Browsing PBH By Articles

How Corporate Profits Are Killing The Economy

The Article: Corporate Profits Are Eating the Economy by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.

The Text: Here are two things that are true about the economy today.

(1) The Dow Jones industrial average is poised to set a new record as corporate profits stretch to all-time highs.

(2) There are still fewer working Americans today than there were before the start of the Great Recession.

The fact that these two things can be true at the same time might outrage you. But it shouldn’t surprise you. In the last 30 years, there has been a great divergence between growth and workers’ incomes, as the New York Times reminds us today. Corporate profits have soared, in the last decade especially, particularly because of three things: Globalization has pushed down the cost of labor available to multinational corporations; technology has allowed companies to make more with fewer workers, in general; and Big Finance has gobbled up the economy, as the banks’ share of total corporate profits has tripled to about one-third since the middle of the last century, according to Evan Soltas.

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Why Tax Avoidance Is A Bigger Problem Than Welfare Fraud

The Article: Welfare fraud is a drop in the ocean compared to tax avoidance by James Ball in The Guardian.

The Text: Joanne Gibbons was sentenced to community service for claiming income support while holding down two paid jobs. Through accumulated payments of £66-a-week, the court heard, she collected £3,140 to which she wasn’t entitled.

Predictably, the Daily Mail is outraged. But here’s the strange twist: had Gibbons claimed the benefits to which she was actually entitled, she could have collected £130 a week through family tax credits and child benefit. In total, Gibbons’ fraudulent claims cost the taxpayer around £3,100 less than claiming what she was actually entitled to.

It’s the reaction to Gibbons’ claims which are particularly noteworthy. Matthew Sinclair, chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance – an organisation rarely troubled by wealthy people’s tax avoidance – tells the Mail:

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The Extraordinary Science Of Addictive Junk Food

The Article: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food by Michael Moss in The New York Times.

The Text: On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.

James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.’s on America’s growing weight problem. “We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.” Getting the company chiefs in the same room to talk about anything, much less a sensitive issue like this, was a tricky business, so Behnke and his fellow organizers had scripted the meeting carefully, honing the message to its barest essentials. “C.E.O.’s in the food industry are typically not technical guys, and they’re uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people talk in technical terms about technical things,” Behnke said. “They don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to make commitments. They want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy.”

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Jason Russell And Viral Activism

The Article: Jason Russell: Kony2012 and the fight for truth by Carol Cadswalladr in The Guardian.

The Text: Exactly a year ago, Jason Russell was a nobody. Not a nobody, precisely, but just ordinary. Normal. He was a healthy father of two, living in San Diego, and was happy and fulfilled in his work as a director for Invisible Children, a non-profit organisation he’d helped found.

And then, on 5 March, he released Kony2012, a 30-minute film that explained why the world needed to catch and bring to justice Joseph Kony, a central African warlord, who, over the previous 26 years, had abducted 30,000 children and turned them into soldiers and sex slaves. Russell directed and starred in the film, and within hours it was on its way to becoming what was then the most viral video of all time. It took a day to hit a million views; six days to reach 100 million.

Every news outlet on the planet, it seemed, wanted an interview with him. Every news website in the world carried a story on him. Every blogger had an opinion on him. More than a million people left a comment about it on Youtube. On Facebook, 11 million people clicked on “share”.

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Bill Moyers On Shitty American Internet

The Article: Bill Moyers: Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair by Bill Moyers in AlterNet.

The Text: You’ve heard me before quote one of my mentors who told his students that “news is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.” That’s why two books are rattling the cages of powerful people who would rather you not read them. Here’s the first one. Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age by Susan Crawford. Read it and you’ll understand why we Americans are paying much more for internet access than people in many other countries and getting much less in return. That, despite the fact that our very own academics and engineers, working with our very own Defense Department, invented the internet in the first place.

Back then, the U.S. was in the catbird seat – poised to lead the world down this astonishing new superhighway of information and innovation. Now many other countries offer their citizens faster and cheaper access than we do. The faster high-speed access comes through fiber optic lines that transmit data in bursts of laser light, but many of us are still hooked up to broadband connections that squeeze digital information through copper wire. We’re stuck with this old-fashioned technology because, as Susan Crawford explains, our government has allowed a few giant conglomerates to rig the rules, raise prices, and stifle competition. Just like standard oil in the first Gilded Age a century ago.

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