to an extreme free-market ideology have been employed by large corporations over several decades to cast doubt on such different environmental issues as the risks of tobacco smoke, the dangers of DDT, the effectiveness of the Strategic Defence Initiative, the regulation of CFCs, and the causes of global warming.
A review in the Christian Science Monitor calls this "one of the most important books of the year. Exhaustively researched and documented..."
posted by binturong
on Jul 12, 2010 -
48 comments
The NYT reports that GE has brokered a deal between MSNBC and Fox News to "reconcile" Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly, preventing further criticism of each other or GE. The deal went into effect June 1, the very same day Olbermann
declared he was "quarantining" Fox, avoiding discussion of the channel in the future. Mr. Olbermann, who is on vacation, said by e-mail message, “I am party to no deal.” Glenn Greenwald
breaks down the political consequences of the deal.
posted by mek
on Aug 1, 2009 -
62 comments
Anarkon is a corporate collective comprised of the nations most innovative and forward thinking businesses, known internally as Affiliates. Our primary objective is to sell a long overdue revolution to the American public through an innovative branding and advertising campaign which will benefit today’s large corporations, the American economy and the consumer alike.
posted by streetdreams
on Sep 16, 2008 -
29 comments
Sysco : whether it's Wendy's, Applebee's, the local diner, a fancy restaurant, the cafeteria, or Guantanamo Bay,
it's what you eat. Serving over
400,000 businesses, the
"Wal-Mart of Food Service" has all the bases covered, from
"Unique 3-D technology gives you the look and texture of a solid muscle chicken breast, at a fraction of the cost" to
more gourmet offerings.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim
on Jul 30, 2008 -
135 comments
"On May 10th, 2007, this video was banned in Congress" - Filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, wanted to show a four minute clip of his film when testifying to Congress, but Republicans disallowed it.
This is the clip from his excellent movie now available on Google Video,
Iraq for Sale.
posted by nickyskye
on May 13, 2007 -
52 comments
The Reedy Creek Improvement District's goal "is to provide effective and efficient services to the public and our taxpayers." The taxpayer is Disney, and the taxes are used to provide services for Disney by
contracting the services to Disney. The
RCID is a county-like entity in Florida, composed of the cities of Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake, which are also controlled by Disney. The government of the RCID is elected by the landowners - Disney executives who own five-acre plots, the only non-corporate and non-government landowners. The governments of the cities are elected by the residents - about 40 Disney employees split between
Bay Lake and
Lake Buena Vista. The
Rotten Library (SFW article on a NSFW site) discusses the district, which is administered from a
SimCity 2000 construction site.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim
on Feb 9, 2007 -
17 comments
Undark and the Radium Girls is the fascinating true story of several female employees of the US Radium Corporation at the turn of the 20th Centry. The women were employed to paint radioactive "Undark", a glow-in-the-dark paint for military application (dials that needed to be seen at night, etc) onto the machinery. The women were given lethal amounts of paint & fine brushes, which they all routinely kept sharp by wetting the tips in their mouths. Twenty years later, as their jawbones disintegrated & the tumors began to spread, they started down the path to figuring out who had murdered them, and how.
posted by jonson
on Jan 2, 2007 -
68 comments
"Drove my Chevy to the levee..."? That's a lawsuit. "Pass the Courvoisier"? Yup. Lawsuit too. Artwork using Barbie Dolls? Lawsuit again... It's all part of the
Trademark Dilution Revision Act, which would eliminate the non-commercial "fair use" protections of trademarks in art, literature, and speech--
To amend the Trademark Act of 1946 with respect to dilution by blurring or tarnishment. It goes to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the 16th, and there's a large roster of groups fighting it, including the American Library Association, EFF, and more, saying that consumers as well as artists would be preventing from exercising their free speech rights unless it's amended.
posted by amberglow
on Feb 3, 2006 -
35 comments
How Powerful Is Productivity? TCS interviews Former Carter Staffer (and Democrat) William Lewis, who makes some interesting remarks about worker productivity:
There were many disparaging comments made in the US and maybe even stronger abroad, (and especially in Japan) about how the US labor force was getting what it deserved because it was lazy, uneducated and maybe even dumb. And of course, the Japanese then showed -- the really capable, competent Japanese manufacturing companies -- showed that was wrong by coming here, building their own factories, managing American labor and taking a lot of other local inputs and coming within five percent of reproducing their home country productivity.
posted by Kwantsar
on Jun 20, 2005 -
11 comments
