Are you nuts?

Amy I love you but this for-profits free-for-all is why the chocolate industry is still using slavery, why the amazon is burning, and why a whole lot of other things are happening.

Are you nuts?

Amy I love you but this for-profits free-for-all is why the chocolate industry is still using slavery, why the amazon is burning, and why a whole lot of other things are happening.

NicoleK at August 25, 2019 10:09 PM

The only thing that damages the environment more than capitalism is socialism. You are probably too young to have experienced East Germany and Russia after World War II.

Ever been to Beijing? You can see the air inside the airport.

When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. Social justice is not about saving the environment it is about saying politically correct things while doing nothing.

The Amazon is not burning. At least, not at the rate people think. Most of the recent hysteria is due to bad data from a system used in Brazil to identify new fires for fire suppression. It has two problems: (1) it double-counts a lot of fires, and (2) it can't distinguish what kind of vegetation is burning. As it turns out, most of the fires are burn-offs of land that is already being used for farming or ranching; it's a method of controlling weeds and encouraging new growth that is also used in first-world nations.

Many of the news articles have used a photo from NASA for shock effect, while disregarding the description that NASA published with the photo. As such, the use of it is misleading.

this for-profits free-for-all is why the chocolate industry is still using slavery, why the amazon is burning, and why a whole lot of other things are happening. ~ NicoleK at August 25, 2019 10:09 PM

The only thing that damages the environment more than capitalism is socialism. ~ Isab at August 26, 2019 6:12 AM

Soviet bloc countries were filthy places. After the Cold War ended, we discovered just how filthy. Not in terms of litter, but in terms of chemicals in the air and water.

Isab put it nicely, "when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible." And in a socialist country, everything is done for, and by, "the people."

Capitalism is why you have safety devices on your cars. Socialists and activists will falsely claim it's because of the government but, in reality, it's because the automobile companies completed with each other to appeal to safety-conscious consumers - for a profit.

The East German Trabant automobile was a travesty. When the Berlin Wall came down hundreds of thousands of them were abandoned by the now-free East Germans in favor of Volkswagens, Opels, and Audis with seatbelts, turn signals, fuel gauges, anti-lock brakes, air conditioning, and a host of other features Western auto buyers took for granted because every car sold in the West had them.

Of the late model Trabant, AutoTrader said: "The 1980s model had no tachometer, no indicator for either the headlights or turn signals, no fuel gauge, no rear seat belts, and no external fuel door, and drivers had to pour a mix of gasoline and oil directly under the bonnet/hood." The East German party bosses were driven around in modern, safety-equipped Mercedes and BMW automobiles. The proles had to settle for a rattling death trap.

In addition to a disregard for public safety, the environmental damage done by the East German socialist/communist regime was incalculable. Colin Grabow, in The Federalist describes it:

When the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain was finally lifted to expose the inner workings of communism to Western eyes, one of the more shocking discoveries was the nightmarish scale of environmental destruction. The statistics for East Germany alone tell a horrific tale: at the time of its reunification with West Germany an estimated 42 percent of moving water and 24 percent of still waters were so polluted that they could not be used to process drinking water, almost half of the country’s lakes were considered dead or dying and unable to sustain fish or other forms of life, and only one-third of industrial sewage along with half of domestic sewage received treatment.

An estimated 44 percent of East German forests were damaged by acid rain — little surprise given that the country produced proportionally more sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and coal dust than any other in the world. In some areas of East Germany the level of air pollution was between eight and twelve times greater than that found in West Germany, and 40 percent of East Germany’s population lived in conditions that would have justified a smog warning across the border. Only one power station in East Germany had the necessary equipment to clean sulphur from emissions.

The East German town of Bitterfeld was one of the most polluted human-inhabited places on earth and was described Marlise Simons in The New York Times as “The air stings, and the water in brooks and rivers has turned to syrup....” A reporter for The Independent recalled gas masks lining the lobby of the guest house in which he stayed and that the leaves had turned brown by June due to the chemicals in the air and water.

Imagine what we'd find in China or North Korea when we're finally allowed to look.

Government control is not the answer. Remember, it was the government's EPA that caused the Gold King Mine waste disaster. And no one has been punished for it yet.

When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.

I've mentioned this here before, but read and weep. Make sure you check the section about Vozrozhdeniya.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

"Make sure you check the section about Vozrozhdeniya."

Well, gee, don't miss Lake Karachay, either.

-----

Amy I love you but this for-profits free-for-all is why the chocolate industry is still using slavery, why the amazon is burning, and why a whole lot of other things are happening.

Yeah, like your ability to buy food from all over the planet, drive a car that can go over 200MPH and still get ~25MPG, fly in a jet anywhere in the world...
...talk on your phone. Post here on one of a thousand different devices.
Why are you worried about slavery? In the USA, the self-promoting "experts" on the topic don't care at all except in attempting to extort yet more money from people who have nothing at all to do with their abject failure.

So. You gonna ban chocolate or invade a nation for cocoa beans?

On the topic of corporations: you're virtue-signalling, that's all. If you actually FORCED governments to make corporations divert their assets to some damned thing, you'd object to their poor price performance. In the process, you'd enable the government to force YOU to do such a thing, because you've forgotten or do not know that a corporation is a legal fiction built to coordinate an activity, chartered by the laws of the sponsoring state, which income comes from... you.

Here's a quick tip: want to use capitalism to protect the environment? Buy a rifle. Be it an AR-15 or one of the thousands of other models, 10% of the purchase price goes to conservation via the Pittman-Robertson Act.
The more expensive, the better!

Since people have already covered the environment and slavery issue my complaint is these CEOs are playing games with other people's money. Many of them aren't shareholders. They don't own the company, they just manage it. This isn't their money to do this with. In a similar vein these 'stakeholders' have no stake in the business.

For the most part these CEOs and advisers are incompetents who are looking for some excuse why they shouldn't be replaced for poor business performance. I doubt that will work out for them. When traditional economic results don't show up people will sell their stock and eventually the company will go under. They are like the Gillette guy. Quite frankly they aren't a concern. There are millions of ways to screw up a business and it happens all the time. Trendy socialist causes aren't significant. What is significant is managers for public employee pensions. They want an excuse to play politics with other people's money. Most such pension plans are already doomed to failure. This will just speed up that process.

The Business Roundtable is trying to give their customer (government pension managers) the cover they need to have fund while further destroying the retirement benefits of government employees.

https://www.aei.org/publication/asking-the-correct-question/

Nice hockey stick graph.

https://www.aei.org/publication/asking-the-correct-question/

Nice hockey stick graph.

Well, gee, don't miss Lake Karachay, either.

You forgive me if I take a pass on visiting a strontium-90 polluted area. But in reading the article, I saw that the town of Ozyorsk was once called Chelyabinsk-40. That seemed familiar. And then I noticed this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster

And that's when I remembered why it seemed familiar. And this gem from the Karachay link:

Little to no consideration was paid to worker safety or responsible disposal of waste materials, and the reactors all were optimized for plutonium production, producing many tons of contaminated materials and utilizing open-cycle cooling systems which directly contaminated every liter of the thousands of liters of cooling water the reactors used every day.

In the socialist system, if you're not in the Party, the Politboro, or a member of the nomeklatura, you're a replaceable cog in the great machine.

The Business Roundtable is trying to give their customer (government pension managers) the cover they need to have fund while further destroying the retirement benefits of government employees.

This right here. And not just government employees, but anyone with a 401k or 403b. And potentially retirees who were advised to put some money into large cap stocks because they're stable and pay reliable dividends.

How did our retirement investments go bust, dear?
Gradually, then suddenly.

Two points..

1. This is really a call to diminish the responsibility of corporate executives to the company's ownership. Currently, executives need to demonstrate that their actions are pursuant to the business interests of the company and that's ultimately measured by financial performance. If you change 'business interests' to 'socially responsible', they'll simply do what they want and call it 'socially responsible'.

2. And this shift also opens the company to all sorts of lobbying and extortionate campaigns from outsiders. Today executives can point to their fiduciary responsibility to the company's owners to justify why they can't divert resources to finance and execute social and political goals. If they don't have that defense, they're going to be forced to take sides.

Do you really want Blue Companys and Red Companys acting as ideological agents of political interests?? - take a look at what's been going on at Google.

How'd we get from companies shouldn't use slaves and destroy the environment to we should have socialism?

No, we need some standards. Things should cost what they actually cost. Those costs aren't free, they're being paid for. When global sea levels rise, we will all be paying for the walls to be built. When countries have slaves and horrific exploitation, we all pay when the refugees start flooding in.

Bullshit that there should be no standards.

We got there because you are the one who is being nuts NicoleK. You complained about the Amazon burning. But it isn't burning any more or less than it has been for quite some time. A 'for-profits free-for-all' isn't causing the Amazon to burn. In many ways it is the opposite. At one time it was common for certain rivers in the US to catch fire. Did government regulation stop that and punish the evil capitalists? No. Someone figured out how to sell the chemicals that were being dumped into a public area. It was capitalism that cleaned things up.

I agree there should be standards. But what the Business Roundtable is promoting is not the way to implement them. You as a customer should not buy from companies with practices you find abhorrent. People who are not customers, suppliers, owners, or lawful regulators should not be able to tell companies what they should and should not do. Nor should they be able to tell you where you should and should not be able to shop.

How'd we get from companies shouldn't use slaves and destroy the environment to we should have socialism? ~ NicoleK at August 26, 2019 10:29 AM

The unqualified and seemingly anti-capitalist scorn for "...this for-profits free-for-all...." led us there.

And just how much of this "being socially responsibility" is really about avoiding a shake down by SJW?

These leaders seem to have forgotten that by following their fiduciary duty they ARE doing good. They are making sure my retirement fund grows so I won't need welfare. They are keeping people employed so they can take care of their families. These employees pay taxes to cover the rest of the things society wants to do. They keep things running so there is gas at the gas station when you need it and stuff in the stores when you want it. The problem with doing good like this is that people take it for granted and want to be praised for doing MORE, something special. This is simple narcissism.

Something they really need to remember is "get woke go broke". It is a law.

Why is your default position the premise that Corporations and capitalists are evil, and they don’t care about the environment?

Sounds to me like you have been watching too many movies, or possibly some serious Oberlin brain washing.

> we all pay when the
> refugees start
> flooding in.

Um, didn't you flood out of the United States and flood into some other country? Who paid for it? I mean, what was the vector of transferred wealth that made you want to do it?

I mean, when you say "we," who exactly do you mean? Not harshing— Sincerely curious.

Had never heard of Karachay.

I hate commies.

I often hate American government regarding similar matters too, but man I hate commies.

I like this article by Bob Lewis today, "The Roundtable Turns".

https://issurvivor.com/2019/08/26/the-roundtable-turns/

A quote from the article:

...
"What matters more, as was first pointed out in this space seventeen years ago, there are bigger reasons for CEOs to reject such a puerile and shallow fiduciary philosophy as the pursuit of shareholder value.

It’s like this: Shareholder value, which is EconomistSpeak for making the price of a share of stock increase, is a poor predictor of future performance. Heck, it doesn’t even reliably describe current performance.

Why? you might ask. Answering a question with a question I might ask you in return, what does reliably describe current performance and accurately predict future performance?"
...

He explains more in the article, which ends with this:

"Which leads to this conclusion: The Business Roundtable has taken a correct step.

It’s for the wrong reason, but at least it’s a step."

No, the step the Business Roundtable has taken is wrong as well as being for the wrong reasons. Yes stock price is not a perfect predictor of future performance. It is the current value of a company based on it's current state and predictions of it's future state. The current state is known but the future can be quite hard to accurately predict. Calling for a more accurate way to predict the future is fine. Demonstrating that your new metric actually predicts things better than the old ones is even better. What the Business Roundtable has done is none of that.

“It’s like this: Shareholder value, which is EconomistSpeak for making the price of a share of stock increase, is a poor predictor of future performance. Heck, it doesn’t even reliably describe current performance.”

This is a simplified and disingenuous measure of value. Some shares pay interest and or dividends.
“Increase in value” can often be illusory and driven by inflation and market turmoil.

When global sea levels rise, we will all be paying for the walls to be built

Will we though?

Look at New Orleans, the resident there voted for DECADES to defer maintaining and upgrading their sea walls and just dumped the cost on the country as a whole

Also when I was in high school in the 90's I was assured that unless we "do something NOW" that by 2015 all the polar bears and penguins would be dead, there would be no more polar sea ice, Antarctica would be filled with refuges fighting each other to the death for arable land to grow crops, and the whole of Florida - the eastern seaboard to the Appalachians - most of Texas - and the western seaboard would all be 20 feet underwater by . . . .

2010

Amy,

I am a big fan of you and often frequently agreefully or nearly fully w/ the great bulk of your articles. In this case I respectfully dissent. Corporations when functioning with no conscience re the context of the bigger world around them often do great harm inadvertantly to some no. of ppl.

Thinking of all society as a big body cell, corporations can be viewed as one of the many and critical organelles, the mitochondria. If the mitochondria in a cell produce energy and prducts for the cell ignoring the damage they might do to nearby other organelles, eventually it is overall quite damaging to the whole cell. And the mitochondria exist to serve the cell, not damage it.

Same kind of idea here.

> What the Business Roundtable
> has done is none of that.

Maybe not, but at least they're running a centralized Clearing House!

They're not like those kids who're just relying on a number on a computer... which will always be something that can be changed, y'know?

Because economic considerations are extremely technical! Some people just don't understand!