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corporations

Thursday 25th of April 2024

Artificial intelligence  A corporation or a government department isn't a conscious being, but it is an artificial intelligence.  It has the capability to take decisions which are completely distinct from the intentions of any of the people who compose it. And under stressful conditions, it can go stark raving mad. Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine © 2024 Kwiple.com
Bullshitters say We remain committed to supporting the communities in which we do business, and this includes paying a fair share of property taxes. From a press release issued by Target, which could just as well have been issued by Best Buy, Kohl's, Lowes, Walmart or other big-box retailers suing local governments to have their property taxes greatly reduced – especially small towns that can't afford to defend themselves against mulltinationals – on the basis of the “dark store argument,” which asserts that open stores should be taxed at the same rate as shuttered stores however far away or disastrous the effect on local police, firemen, schools, healtcare, etc. Quoted in Bloomberg Businessweek, December 12-18, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
By the numbers In 2015, the median compensation for the 200 highest-paid executives at public companies in the United States was $19.3 million, up from $9.6 million five years earlier. New York Times, December 8, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
By the numbers In America about half of college degrees in business awarded since 2000 have gone to women, but the share of senior executives who are female has remained stuck at one in five. The Economist, October 5, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
By the numbers The world has more than 70 times as many stock market indices as it has quoted stocks, according to a survey by the Index Industry Association. A census of its members found that they publish and regularly recalculate 5.28m indices, of which 3.14m cover stock markets. According to the World Bank, the number of public companies in existencee is only 43,192. Financial Times, January 23, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
China China has a national economic strategy designed to create more and better jobs. We have global corporations designed to make money for their sharehollders. No contest. Robert B. Reich, Beyond Outrage © 2020 Kwiple.com
Corporate governance As Mr [Charles] Dumas argues in his book [Populism and Economics] this Victorian invention [limited liability] ensures that a company and its owners have only limited exposure to damaging consequences of their actions. Yet the implicit contract behind limited liability – companies pay tax in exchange for limited exposure – has broken down because globalisation has turned corporate taxes into an increasingly voluntary levy. Limited liability also contributed to excessive risk-taking in banking before the 2007-8 crisis. John Plender, Financial Times, July 26, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Corporations All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893) © 2020 Kwiple.com
Corporations The biggest flaw in the shareholder primacy model is that the shareholder is no longer the residual risk-taker in the corporation. Bankruptcy is no great threat to institutional investors running huge diversified portfolios. Employees have much more at risk, especially where their skills are specific to the firm. Suppliers likewise often have more at risk than shareholders. John Plender, Financial Times, January 2, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Corporations Corporations are people. Mitt Romney © 2024 Kwiple.com
Corporations A recent study showed the proportion of psychopaths in corner offices is the same as in prison. Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times, April 17, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Corporations To the extent that corporations benefit from government largess in areas such as clean energy, health care, free trade, and international economic development, they are unlikely to bite the hand that feeds them. Jennifer Delton, “Why the American Center Held —and Then Fell Apart” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Democracy If  democracy is justified  in governing the state, then it must also  be justified in governing economic enterprises; and to say that it is not  justified in governing economic enterprises is to imply that it is not justified in governing the state.  Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy © 2018 Kwiple.com
Democracy  When corporations get so big that they can start to squeeze the government, then democracy no longer works. Elizabeth Warren © 2019 Kwiple.com
Duh obvious Mergers at this scale are reconfiguring the American economy in ways that seem to be tilting the scales toward the interests of ever-larger corporations, to the broad detriment of labor. New York Times, November 2, 2016, on the proposed $85 billion merger of AT&T and Time Warner © 2016 Kwiple.com
Elites Of the elite corporate professions — law, finance, consultancy — the first two are vilified as ruthless. But only the third is seen as outright bullshit. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 24, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Fascism The first truth [about the liberty of a democratic people] is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.  That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, April 29, 1938, Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies © 2022 Kwiple.com
Feelings Handshakes have given way to bear hugs, back pats and lingering embraces in some corners of the corporate world. … Huggers say their touchy-feely approach breeds teamwork, trust and better business results. Huggees don't always agree. Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2017, on co-worker hugging, mostly by CEOs © 2016 Kwiple.com
The Frightful Five Nearly a year ago, I argued that we were witnessing a new era in the tech business, one that is typified … by a posse I like to call the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet … As in 2016, they are half of the world's 10 most valuable companies … Their wealth stems from their control of the inescapable digital infrastructure on which much of the rest of the economy depends – mobile phones, social networks, the web, the cloud, retail and logistics, and the data and computing power required for future breakthroughs … they have begun to set their sights on the biggest industries outside tech … on autos, health care, retail, transporation, entertainment and finance. citation Farhad Manjoo, New York Times, Jan. 5, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Globalization I am not a U.S. company and I don't make decisions based on what is good for the U.S. Lee Raymond, CEO of ExxonMobil © 2020 Kwiple.com
Globalization Ideally, you'd have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy. Jack Welch © 2017 Kwiple.com
Globalization The public perception is that the companies reaping the rewards of globalisation are beyond reach of the rules that apply to everyone else. All the insecurities of globalisation fall on ordinary citizens. Philip Stephens, Financial Times, September 16, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Government When aggregated wealth demands what is unfair, its immense power can be met only by the still greater power of the people as a whole, exerted in the only way it can be exerted, through the Government; and we must be resolutely prepared to use the power of the Government to any needed extent, even though it be necessary to tread paths which are yet untrod. Theodore Roosevelt © 2016 Kwiple.com
Hypocrites say My warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out of politics. It's not what you're designed for. And don't be intimidated by the Left into taking up causes that put you right in the middle of one of America's greatest political debates. Mitch McConnell, who has spent a career being the best among his Senate colleagues at attracting money from giant corporations and their CEOs, expressing his outrage that some of them stopped contributing to Republicans after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, and joined Democratic-led opposition to Republican-led efforts to pass voting suppresion laws © 2021 Kwiple.com
Income inequality A 2014 study by Alyssa Davis and Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning advocacy group in Washington, found that chief executive pay compared with the earnings of average workers had surged from a multiple of 20 in 1965 to almost 300 in 2013. New York Times, December 8, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Income inequality According to new data from research firm Equilar, the median compensation – without perks – for C-suite executives at Fortune 100 companies jumped nearly 15% to $7.4 million in fiscal year 2015 from $6.5 million in 2013. Over the same period, perks jumped 21.6% to a median value of $126,550. Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Advocates of free enterprise like to say hard work should be rewarded, but in today's corporate culture, that simply isn't the case. While CEOs are often compensated, at least in part, on their companies' overall success, regular employees, who arguably are as responsible as executives for that success, are often not. According to a 2017 report … three-fourths of executives, directors and managers were given bonuses, while less than half of hourly workers were. Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 25, 2017 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality For the first time, all 10 of the top-paid C.E.O.s on Equilar's list received at least $50 million last year. New York Times, May 17, 2015 [Equilar, Inc. analyzes executive pay] — $50,000,000 per year = $136,986 per day = $5,708 per hour = $95 per minute = $1.59 per second ASSUMING they worked every second of the year © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality A July report from the Economic Policy Institute found that the chief executive officers of America's largest companies made an average of $15.6 million in compensation in 2016, or 271 times the annual average pay of ordinary workers. Although that gap has narrowed over the past few years, it's still astronomically larger than the 20 times recorded in 1965. Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 25, 2017 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Pension gains averaged 8% of total compensation for top executives at S&P 500 companies last year, up sharply from 3% the year before … But the gains are much larger for some executives, totaling more than $1 million each for 176 executives at 89 large companies that filed proxy statements through mid-March. For those executives, pension gains averaged 30% of total pay. [which is often in the tens of millions] Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2015 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Philippe Dauman, president and chief executive of Viacom, the entertainment conglomerate … got $84.5 million [in compensation in 2010] , an amount that exceeds the entire 2011-12 town budget for North Haven, Connecticut. It takes a village to pay a corporate titan. Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence © 2015 Kwiple.com
Inequality American economic luck ran out when an economic order that had generated a fair degree of equality among white male citizens without much planning, regulation or deliberate collective decision was replaced by the revolutionary new order of corporate capitalism. … [T]he agrarian socioeconomic order was destined to be wholly superseded by corporate capitalism. As an unregulated external force, corporate capitalism would automatically generate acute inequalities in the distribution of property as well as other social and economic resources. Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy © 2018 Kwiple.com
Inequality [M]ajor inequalities in wealth and income in countries like the United States do not flow from interfirm or interindustry wage differentials. They are caused primarily by two other factors: a highly concentrated ownership of property and very large payments to top corporate executives whose decisions are, for all pracitcal purposes, independent of all effective external controls. Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy © 2018 Kwiple.com
Kwiple dictionary cost cutting (kôst kut'ing), n. Euphemism for firing people. © 2015 Kwiple.com
Kwiple dictionary First Amendment (fûrst ə mend' ment), n. According to Supreme Court decisions since the mid-1970s, it's the Constitutional provision that guarantees corporations and non-profits the right to spend unlimited amounts to buy elections, legislatures and courts, and ordinary people the right to burn flags in protest, except on its grounds. © 2015 Kwiple.com
Kwiple dictionary multinational corporation (mul'tē nash'ə nl kôr'pə rā'shən), n. A corporation far surpassing pre- revolutionary French aristocrats in its global reach, ownership of the Earth's resources, accumula- tion of wealth, desire for tax avoidance and lack of a sense of obligation or loyalty to its workers and others, but has yet to face its 1789. © 2015 Kwiple.com
Kwiple dictionary tort reform (tôrt ri fôrm'), n. A corporate-sponsored movement to achieve (1) legal immunity for damages or injuries resulting from using their products, and (2) legal immunity from being sued or having to provide victims with financial compensation. A post-tort-reform example: Your baby becomes mentally retarded from eating peeling paint. Tough shit. Learn to be a better parent. © 2015 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Amend the Constitution to deny personhood to corporations and other such artificial entities while preserving their right to enter into contracts © 2015 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Amend the Constitution to guarantee governments' right to pass ordinances or laws to protect public health, public safety or the environment, even though they may adversely affect companies' profits © 2015 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Getting firms to bring money home by lowering taxes on profits earned abroad will richly reward shareholders and do little for anyone else © 2017 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Nondisparagement agreements are nothing but silencers on corporate guns © 2017 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Prohibit the Small Business Administration from lending to franchisees or guaranteeing loans to them, which drives truly independent small businesses out of business and transfers the costs of failures from corporate franchisors to taxpayers © 2017 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Tax multinational corporations by apportioning their consolidated worldwide profits to countries  based on the percentage of revenue from sales to customers in the country © 2016 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say What's good for corporations is often no good for countries  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Law Being inanimate should not be a barrier to legal personhood – the courts are well populated by inanimate objects: the State, the Church and the corpo- ration have all, over the centuries, been recognized by the law. Why shouldn't nature have the same legal standing as the companies seeking to exploit it? André Dao,  “What if trees could sue?” New Philosopher #14: Nature © 2016 Kwiple.com
Leadership roles In total, there are just four black chief executives among the 500 largest companies in the country. New York Times, June 6, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Lobbyists In 2006 … more than half of all registered lobbying organizations represented corporations or business associations, while a bare 1 percent each represented labor unions and poor people. Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? © 2019 Kwiple.com
Markets Another reason for the concentration of corporate power is political capture. Americans invented modern antitrust policy, and love to rail against “statist” old Europe. But a fascinating study by academics Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon shows that EU markets are, in fact, more competitive. They have lower levels of concentration, lower excess profits, and lower regulatory barriers to entry. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 23, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Modernity By himself, the human being, whether worker or manager, is incapable of producing.  Peter Drucker © 2017 Kwiple.com
Money in politics In order to achieve the widest possible distribution of political power, financial contributions to political campaigns should be made should be made by individuals alone. I see no reason for labor unions – or corporations – to participate in politics. Barry Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative © 2019 Kwiple.com
Money in politics In the 2015-16 election cycle, business outspent labor $3.4 billion to $213 million, a ratio of 16 to 1, according to the non- partisan Center for Responsive Politics. All of the nation's unions, taken together, spend about $48 million a year for lobbying in Washington, while corporate America spends $3 billion. Little wonder that many lawmakers seem vastly more interested in cutting taxes on cororations than in raising the minimum wage. Steven Greenhouse, New York Times, August 3, 2109 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Money in politics My warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out if politics. … I'm not talking about political contributions. Mitch McConnell © 2022 Kwiple.com
Multinational corporations An international business operating throughout the world should conduct its operations in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs of its management, or the political beliefs of the countries in which it is operating. Alfred P. Sloan, Chairman of the Board from 1937 to 1956 of the General Motors Corporation, whose German operations manufactured armaments for Hitler during World War II © 2020 Kwiple.com
Power  The difficulty is not that corporate power is beyond the control of the American government. It is that corporate power controls the American government. Robert B. Reich, The System © 2021 Kwiple.com
Profits  If it's wrong to wreck the planet, then it's wrong to profit from that wreckage. Bill McKibben and Kumi Naidoo  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Public discourse America's least-trusted institutions — Congress, television news and big business, says Gallup — are remorselessly heard-from. The most trusted are the military (a closed box to most citizens) and small business (too poor to advertise at scale). … The feeling of your pain, the stakeholder-flattery: ingratiation has been the way of public and private elites during the exact era that trust in them has dropped. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Coddle monopolists © 2017 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Immunize corporate executives against criminal prosecution © 2017 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Passing laws by rubber-stamping bills written for us by corporate lobbyists is change we believe in © 2017 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Sacrificing the environment and public health to increase corporate profits is change we believe in © 2017 Kwiple.com
Resisters say If I make my uterus a corporation will yall stop regulating it? Placard, Women's March on Washington, January 21, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Science Scientists deliver outcomes favorable to companies, while university research departments court corporate support. Universities and regulators sacrifice full autonomy by signing confidentiality agreements. And academics sometimes double as paid consultants. New York Times, January 2, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Arbitration benefits all parties © 2016 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Arbitration is not in the pocket of corporations © 2017 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements deter “crime in the suites” © 2016 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Getting firms to bring money home by lowering taxes on profits earned abroad will create more jobs for humans here than for robots © 2017 Kwiple.com
Socialism The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibility for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are – or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously – preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Milton Friedman © 2019 Kwiple.com
State of the union Business practices aimed at boosting shareholder value – like outsourcing, offshoring, automation, union-busting, predatory lending, and a range of anti-competitive abuses – have undermined the security of large swaths of the country. In turn, a flood of business dollars for campaign donations and lobbying over decades has helped thwart effective government responses to rising pain on Main Street. David Callahan © 2017 Kwiple.com
Stock markets The performance of the S&P 500 index is now the most concentrated it has been since the 1970s. Seven of the biggest constituents  — Apple, Microsoft, Google owner Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla and Meta — have ripped higher, gaining between 40 per cent and 180 per cent this year. The remaining 493 companies are, in aggregate, flat. Financial Times, June 15, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Surely you jest Multinationals faking wokeness to attract liberal millenials © 2016 Kwiple.com
Surely you jest Saying companies can have religious beliefs  --> © 2017 Kwiple.com
Tax evasion By my estimate, the artificial shifting of profits to low-tax locales enables US companies to reduce their tax liabilities, in total, by about $130 billion a year. Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations  © 2016 Kwiple.com
Taxes The company's army of lawyers and tax advisers had used every loophole to ensure GE paid a grand total of zero federal taxes on its $5.1 billion of U.S. profits in 2010. The company even claimed a rebate from the Internal Revenue Service. That's what a thousand-strong tax department can do for its employer. Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Taxes If my tax bill was 0.05 percent falling to 0.005 per cent, I would think I need to take a second look at my tax bill. Margrethe Vestager, European Union competition commissioner, ordering the Irish government to recover €13 billion ($14.5 billion), plus interest, from Apple, Inc., for allowing it to pay virtually no tax on profits from sales in Europe and other markets for 25 years by allocating them to a “stateless”-for-tax-purposes “head office” located in Ireland that had no employees, no premises and existed only on paper © 2016 Kwiple.com
Taxes Multinationals pay less tax despite curb on avoidance  — — — — — — — — — — — • Effective rate drops 9% in a decade • State cuts make up only half of fall headline, Financial Times, March 12, 2018 [print edition] © 2018 Kwiple.com
Taxes The new corporate tax cuts are unlikely to stimulate the level of job creation and wage growth that the Trump administration has promised, a trio of prominent economists has concluded, because high tax rates were not pushing much investment out of the United States in the first place. Instead, the researchers conclude, multi- national corporations based in the United States and other advanced economies have sheltered nearly 40 percent of their profits in tax havens like Bermuda, depriving their domestic governments of tax revenues and enriching wealthy shareholders. New York Times, December 8, 2016 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Taxes Under the new law, income made by American companies' overseas subsidiaries will face United States taxes that are half the rate applied to their domestic income, 10.5 percent compared with the new top corporate rate of 21 percent. … Under the new rules, beyond the lower rate, companies will not have to pay United States taxes on the money they earn from plants or equipment located abroad, if those earnings amount to 10 percent or less of the total investment. New York Times, January 8, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
TPP Big corporations used the secretive process of negotiating the TPP to win big at the expense of the rest of us. More than 500 corporate advisers had access to the TPP text during the seven years of negotiations, while the public and the press were locked out. TPP would also grant new rights to thousands of multinational corporations to sue the US government before a panel of three corporate lawyers. These lawyers can award the corporations unlimited sums to be paid by America's taxpayers, including for the loss of expected future profits. Melinda St Louis, Financial Times, 2016/10/11 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Supreme Court to large corporations  Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you Matthew 7:7 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Surveillance  … surveillance must always go both ways. If surveillance goes only from top to bottom, this is the high road to dictatorship. So whenever you increase surveillance of individuals, you should simultaneously increase surveillance of the government and big corporations too. … If it is not too complicated to start monitoring what you do — it is not too complicated to start monitoring what the government does. Yuval Harari, Financial Times, February 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Unions In many corporations, the mentality is that any supervisor, whether a factory manager or retail manager, who fails to keep out a union is an utter failure. That means managers fight hard to quash unions. One study found that 57 percent of employers threatened to close operations when workers sought to unionize, while 47 percent threatened to cut wages or benefits and 34 percent fired union supporters during unionization drives. Steven Greenhouse, New York Times, August 3, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
t Want foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws without appearing in U. S. courts? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com
t Want laws written in secret by lobbyists for multinationals? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com
Want multinationals to control how elected officials use tax dollars? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com
t Want multinationals to have power to nullify laws passed by democracies? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com
Want multinationals to impose court decisions won in one country on other countries? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com
Want multinationals to limit your access to content you paid for? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com
Want multinationals to prevent im/exporting of intellectual properties? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com
t Want multinationals to roll back efforts to avoid future financial collapses? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com
Want multinationals to rule over nation states? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com
Want multinationals to sap efforts to mitigate the effects of global warming? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com
Want multinationals to store medical & other personal data about you overseas? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com
 
Want multinationals to sue a country if its laws lower their “expected future profits”? If not, tell your Congressman to Vote No on TPP © 2015 Kwiple.com