News & Articles

When a big-name retailer finds its sales in a slow downward spiral, the geniuses in the executive suite often try to keep their profits up by cheapening their product and delivering less to customers.
To see how well this strategy works, look no further than the declining sales at Walmart and McDonald’s. When the geniuses in charge of these behemoths applied the cut-back strategy, their slow decline turned into a perilous nose-dive. You’d think their experience would keep other executives from making the same mistake, but here comes an even bigger – and much more important – retail behemoth saying, “We have to cut to survive.”
That’s the pronouncement last year by the honcho of the US Postal Service, which has been eliminating employees, closing facilities, and reducing services for years. Each new round of reductions drives away more customers, which causes clueless executives to prescribe more cuts. In a January decree, USPS virtually eliminated overnight delivery of first-class mail, and it’s now planning to close or consolidate 82 regional mail processing plants. This means fewer workers handling the nation’s growing load of mail, creating further delays in delivery. The answer to this, say the slap happy executives, is – guess what? – to cut even more “service” out of postal service. They want to close hundreds of our local post offices and eliminate Saturday mail delivery (which is one of USPS’ major competitive advantages).
Fed up with the deliberate degradation of this vital public service, postal workers themselves are putting forth a vision and innovative plan not merely for USPS to survive, but thrive. With more than 70 other national groups, they’ve forged “A Grand Alliance to Save Our Public Postal Service.” To be part of its actions, go to: www.AGrandAlliance.org.
“APWU Asks Union Members to Build Support for Postal Bills,” www.apwu.org, February 19, 2015, .

Why not televise the widening wealth gap?

The debilitating spread of inequality between the superrich 1-percenters and America’s downwardly mobile majority is of huge economic, political, and cultural significance to our country. So why is it largely ignored by the television media?
Meet David Zaslav, CEO of the Discovery Channel’s cable-TV empire. His salary last year was $3 million – but it was padded with an extra $6 million bonus, nearly $2 million in perks, and a neat $145 million in special stock gimmes, a total paycheck of $156 million. For one guy in one year. Zaslav is not just a 1-percenter, but a top 1-thousandth-of-the-1-percenters.
Les Moonves at CBS is up there, too, wallowing in the $54 million he was paid in 2014. In fact, of the 10 most lavishly-paid corporate chieftains last year, six are television barons, with Comcast, Disney, Time Warner, and Verizon joining the elite class. Someone should cast the whole bunch of them in a reality-TV show called, “The Wealth Gap Are Us!”
What genius do they have that warrants such extravagant pay? None. It’s simply that they are lucky hirelings of an exclusive club of wealth that owns and controls most television conglomerates. The billionaire media tycoon Sumner Redstone, for example, owns nearly 80 percent of the voting stock of both CBS and Viacom, so $50 million for Moonves is not a stretch for him, nor can other stockholders stop his excess. Likewise, only three billionaires control Discovery, and $156 million for Zaslav is nothing to them. Then there’s Comcast, which owns NBC and Universal Studios. It’s CEO, Brian Roberts, controls a third of the conglomerate’s stock – so he’s essentially able to set his own pay.
When so few people with such massive wealth control the media, the media is not likely to turn its public spotlight on the malefactions of great wealth.
“6 of 10 best-paid CEOs are media executives,” Austin American Statesman, May 27, 2015.

The legalized immorality of Big Pharma

Al Capone, the infamous mob boss and bootlegger in Chicagoland during the 1920s, always maintained that he was just a businessman, saying the only difference between him and others was that the law criminalized his business, while legalizing the criminality of so-called “legitimate” businessmen.
Of course, big business bosses today would find their comparison to mob bosses distasteful – yet it’s not that far from a true fit for many of their corporate “enterprises.” After all, we regularly see shameless racketeering schemes from the establishment peers of Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Food, etc.
Then there are the wiseguys of Big Pharma, whose industry-wide business model is based on legalized price gouging. On February 10, for example, Valeant Pharmaceuticals stunned heart patients, doctors, and hospitals by suddenly jacking up the price of two essential life-saving heart drugs. By a lot – Valeant tripled the price of a single vial of Nitropress, from $260 to more than $800, while sextupling the price of Isuprel from $215 a vial to nearly $1,400!
Had the drug maker improved the medicines? No, they were exactly the same formulations as before. The only thing that changed was ownership – Valeant had bought the rights to the medications from another company on February 10. Then, on that very day, it arbitrarily used its monopoly control to exact a rip-off price from those who have no choice but to pay it. A spokeswoman for Valeant was unrepentant: “Our duty is to our shareholders and to maximize the value” of their investments, she declared.
By “duty,” the lady from Valeant didn’t mean a moral duty, but a “duty” manufactured by corporate lawyers and lobbyists to extract immoral profits from vulnerable people. Al Capone would smile approvingly at that rationalization.
“Firms Buy Rival Drugs, Then Raise Their Prices,” www.wsj.com, April 27, 1015.