Mammon category archive

When you run the numbers, it sure begins to look as if the “gig economy” is a rigged economy.

I blame the Chicago School, whose theories fed the notion that “return to shareholders” is the ultimate responsibility of a business, greater than maintaining the health and integrity of the business itself. This, in turn, provided a rationalization for looters to claim that, if looting a business increased return to shareholders, then, well, looting a business is a righteous act in the interest of the greater good.

Or, to put it another way, the Chicago School provided Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes for the Gordon Gekkos of the world, who proclaim that “Greed is good.”

Robert Reich argues that (some of) today’s generation of robber barons are looking to turn back the clock. An excerpt:

Musk, Thiel, Murdoch, and other billionaires now backing the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything — at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.

Follow the link for his evidence.

PoliticalProf.

I blame the Chicago School and the notion it birthed that the first duty of a company is to provide returns to shareholders.

Or you can read the transcript.

At Above the Law, Joe Patrice considers a Reuters report that Tesla is under investigation for inflating the “self-driving” capabilities of its vehicles. A snippet:

But just how far is too far when it comes to puffery? Tesla has advertised its system as an “autopilot” despite being little more than a driver assistance program.

At The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel looks at what went wrong at Boeing. A snippet (emphasis added):

In 1997, Boeing acquired McDonnell Douglas, one of their largest competitors, in a $13.3 billion merger, which at the time was the 10th biggest in US history. In so doing, it also adopted the company’s CEO, Harry Stonecipher, into executive leadership—a man who, as Wise points out, subscribed to the Jack Welch philosophy of maximizing short-term shareholder value at all costs.

That view quickly took hold at the new Boeing. One CEO after another drove up Boeing’s stock value by skimping on its greatest assets: its world-leading engineering and the experts who made it possible. In the last decade alone, the company spent over half a billion dollars on executive pay and $40 billion on stock buybacks instead of reinvesting those profits in operations. Cracks in this approach started showing in 2018 and 2019, when two faulty 737 Max planes crashed, leaving 346 people dead.

Sam talks with David Dayen about the FTC’s recent ruling on “non-compete” agreements and how those agreements became weaponized to suppress wages.

Sportswriter extraordinaire Bob Molinaro runs the numbers:

BetVirginia has announced that the March sports betting handle was up 16.6% over February. “State coffers,” a press release notes, “benefitted (sic) from both college and professional basketball wagers.” As for the cost to the plungers who throw good money after bad picks or the long-range societal damage of young men getting hooked on easy online gambling, that’s not the state’s problem, right? Not for now, anyway.

Of you can read the transcript.