The NLRB’s complaint agst SpaceX is based on a law *illegal for cos. to fire or otherwise retaliate agst workers who join together to improve work conds. 8 employees' letter: SpaceX: spell out its anti-harassment policies & enforce them more effectively.
If their lawsuit succeeds in getting the fed courts to declare: NLRB unconst. -could set a dangerous precedent-.
"Inflation is not about the dude at Arby's who got a 50 cent raise 3 months ago or a $1400 check 3 years ago. It's about corporations making record profits by ripping-off Americans so CEOs can spend trillions on stock buybacks & dividends. It's about corporate greed, boss."
~ Warren Gunnels, re: Kathy Jones saying, "Corporate profits rose to a new all time high in Q4 of 2023"
"General Mills just paid a $300 million dividend to investors, bought back $150 million in stock to enrich execs and investors and pays its CEO $16 million. It makes 2.1 billion a year in profit.
It is raising prices on cereals 20% and blaming 'inflation.'"
"Why are we talking about whether paying fast food workers a better wage will drive up the cost of a Big Mac instead of asking how much
McDonald's CEO's $17.8M
salary is driving up the cost?"
Key takeaways from Judd Legum's latest on the corporate profit bonanza:
"In the last three months of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion."
"Theoretically, this should not happen. Corporations should not be able to dramatically increase their profit margins by increasing prices because competitors should step in with lower prices and steal market share."
"Supply shocks related to the pandemic created widespread cost increases that consumers accepted. Although those supply shocks have dissipated, many businesses have maintained higher prices anyway."
"Economist Christian Weller notes that corporations are using their record profits 'mainly to pay dividends to their shareholders and building up their stockpiles of cash.'"
"At the end of 2023, Americans were paying at least 30 percent more for beef, pork, and poultry products than they were in 2020.
Why? Near-monopoly power. Just four companies now control processing of 80 percent of beef, nearly 70 percent of pork, and almost 60 percent of poultry. So of course it’s easy for them to coordinate price increases."
"Just how outsourced is Boeing’s production? Almost two weeks after the Alaska Airlines blow-out, it was revealed that the door plug that blew out of the Alaska Airlines plane wasn’t actually produced in Wichita. It was produced in Malaysia, where workers’ concerns about speed of production and quality oversight are apt to have even less impact on their managers than in the United States."
Bit of UBI goodness. The only reason it's not implemented is because if people weren't stuck in underpaid jobs where corporations don't pay a living wage and welfare is used then they might ask questions.
And last time that happened was the summer of 2020 which is why theyve been desperate to "return to normal".
For the pro-monopoly crowd that absolutely dominated antitrust law from the Carter administration until 2020, Amazon presents a genuinely puzzling paradox: the company's monopoly power was never supposed to emerge, and if it did, it should have crumbled immediately.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
@pluralistic From the post - an incredible insight:
Amazon is the poster-child for monopoly run amok. As Yanis Varoufakis writes in Technofeudalism, Amazon has actually become a post-capitalist enterprise. Amazon doesn't make profits (money derived from selling goods); it makes rents (money charged to people who are seeking to make a profit)
BTW - personally I have not purchased anything from amazon in years. I stopped my once in a random blue moon shopping at #WholeFoods, and absolutely refuse to become a #prime member.
While Wendy’s plans to price gouge you with Uber-style surge pricing, it’s simultaneously enriching wealthy shareholders with a $500 million stock buyback program.
That’s the thing about corporate greed: It’s shameless.
They’ll just keep pushing to see how far they can go.
#Tennessee has a lot of problems: infant mortality and maternal death rates, poverty, lack of healthcare access, low education spending, and many more.
But the #Republicans in the state legislature have different priorities. They’re busy passing huge corporate tax breaks!
The price of Huggies diapers went up 6% between April- June 2023.
Inflation, right? Wrong.
Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Huggies, reported that the cost to make its products fell by $75 million.They took the money and ran, banking $168 million in operating profits in Q3 2023.
Now, new research shows that corporate profits drove 53% of inflation during the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2023. During the 40 years prior to the pandemic, profits drove just 11% of price growth.
“A new report claims ‘resounding evidence’ shows that high corporate profits are a main driver of ongoing inflation, and companies continue to keep prices high even as their inflationary costs drop.
The report … found corporate profits accounted for about 53% of inflation during last year’s second and third quarters.”