Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for September 19, 2023

Bonuses all round, business as usual

“As a manufacturer of a wildly addictive software that spreads disinformation like a virus, we can either be financially bankrupt, or morally bankrupt. Pick one”

As if they knew how to measure responsibility.

And being morally bankrupt is a small cost of doing business

Market concentration is the corporate hedge against inflation.

That, and the tax cuts for the rich — especially the patriotic multinational corporations.

And we got this dip in the responsibility graph when we laid off half the employees, cut the pay of the rest, and invested the savings in bonuses for management and increasing the stock buy-back. And this dip was when we starting heating our factory by burning baby seals.

This is the entire corporate model.

Morally bankrupt, are we? Is that all? Okay. That’s fine. /s

Humans can have morals but corporations are inhuman.

I have often commented on Wiley’s prejudice against the business world, but reading these comments I’m more concerned now about the general public.

Hey, youse Executives. How about following that chart’s profit line right outta that open window? You’d be doing us all a big favor.

The corporation is not COMPLETELY immoral. It made its line of children’s’ breakfast only MILDLY addictive.

Big corporations love inflation. It gives them an excuse to raise their prices even higher than the actual increase, and it also lets them raise their executive salaries and bonuses.

Thus a colloquy of highest-level self-styled “Job Creators.”

Trump Inc. Headquarters.

It certainly helped when Good Will was considered an important corporate asset.

Seems to me that the last decade or 2, they’re less consumer demand driven, and instead dictating to us what we will like – then spending a fortune in advertising to create desire and demand.

where are the donuts.

So, business as usual. Nice. Laissez faire.

Oof. Thing is, give anybody (or government agency) that much success (power) and they’re liable to end up corrupted. One way or another.

Politicians are mini-corporations now; all profits and no public service

Only thing worse then big business is big government. Government programs that don’t work out don’t go bankrupt they continue on and usually get more money.

Businesses can go a long way on that chart and not feel the effects that are daily applied to the average person, worker or not. When the effects begin to impinge on their intake, they ‘adjust’ their plan to accommodate the changes. Just so long as the ‘profit’ run is on the upside, almost any plan will do.

Oh, how true. Record profits, and none of that nagging responsibility to spoil the fun.

there is a client fee to remedy that!

It is interesting that if you go back 50 years, you can find the same complaints as I am seeing today. A lot of people complaining that minimum wage needs to be raised and that all business leaders are corrupt. Simply, those that don’t have money want it. That is not a bad thing though it may sound like it, as it provides motivation to work smarter or harder to make your life better (at least much of the time). For some, regardless if they are rich or poor, they decide to take shortcuts and do dishonest things to try to achieve being richer. The sad part is those who take the shortcuts are never satisfied. The only entity that is better off as a result of inflation is government as its debt as a percentage of GDP goes down. No one else actually benefits. It is interesting to see all the references in the comments about record profits, guess what, inflation is a key factor in that on a real dollar basis, but not as a percentage of revenue basis. So, a businessman likes to try to attract investors by stating they are having record profits, the wise investors will look at the profits based upon percentages, not actual dollars. It is all a circle with each part feeding the next.

Morality won’t buy you a new Lexus. Money and morality are both imaginary concepts, not reality. Neither exists in nature so are therefore whatever a sufficient number of people agree them to be. The universe has no preference at all for one or the other. No matter what you like to think, if enough people agree that it’s properly moral that some people lose, that’s as valid a morality as any, and one that has a much longer history.

With great power comes great irresponsibly.

“corporation, n. an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility” —Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), American author, The Devil’s Dictionary

The words of our profits are written on the subway walls

Consider a simple example. Suppose that you, a private individual, really, really like a particular candidate for (let’s say) governor of Wisconsin. You like him so much that you write out a check for $1000 to his campaign, really serious money for the average working person. Then you go out and hit up 500 — 500! — of your friends, co-workers, family members, nabors, bowling teammates, service-club members, fellow parishioners, etc. to do the same. A walloping $500,000 from the lot of you — half a million bucks is a powerful showing of support from a whole lot of people! You had to work really hard to get it, but it was worth it.

Then the CEO of a large company, wanting the state to stop enforcing regulations that interfere with corporate profits, takes 5 minutes off to write a check for twice that (a million dollars) to your candidate’s opponent. She does this without needing to consult her workers, her customers, or even her stockholders — the people who were responsible for her having that million bucks in the corporate treasury in the first place and who might very well disagree with the use it was being put to if they’d ever been consulted (which they never are).

Whose interests are being represented here?

“Democracy” means “rule by the people”. What we have instead is either “plutocracy” (rule by the rich), “kleptocracy” (rule by thieves), or “kakistocracy” (rule by the worst).

US courts have determined that a corporation’s sole obligation is to return the best rate of return to its investors as legally possible.

Ethics and morality don’t factor when there’s a nickle to be made.

Since most of those creditors won’t collect until a possible afterlife, all we have to do is live forever and we’re good (well, maybe not “good”).

Is it better or worse that isn’t under the rubric of our bankruptcy laws?

Wiley, how can you be so right when you’re mostly wrong? A conundrum…

Is that an open window I see? Nah…

You guys take a lot of the fun out of reading the comics.

Most intelligent people are pretty sure corporations are responsible for the Greedflation going on right now as they are the ones with record profits.

Terrific … so we’re all right, then??

They don’t mind. It’s more profitable to pay the fines and go right back to screwing the public.

As a long time consultant: You should be be concerned about businesses.

You have to pull some good news out of bad news I suppose. :)

Companies exist to make a profit, governments exist to protect citizens, including protection from shoddy products, lying advertising, etc. And governments should apply taxes at levels that benefit society, not companies. I blame Reagan’s policies and the tax-lowering mantras that have deepened the inequality we see. I believe that corporations will be less inclined to award eight-figure salaries to their CEOs if Congress levied taxes on companies at the levels of the 70s.