Markets - Where did all the stocks go?
Public Companies In Decline
The number of public companies has fallen fast by Matt Phillips, David Crowther 4/28/24
"...After analyzing the effects of mergers, private-equity investment, and regulatory costs, the paper suggests that M&A is the main culprit. (Though they do theorize that higher costs associated with regulation could be a less important contributing factor.)
“Mergers seem to be the biggest driver of this trend,” Ali Sanati told Sherwood. Sanati is a finance professor at the American University in Washington, DC, and a coauthor of the 2023 paper.
The authors categorized mergers according to various financial metrics, noting that mergers motivated around financing and innovation “are the ones that effectively reduce the number of U.S. listings.”
Apple workers are striking at a store in Maryland by Millie Giles 5/13/24
"...In the aftermath of its outrage-inducing object-crushing advert, Apple has been dealt another PR blow, as it faces its first retail employee strike in history.
...While Apple is currently in the firing line for its employee practices, with labor unions like the Communications Workers of America accusing the tech giant of union-busting, collective strike action has been gaining traction across the US more widely..."
By Mary Wildfire, originally published by Resilience.org May 14, 2024
"...A sociopath is by definition selfish, concerned only about getting what he or she wants and unconcerned about anyone else’s needs. And what is it that they want? Usually wealth. Some—the narcissists—also want the spotlight, want fame and adulation. Some crave power for its own sake, aside from the need to use power to get more wealth. Some don’t care about either of those. But mostly, it seems, what the billionaires want is more money. They have more money than they could spend in twenty lifetimes but they still are willing to sacrifice our children’s future to get even more money. This is remarkably narrow thinking, a fascination with numbers—you might even call it machinelike..."
Millions of people are priced out of internet already, and it's only going to get worse.
"...Given how essential the internet now is to modern life, America remains worryingly uneven in its adoption of home broadband. According to a set of surveys that Pew Research Center has been running for the last 23 years, just 1% of American adults had a home broadband subscription in 2000; last year, 80% said the same. However, that growth hasn’t been mirrored across all income groups, with only 57% of adults in households where annual income is below $30K reporting a subscription to broadband at home late last year… and that was with the ACP in place..."
Kids can't do homework on Mom's phone, class. Internet should be regulated as a utility and available to everyone regardless of ability to pay. You literally can't function in modern society without it. You can't pay bills, and you can't find work.
I think there are tons of people who would love a regular car, an EV or Hybrid, without all that other electronic junk. Purposefully making transitioning to cleaner options too expensive is a stupid policy.
Just another of the many reasons why we don't buy Nestle products at home, and I didn't allow them at our congregation back when I was head of the kitchen - they're a sh!t company, dumping sub-standard products in poor nations that they would never sell at home. (Not to mention stealing their water for pennies on the dollar.)
This is why it feels like it’s getting harder to live on our wages. This was done on purpose by big business. The Democratic Party wants to fix this. The Republican Party created this situation and wants to block all efforts to fix it. #politics #economics #PredatoryCapitalism #VoteBlue
By The Last Farm, originally published by Adapt : Survive : Prevail April 1, 2024
"...Art is trans-historical and trans-cultural: for as long as humanity has existed, we have found meaning and joy in its production. Were we to be liberated from the shackles of petro-capitalism and its productivist whip, we would inevitably dedicate some of our hard-won free time to making more art. And were we to do so in a world that finally steps away from its suicidal addiction to fossil fuels, the art we would make would necessarily look quite different than it does today.
So what might the art of the future look like? ...These directions assume that art—along with the rest of our material culture—will rely primarily on organic materials... They also assume that the labor currently done by wage slaves and fossil fuels will instead be done by free people working collectively..."
Another example of capitalism willing to sacrifice you on the altar of their profits...
UK Government Holds its Nerve on Heat Pumps as Clean Heat Policy Confirmed
By Phoebe Cook, originally published by DeSmog Blog on March 25, 2024
"...In recent months, some boiler companies preemptively raised their prices by £125 per unit in anticipation of fines...Claire Coutinho, who accused the boiler manufacturers of “price gouging plain and simple”...
[Legislators] asked Callanan whether he’d read the “excellent investigative journalism” article published...on the gas lobby-funded campaign...
“My Lords, I’m supportive of a sensible debate on competing technologies, but planting misleading and false stories about heat pumps to negatively affect public support for the technologies is frankly a disgrace. And the big boiler manufacturers who fund the EUA should be ashamed of themselves...”
The existential threat of artificial stupidity By Bart Hawkins Kreps, originally published by An Outside Chance March 15, 2024
Class, a corporation is never going to allow an AI to "decide" that predatory capitalism, planned obsolescence, wasting resources, pollution, or consumerism is wrong and must end.
There is no basis for trusting ANY decision made by AI, simply because for-profit corporations are not going to allow it to "decide" anything at all that will go against their profit-at-all-costs imperative.
Not to mention the surveillance issues.
"...With minor variations headline writers have posed the question, “What if AI falls into the wrong hands?”
But AI is already in the wrong hands. AI is in the hands of a small cadre of ultra-rich influencers affiliated with corporations and governments, organizations which collectively are driving us straight towards a cliff of ecological destruction..."
Outdated Narratives Have Humanity in a Downward Spiral—It’s Time to Tell ‘Stories for Life’
By April M. Short, originally published by Resilience.org
March 1, 2024
"An animated short film, which screened between acts on the big screens of each of the four main stages at the Glastonbury Music Festival in 2022, delves into the idea of story as a means for change. It is titled, “Stories for Life,” and it opens with scenes of fire, a child digging through a pile of trash, plastic rubbage floating in the water, and smoke billowing from an industrial tower. A narrator’s voice speaks over the imagery: “Life is in trouble. As a species, we are facing crises that we can no longer ignore. At the root of them all is our economy; an economy designed to destroy life; an economy designed by us.”
As the narration continues, a series of illustrations seem to lay out the challenges of our world, one by one...
"Admittedly, Crazy Town can be a dark place to inhabit – just look at some of the topics from our previous seasons (e.g., Terror Management Theory, ecomodernist fantasies, and accidental self-defenestration, for crying out loud!).
That’s why we’re bringing you “Escape Routes” as the theme of our sixth season, which is dropping Wednesday, March 13.
Each episode this season will highlight how we can escape some sort of destructive -ism, including industrialism, consumerism, urbanism, capitalism, and globalism."
"Not that business reform is by itself sufficient for sustainability. The economy grows as an integrated whole, ultimately limited by agricultural and extractive surplus at the base. (That is the essence of the “trophic theory of money.”) In other words, not all businesses can be truly “green,” even if most can become “less brown.” That’s why there is a limit to economic growth and a fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. Therefore, macroeconomic policies to cap the size of the economy are a prerequisite to sustainability.
...We need to reform businesses so they adopt environmental protection goals on their own. This means encouraging new legal forms of business: ones that allow the purpose, governance, and role of profit to align with the steady-state goal."
"Excess Retirees" are people who have decided to retire above and beyond what the Federal Reserve model predicted.
You can tell the workforce is getting to be a stressful and unfulfilling place to be when people bail from it, as lots and lots of people are doing - either to retire or to be older entrepreneurs (or both).
Of course, retirement is a pipe dream for a lot of us, so we can speculate that these are people with 401ks and IRAs or good social security benefits who would be reasonably expected to keep their jobs longer, but decided to leave.
The Fed, of course, does not know exactly why they all retired early. But we can guess...
Anyway, you can expect to hear more squawking from the GOP about how a self-funded program is somehow torching the general budget, when a very easy tweak to the tax code could fix that.
There is absolutely no reason not to raise the salary cap for social security taxes, but they'll pretend they need to cut benefits.
The modern predatory capitalist society completely ignores normal and natural cycles of nature and human biology. This expectation that people work like machines, this plantation mentality, is destructive and must be eliminated. We have to learn to live WITH nature, not in spite of it.
One of government's main responsibilities is to protect citizens; from outside enemies, to be sure, but on a day to day basis the protection most needed is from predators who call themselves capitalists. Instead of providing that protection, government collects its pay and takes its marching orders from them. #PredatoryCapitalism #Oligarchy
Some notable reviews given (via Waterstones website) to newly-published “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy” by investigative journalists Claire #Provost and Matt #Kennard.
Noam Chomsky: “This wide-ranging inquiry-based on intensive on-the-ground investigation-unearths 'a parallel world, outside of scrutiny...with very real consequences. An ugly world, out of control, unaccountable, but with overwhelming power. It ranges from investor-state legal systems to intricate systems of corporate welfare that aid elites and investors. Always concealed in elaborate devices of seeming to do good. Silent Coup is a highly revealing expose of the hidden real world.”
Jayati Ghosh: “Silent Coup is a crime story: a gripping description of the murky legal, and regulatory structures and policy changes that privilege big corporations. It's a tragedy, outlining the terrible consequences for people and nature, for democracy and accountability. It's a lesson in economics, providing fascinating and important insights into the functioning of global capitalism today. But finally it's also a story of hope, about apparently powerless people resisting these trends in the struggle for better and more just futures. Don't miss this.”
Vadana Shiva: “Silent Coup is investigative journalism at its best. It shows us how corporations rule the world: suing sovereign, democratic governments in invisible courts to erode constitutions and the democratic rights they enshrine-and writing laws and treaties to privatise the earth's resources and public goods. Sovereign communities and countries are being displaced by sovereign companies and the supranational systems they have built to establish their control, creating in the process our age of corporate colonialism. The book is vital reading for all who care for human freedom, human rights and democracy.”