Twinkie maker Hostess pissed off a lot of reasonable people by not only cutting worker pay while leaving the CEO's pay untouched, but also giving executives $1.75 million in bonuses at the same time they are liquidating the company and laying off 15,000 workers. That's some brazen shit. More enraging is how typical such behavior is.
American states, counties, and cities routinely offer huge tax incentives and subsidies to private businesses in order to lure those businesses into locating themselves in a particular place. Spend a little to get a lot, the theory goes. Priming the pump of economic development, etc. The problem is that what is supposed to be spending for the public's benefit in fact benefits only private corporations. And it should be outlawed.
Corporate executives at public companies are allowed to buy and sell stock in their own company—but they are not allowed to buy and sell stock in their own company based on nonpublic information (information that they would know, but that the average investor would not). That would be insider trading, which is illegal. So why do executives seem to do far better than average when trading their own company's stock? HMMM.
Knick-knack monster Wal-Mart is facing an uncharacteristically well-organized worker strike this Friday, on what is one of the busiest shopping days of the year. The company is scared enough to try to get the NLRB to tell the company's own employees they can't protest. Since we can't imagine that that long-shot attempt at crushing dissent will be successful, you should be ready for Wal-Mart Black Friday: Protest Edition.
Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the world. It is also stridently anti-union, fearing that a unionized workforce could be an existential threat to its cut-every-last-penny business model. Unions have been trying unsuccessfully for years to organize Wal-Mart's work force. (See here if you're unclear on why Wal-Mart workers might need a union.) But the latest push seems to have the big bad retailer a little shook.
Let's get a few things straight right off the bat. Number ONE, the "Millennial" generation is the best generation, because they are currently the most fuckable-looking, and therefore their every whim and desire must be obsequiously catered to by the corporate forces seeking to exploit their "cool" factor for profit; Number TWO, all food must be recast in the image of whatever a corporation imagines the Millennial Image to be; and Number THREE, soup is great, mmmm, soup. We must have some Campbell's Millennial Soup.
Last month, David Siegel, the CEO of Westgate Resorts, sent his thousands of employees a very ominous letter warning them that if Barack Obama was reelected, it could "endanger your job," and that "If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, as our current President plans, I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company." So... has everyone been fired, yet?
David Siegel is the founder and CEO of Westgate Resorts, a huge national timeshare company and one of the largest resort developers in the world. In 2007 he was a billionaire, although he may be only a hundred-millionaire now. He and his wife Jackie were the subjects of the recent documentary "The Queen of Versailles," about their ongoing quest to build the largest house in America, a 90,000 square foot monument to excess. And yesterday, David Siegel sent an email to all of his thousands of employees, in which he—in a veiled way—insinuated that they would be fired of Barack Obama is reelected.
Lincoln, the auto company whose average customer is the same age as Abraham Lincoln, has a problem: they're rolling out a hot new car, and they would like to sell it to some people who may not be about to die. Where is the more youthful, affluent audience for this stupid car? If you said "probably buying a BMW," you are far too honest to ever be a chief marketing officer.
Devil-tinted big box retailer Target has one great competitor that keeps its executives awake at night. No, not Wal-Mart—Amazon. It's Amazon that is poised to become the amorphous online "big box" of the future, leaving today's big, concrete boxes in a perilous position. But Target has a plan to save itself: it will give all of its customers an AMAZING shopping experience.
World-beating crap purveyor Wal-Mart turns 50 years old this year. They can celebrate because they're the world's biggest retailer and destroyer of the American dream; we can celebrate because the store has abandoned its plans to build a store in NYC, for the moment. And everyone can celebrate with this nice, furious rant sent to us by a former Wal-Mart employee.
The lamestream media would have you believe that the greedy little wastrel "Millennial" generation should actually be called "Generation Y." Do not believe this Millennialist propaganda, gentle readers. They are Millennials, and they are the best. And they're coming to take over your workplace with their youthful, self-indulgent demands.
It appears that Wal-Mart has turned around its two-year long sales slide that seemed, momentarily, to mark the end of America's love affair with big box bottom-feeding. Same-store sales have now risen for four straight quarters, overseas sales are growing, and the company is once again dominant enough to be considered the leading indicator of the financial health of you, the consumer. So how are you doing out there? Poorly.
In the past 40 years or so, CEOs have gone from earning 20 times more than the average worker, to more than 230 times the average worker. Over the same period of time, unions have weakened to the point that successful companies feel comfortable asking for unprecedented concessions from workers at the same time the company is reaping record profits. What do these things have to do with each other? Everything.
Corporate America knows that the key characteristic of you, the consumer, is this: you are a liar. You lie to your wife. You lie to your boss. And, worst of all, you lie to corporate America survey-takers whose job it is to determine what you like so that corporate America can sell that thing to you. What do you really like? Corporate America will track your eyeballs in order to find out.
If you read "the business section" or invest in a "portfolio" or are a member of or have ever gotten into an argument with a member of "the Republican Party," you're probably familiar with the argument that corporations have a moral and legal duty to act solely to grow their value for their own shareholders. If you are not a corporation's shareholder, in other words, it has no duty to do shit for you. Now, this idea is being challenged. BUT: should it be?
Since we started covering Target's voracious anti-unionism and labor woes last year, former employees have described the company to us as "humiliating," "'pleasant' slavery," and "the sketchiest place I ever worked," among many other things. But—to our surprise—Target is also one of the "World's Most Ethical Companies."
Earlier this month, a flack named Stephanie Harnett—who worked for Mercury Public Affairs, and whose client was Wal-Mart—was caught posing as a reporter to sneak into an anti-Wal-Mart event in Los Angeles. She was fired soon after we published the story, and both Wal-Mart and Mercury decried her actions. The firm said that Harnett was not acting on their orders. (Later, a different former PR person who worked on Wal-Mart's behalf told us that she had been instructed to use similar tactics by her own firm.)
