Let’s reboot this thing. Have at thee.
Political Discussion In The 20s
- This topic has 979 replies, 27 voices, and was last updated 4 years, 8 months ago by
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This is our current sad example of what spreading fear of islam and our muslim fellow citizens leads to:
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-eleven-dead-in-suspected-far-right-attack/a-52438047
Germany: Eleven dead in suspected far-right attack
[Ah, shit, sorry, the copied part is showing the formatting stuff again… basically, a guy walked into two different hooka bars and shot and killed nine people.]
There is little doubt that mental illness is a factor here – the guy apparently had a youtube channel where he sprouted all kinds of conspiracy theory nonsense – but I am sure that the current climate in which unstable people are told that they are at war with a culture trying to replace them does its part in causing people like this to actually become violent.
More information the case and its background, for anyone interested:
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You’re actually a 23 year old female contortionist?
No, Todd, you’re thinking of Miqque.
Post #420 and it’s about Miqque?
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You’re actually a 23 year old female contortionist?
No, Todd, you’re thinking of Miqque.
Post #420 and it’s about Miqque?
Tim is the imperfect clone of Miqque.
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Oh my fucking God how evil is Putin
Two words: Alexander Litvinenko.
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Yup. Sergei Magnitsky are two more.
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We need to be careful here – yes, these claims about Putin’s interference have been made since Obama was an outlier, and they likely don’t count for much now on Sanders, but it’d be silly to discount the numerous links between Russian agents and the 2016 result.
Just because some of the claims are BS doesn’t mean all of them are.
An annoying aspect of this topic is that Russian 2016 interference claims are dismissed as crackpot theories by the right wing (they don’t want to admit that their dude is compromised or that his win was anything other than a result of his ability), and by the far left (who don’t want to concede that Hillary could have ever won; it also blunts their “Bernie would have won” message (which we may get to test in November anyway)).
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Bloomberg is chucking money at it but I’m not sure how intelligently that’s being spent.
I saw some exampled the other day of a Twitter post criticising him and underneath were 20 completely identical responses from users with the same pro-Blloomberg hashtag that hadn’t posted on the platform for several years. Nice for them getting $10 a tweet or whatever he’s paying them but it’s not subtle, they are so obviously being paid for it’ll likely turn off as many people as it attracts.
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Right now, Bernie is running away with it.
Im sort of more interested in who the VP picks are. Id bet Warren has been approached by all camps.
Excluding Bloomberg, obviously
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Bloomberg is chucking money at it but I’m not sure how intelligently that’s being spent.
I saw some exampled the other day of a Twitter post criticising him and underneath were 20 completely identical responses from users with the same pro-Blloomberg hashtag that hadn’t posted on the platform for several years. Nice for them getting $10 a tweet or whatever he’s paying them but it’s not subtle, they are so obviously being paid for it’ll likely turn off as many people as it attracts.
He’s also got Instagram memes account doing promoted posts, which is a bizarre choice.
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I’m very excited with Bernie’s wins. Tbh, when he announced he was running again I was skeptical. I never stopped liking him but I was worried his moment had passed and he would just fizzle out and embarrass himself. So I’m glad to be proven wrong there.
But the point is I was most excited by Elizabeth Warren at the start of this primary cycle. My second choice was Kamala Harris. But Harris backed off M4A and had a troubling record as DA. But Warren’s campaign has been even more disappointing in some ways. She’s trying to appeal to the left and the center at the same time and it’s not working. The hot mic stunt was embarrassing, as is her utilization of the “Bernie Bro” narrative in recent weeks. I don’t mind her going after Bernie but she’s picking bullshit reasons that seem designed to appeal to the pundit and donor classes.
Most disappointing though is her own waffling on M4A. I just don’t get the reasoning behind splitting the fight into two bills, one of which she’d seek after 2022 when we may lose the House. It’s concerning to say the least; paired with her tacking to the center lately makes me wonder how hard she’d even fight for M4A. I want a fighter in the White House, not someone who’ll back down to Meghan freaking McCain in an interview.
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I kinda like Bernie but I think his proposed wealth tax is too draconic. It could really screw the US if it brings down investment and bright young people go to other countries to start their business.
He says he wants to be like Norway or Sweden but none of those countries have a wealth tax like that, in fact both have more billionaires per capita than the US.
I don’t imagine he’ll be able to do half of what he;s proposing if he wins anyway. This is why the fear-mongering is so silly; all of his ideas should he win still depend on the composition of both houses, no? Heck, even if he were to win, Democrats won’t fall in line behind him like the Republicans do for Trump (and any R President, really) – he’ll still have to fight with a majority.
I suppose the big idea is that it’s time to challenge the notion that high taxes scare off investment. If the impact of higher taxes is a better country in which to operate, that can very easily more than make up for slightly lower profits.
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This is the first time I’ve heard of anybody in Parliament — on either side — speak openly about how corporate lobbying works. Seriously, everybody ought to know about this:
Unboxing freebies, the power of corporate lobbying, and why it’s time for the working class to fight back:
Here’s my full film with @DoubleDownNews 👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/GPcmo2G3Ey
— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) February 25, 2020
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With Bernie now the clear front runner I’m leaning towards agreeing with the people who say his perception as a ‘radical leftist’ is clearly going to work against him in a general election. The Right is likely to be galvanised to vote while the left is probably less likely to turn up.
I think he can definitely beat Trump, but it’s a long road and it will be a hard fought victory if he does. I think there are safer choices for a victorious candidate, but I’m not against Bernie in any sense.
I do agree with Andrew too. He’s unlikely to pass half of what he wants to pass. As far as I know, he wants to keep the filibuster too which is just going to make it harder for him. Obviously, this is because the Democrats would be fucked in a Republican controlled administration without it, but it still means that things that need to passed right now, like the Green New Deal, are almost assured to not be.
Generally, though, I think even one term with Bernie as president is likely to have a positive effect on America’s fiscal future, but culturally I think it will be very unpredictable.
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The radical leftist/socialist thing is the least of Bernie’s problems. Whoever the Democrats run, the Republicans will smear as a socialist regardless of their actual policies. It’s not like Bernie is actually that radical, or even an actual socialist despite his insistence.
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Perhaps not but enough of the left and right feel alienated by the perception of his agenda to not turn up/turn up in a GE.
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That’s the thing though, his agenda has massive appeal to actual voters. There was a discussion on CNN the other day where most of the people were trying to figure out his popularity and one of them just said “People can’t afford insulin”.
Sanders and Trump (and to a lesser degree Obama) are both symptoms of the same social issue – concentration of wealth and milquetoast centre-left parties that have no interest in actually fighting to fix problems that effect the people at the bottom of society – and the problems are starting to effect the middle too. The Democrats became a party of the status quo – obsessed with the portentous responsibility of holding power and noodling around the edges of what they perceived as possible rather than attempting to deliver any kind of bold agenda. Even now, years into Trump’s massive abuse of power they’ll make noises about resisting and Nancy Pelosi will clap sarcastically or tear up a print out of his speech but still vote to approve his budgets. When Obama was in power he reached out to try and appease the Republicans at every turn even when they made public proclamations that they were going to do their best to cripple his administration at every turn and refused to pass how many budgets? Two? Three?
When people are sufficiently alienated from the halls of power, they will gravitate to charismatic leaders who offer radical solutions. Trump is the far-right manifestation of this – the tough guy who says he’ll protect you and hurt the bad guys who need hurting. He may not have followed through on the protection in terms of health and such, but he is at least hurting people. By comparison Sanders offers assistance and solidarity. People thought Obama was going to do the same, but once he was in power it was clear he wouldn’t – there’s a heartbraking story about this in No is not Enough by Naomi Klein.
We saw the same thing in Ireland, culminating in this year’s election. Since the dawn of the state, politics here have been dominated by two parties – Fianna Fáil and Finé Gael. They’re both centre-right, the former being kinda like Blairite Labour and the latter slightly less nasty Tories. The main difference between them was which side of the Civil War they supported, and policy-wise Fianna Fáil would be a little looser with the purse strings and Finé Gael are a bit more socially conservative. We lurched from one party to the other, but in the last 40 years it tended towards one party propped up in coalition by a smaller party that was either further left or slightly further right than the two big parties. And in the last 12 years, that order has begun to collapse. Basically the people who supported the smaller party in power became increasingly frustrated by them surrendering their ideals to the larger one. It lead to the death of the Progressive Democrats in 2009, the Green party losing all their seats in 2011, and the utter collapse of our Labour party’s support in 2015. All the while support flowed towards Sinn Féin, who have been running on promises of (actual) democratic socialist policies. They’re now the second-largest party in the state, and that’s only because nobody expected to win as big as they did so they didn’t run a huge number of candidates.
On paper, Ireland is doing well. We have a low unemployment rate, the GDP is high, all those kind of stats are good. But that isn’t filtering down. We have record numbers of homeless people, the health service is falling apart, renting in Dublin is basically extortion with prices soaring out of control while landlords pull houses out of renting stock and are using them as AirBnBs. It’s easy to ignore that sort of thing for a while, but eventually it gets too hard. Too many people experience these problems, or know someone who does. Finé Gael tried to distract from this by backing progressive social movements like Marriage Equality and Repeal, but it didn’t win them any voters. It’s the same with the US – enough people are impacted by the healthcare crisis. Even if you don’t have any health issues yourself, you can’t ignore the constant cries of support via GoFundMe and other crowdfunding sites. Sanders offers an actual solution to that. People thought Obama did but the Affordable Care Act hasn’t really worked. Most of the other primary candidates are noodling around the edges of healthcare with their proposals, and the voter base is beginning to see through that.
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There’s a way if looking at politics beyond which parties are in power.
We had the ‘post war consensus’ which was very much wedded to a belief in significant taxation, lots of public programs and national ownership and protections. This a period where Eisenhower as a Republican had a 92% top tax rate. It was a reaction the 1920s with enormous wealth in the hands of a few rich families. Nixon was the guy behind the first Universal Basic Income trials.
That started to creak in the mid 1970s when things like the oil crisis created economic pressures and some unions abused the privileges they’d been given to tarnish their image. This ushered in the current ‘neoliberal’ phase where it’s socially and economically all about individual freedom. Clinton removed controls on Wall Street, Blair started the largest move to contracting NHS work to the private sector, Cameron pushed through gay marriage.
Now neoliberalism (or Reaganomics or Thatcherism) is hitting its mid 1970s point. It’s starting to show its failures very openly from a variety of perspectives. That’s why I don’t think the rather obvious point in the past of winning over the middle ground voters works the same any more. They are looking for alternatives and not continuity. In 2016 a large number switched directly from Obama to Trump in the states most directly affected by the changes neoliberalism has brought.
So I have no idea if Bernie will win or not but I can see where running a centrist right now in 2020 could hamper a party’s chances even more.
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In my long-winded way, I was trying to say that this is why people will turn up to vote for him, and that he’s not alienating to the man on the street (also the woman and non-binary person on the street, and those not on streets, of course). The idea of Sanders being alienating comes from the political and media classes, who are alienated from him because the problems he’s addressing aren’t ones that effect them, and the things he’s talking about fixing are to some degree against the interests of the status quo. But they’re increasingly out of touch with regular people.
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The idea of Sanders being alienating comes from the political and media classes, who are alienated from him because the problems he’s addressing aren’t ones that effect them, and the things he’s talking about fixing are to some degree against the interests of the status quo. But they’re increasingly out of touch with regular people.
We convinced ourselves that was the case with Corbyn too. It was only the media controlled by his opponents who had the mantra “Corbyn is unelectable”, and of course they would say that. Obviously that didn’t reflect the regular people, who would prove that he was completely electable.
And then he wasn’t elected.
Which may have been because the repeated mantra brainwashed people, or it may have been because it was always true — in the end, it doesn’t matter, the point was that he fell completely and utterly flat on his face and the political and media classes were right.
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I would say though that the significant difference between Corbyn and Sanders is charisma. I agreed with pretty much all of Corbyn’s policies but he was fucking useless. He was barely adequate in debate, May was the worst leader at PMQs for decades and he often lost to her head to head.
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I early voted yesterday and I voted for Bernie.
I have no great passion for him, nor any of the other candidates. The Democrat choices are once again garbage. (I miss Obama!) I have read a few articles about leaks from the White House that say of all the Dems running, Bernie is the one that scares Trump the most. Trump reportedly sees similarities between himself and his base with Bernie and his which could make for a far closer race. Whether the leaks are true or not, it does make some sense.
Or maybe I just want to see it all burn.
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I would say though that the significant difference between Corbyn and Sanders is charisma. I agreed with pretty much all of Corbyn’s policies but he was fucking useless. He was barely adequate in debate, May was the worst leader at PMQs for decades and he often lost to her head to head.
And I feel this needs to be stressed – Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in the US, and has been for quite some time.
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I listen to Pod Save America regularly and they discuss this very topic on the most recent one. Its a quite even handed discussion.
Its worth listening to, especially considering the speakers have significant experience running Democratic campaigns.
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I think Sanders can win but saying its going to be a tough road does not appear to be gaining me many Thanks in this radical socialist Carrier
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The Gruan with a rare good take on Irish politics from UK pundits:
<p style=”margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; color: #121212; font-family: ‘Guardian Text Egyptian Web’, Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; background-color: #fef9f5;”>In the recent Irish elections, Sinn Féin won 37 seats and took 24.5% of the total vote. Despite this it has been (so far) unable to form a government.</p>
<p style=”margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; color: #121212; font-family: ‘Guardian Text Egyptian Web’, Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; background-color: #fef9f5;”>The prospect of it doing so has produced expressions of horror from its rivals in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. The outgoing taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, described Sinn Féin plans to hold post-election rallies as part of a “campaign of intimidation”, while in an unprecedented intervention, the Garda commissioner Drew Harris (a former senior officer in the Police Service of Northern Ireland) stated that he agreed with a 2015 security assessment that claimed that the IRA army council still “oversees” the party. Mainstream commentators have echoed these points, stressing that Sinn Féin is unfit for government in Dublin.</p>
<p style=”margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; color: #121212; font-family: ‘Guardian Text Egyptian Web’, Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; background-color: #fef9f5;”>This hysteria has several roots. Some evidently dislike the idea of a “northern” party holding power “down here”. Others, usually sotto voce, echo the view of the political correspondent John Drennan who once suggested that Sinn Féin supporters existed on a diet of “chips, Dutch Gold and batter burgers” – a nod to the party’s supporters being mainly working class.</p>2 users thanked author for this post.
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This isn’t really current politics, but we don’t have a thread for economics, and it does have political implications:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-51332811
In 2015, the boss of a card payments company in Seattle introduced a $70,000 minimum salary for all of his 120 staff – and personally took a pay cut of $1m. Five years later he’s still on the minimum salary, and says the gamble has paid off.
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Since then, Gravity has transformed.
The headcount has doubled and the value of payments that the company processes has gone from $3.8bn a year to $10.2bn.
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But Price did get a lot of flak. Along with hundreds of letters of support, and magazine covers labelling him “America’s best boss”, many of Gravity’s own customers wrote handwritten letters objecting to what they saw as a political statement.
At the time, Seattle was debating an increase to the minimum wage to $15, making it the highest in the US at the time. Small business owners were fighting it, claiming they would go out of business.
The right-wing radio pundit, Rush Limbaugh, whom Price had listened to every day in his childhood, called him a communist.
“I hope this company is a case study in MBA programmes on how socialism does not work, because it’s going to fail,” he said.Two senior Gravity employees also resigned in protest. They weren’t happy that the salaries of junior staff had jumped overnight, and argued that it would make them lazy, and the company uncompetitive.
This hasn’t happened.
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Price had hoped that Gravity’s example would lead to far-reaching changes in US business. He’s deeply disappointed and sad that this hasn’t happened.
“Boy, was I wrong,” he says. “I’ve really failed in that regard. And it’s changed my perspective on things because I really believed that through the actions that I did and that other people could do, that we could turn the tide on runaway income inequality.”
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CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility is big in my world.
Look, the world needs macroecononomics, if you want to burn it all down then thats anarchy, thats fourth quadrant politics, and unrealistic.
Envouraging ethical, equitable, moral and selflessly macro and microeconomically sensible behaviour in big corporates is precisely what we should he doing. Largely, ive made a career of it and ill fight anyone in the thunderdome who says my skills would be of better service to our species than in any other role.
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It’s not something reported on much but there are example of better capitalism – a good few of the big corporates have signed up to the London Living Wage, they didn’t do so out of purely moral concerns but because there was a visible benefit to their company.
Then there’s Satoro Iwata, CEO of Nintendo:
Nintendo’s overall net sales declined from its peak of ¥1.8 trillion (US$18.7 billion) in 2009 to ¥549 billion (US$4.6 billion) in 2015. Net income losses were incurred in 2012 and 2014.<sup id=”cite_ref-Finances2009_68-2″ class=”reference”>[67]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-Finances2015_89-1″ class=”reference”>[87]</sup> In 2010, Nintendo revealed that Iwata earned a modest salary of ¥68 million (US$770,000), which increased to ¥187 million (US$2.11 million) with performance based bonuses. In comparison, Miyamoto earned a salary of ¥100 million (US$1.13 million).<sup id=”cite_ref-105″ class=”reference”>[103]</sup> Iwata voluntarily halved his salary in 2011 and 2014 as apologies for the poor sales while other members of the Nintendo board of directors had pay cuts of 20–30 percent.<sup id=”cite_ref-106″ class=”reference”>[104]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-107″ class=”reference”>[105]</sup> This also served to ensure the job security of Nintendo’s employees, preventing workers from being laid off in order to improve short-term finances.<sup id=”cite_ref-fun_55-1″ class=”reference”>[54]</sup><sup id=”cite_ref-73rdSH_73-2″ class=”reference”>[72]</sup>
The problem is, and I’m sure Tim can throw in other positive examples that is reason for guarded optimism, is they get overshadowed by the Bezos of the corporate world, the individuals going for treating everyone like crap, via corporate structures that diffuse responsibility, because people can always be replaced and everything can always be done cheaper. And it’s all for the good of the shareholders, which is all that counts, right?
Encouraging a wider take on CBA is what has the chance of changing corporate attitudes, like the idea of insisting employees stay in office at all hours – a manager should be encouraged to be more flexible and creative. Employee has ill kid at home, needs to get back to look after it, says they can log on remotely and still cover what they need to – that should get an instant go-ahead because how much is that person going to be doing while worried about their kid? Taking the wider view pays off but it requires a bit of creativity and empathy on the part of management.
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It’s a really hard thing to regulate because you have to remember that the shareholders are the bosses not the Directors or the Board, it just happens to be in the case of the megacorporates the majority shareholders happen to also be the CEOs (Bob Iger for example).
What you can do is include a comprehensive CSR clause in your shareholder agreements which obliges every shareholder to act as a policemen to regulate the company towards a certain social position. Nestle did this *poorly* in relation to their cacao bean farming and it is an example of corporates doing that to meet market expectations, that having a comprehensive CSR regime is marketable because it increases profits because the consumers think they are dealing with an ethical company.
It’s not, they did it badly, McDonalds is also an example of a company that has been able to profit out of an ineffective CSR regime, but there are examples out there of successes and althought it’s easy to be sceptical I urge a glass-half-full outlook
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Shareholders are essentially an issue. The wealth is not necessarily with individual humans but with a system. My old boss (a multi-billionaire) pulled his company out of the stock exchange and back into private ownership because he felt the quarterly reporting with a need for continual growth was actually killing the company. You couldn’t do any R&D or take a different direction because the system slaughters any company not posting continual growth every 3 months, which if you follow just one already established business model means often reducing staff, tax avoidance schemes or charging customers more.
Some are right scumbags but some billionaires like Buffet and Gates at least acknowledge most of the continual wealth accumulation is rather obscene and pointless and have argued against the tax system and put in plans to give nearly all their fortunes away. As individuals. Not the system they can’t quite change.
Ian Hislop did a great documentary a few years back (it’s on Youtube) about a time the banks were loved. Run by Quakers they spent a great amount of time making life better for their staff and their community. Building libraries and providing good housing etc. That can’t happen with an Inc or PLC.
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There are lots of reasons to go private but ive never found a good one beyond pure greed for the large corporations. The private system suits, and was designed for, smaller businesses. That Saudi Aramco only just now went public is a good example of improper consolidation of wealth. Its not just about taxes. The ASX listing rules and Corporations act in Australia is better than the loosey goosey shit in America but broadly your reporting obligations are there for a reason. Its not true that you have to continuously post growth to be sustainable, only if you want your share price to boom. Plenty of big corporates still go into administration doing just what you say, Gareth, when the correct course of action would have been to give the shareholders a right to business records and explain the company was approaching its baseline. If your former boss is rich enough go take it private, hes rich enough to buy out the shareholders that get scared off.
Businesses with a certain capex should be listed bevause it means theyre more easily regulated, but thats a tricky position to take because it does impugn basic commercial rights as a business owner.
There are probably other less political reasons too but its early in the morning and i havent had my coffee.
It is quote correct to say that Shareholders are genetally not mum and dad shareholders and usually entities or holding companies. CSR clauses can be a good way to duscourage that becauss if you have a complex holding parent like, say, Israeli Defence (major global corporate owners) that seeds a series of holding companies while maimtaining a supermajority in each, you can force them as a shareholder to not be silent on a particular issue.
It can be complex but the ethical tug of war is happening in that world, i assure you.
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I’ve spent maybe 18 out of 20 years working for publicly listed companies.
I had hard work because the second had been repeatedly charged with breaking consumer laws in Australia.
I don’t know where a constitution comes into play because especially post 2008 every single CSR initiative was staff or consumer led, it was part of our review process. If I didn’t raise money for an orphanage/school for the blind etc I got marked down. Nothing was ever instigated from central office, the only thing was ever fund matching, over 18 years.
There is no mechanism there to make truly altruistic decisions, it all sits behind shareholder value. They may pay lawyers to draft that stuff up but it means nothing.
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So if the world lived like the world, we would need 1.75 worlds to sustain it?
Feels like there’s something missing here. (Some kind of ‘time’ element maybe.)
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So if the world lived like the world, we would need 1.75 worlds to sustain it?
Feels like there’s something missing here. (Some kind of ‘time’ element maybe.)
Basically we overproduce to the point that our current way of life is unsustainable even in the middle term. This doesn’t mean we need to become austere sackcloth wearing monks, but we as a species need to start taking a serious look at how we do things. For example, something like 40% of all useable food produced is wasted – either it’s deemed not fit for sale, dumped at the retail level because it’s gone out of date or the packaging is damaged, or not used at home and eventually binned. Much of the food discarded at the production and retail levels is deliberately rendered inedible to preserve the perceived value of the food that is sold.
We could cut food production by something like a third, change how we distribute the remaining food, and feed every human on the planet. Food production is one of the most environmentally damaging activities we do, mostly meat production but cash crops are frequently devastating as well. This is so intense that literally the only thing you as an individual can do to measurably reduce your carbon footprint is to go vegan.
There are similar issues in various other markets – housing is most notable right now as we’re facing growing homelessness crises in the US, UK and Ireland. But each of those countries has more vacant houses than there are homeless people, and it’s not even a case of unequal distribution of homeless people to location of houses for the most part (this is more of an issue in the US where homeless people gravitate towards California because the pleasant climate makes rough sleeping more comfortable, but it’s not an excuse)
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I guess im not convinced thst Bernie can be a unity candidate. Hes very attractive to me, and you, but theres a lot of disparate voters out there and Bernie needs to unify the democratic voters in a number of very disparate states. Gareths point is a good one, but in spite of it America is seriously bipartisan and the worst thing you could do to your election hopes is keep a portion of your party at home.
This is one of the reasons I was hopeing for Warren, but I can see Lorcan’s argument. I mean, you never know what will happen with these things, but with Bernie, it just might be the same dynamic that we saw with Trump – there’s the voters who will vote Democrat no matter what, there’s the voters who will vote anti-Trump no matter what, but Bernie’s populist activism might just draw in those votes that used to be non-voters because they lost all faith in the system; any candidate (except for Hillary) can get the usual party voters to turn out, but getting new votes on top of those… that was Trump’s success, and it actually might be Bernie’s, because he is the only one talking about the real, deep-seated problems and the only one whose track record shows that he is completely serious and honest about it.
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Youll never convince me that making efforts to run morally conscious regimes on a macroeconomic svale is a waste of time and resources. Implementation issues i get but conceptually, no.
Well that’s where we may find some common ground.
I like the concept but I just see in application very little of this comes from the company coffers. Take for example McDonald’s Ronald McDonald charities, now Mike was telling us how they have contributed a lot to his children’s hospital. However if you look at what they actually do to provide that help it’s collection boxes (now digital ones that round up your change) from the customers. Yet they reap massive positive publicity while essentially doing little more than collecting other people’s money.
Citi and HSBC and the big banks compel their staff to volunteer unpaid on weekends to clean beaches or help charities, none of it really instigated by the company. They just put into the staff performance plans that they must perform CSR duties and then they’ll appear all over the newspapers for all the work Citi has done for local causes. To be honest they’ve done fuck all other than more or less tell their staff they have to do it.
Now to me if one of those companies says they are going to set aside a portion of their profits to say employ 2 beach cleaners or fund an extra wing to the hospital that does enhance the community and shows some level of sacrifice from them then that’s proper CSR. That’s what the Quakers were doing, that’s what Carnegie did with his libraries and Cadbury were doing with Bourneville.
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I understand those arguments but my point is that the graphic is oversimplified to the point of not being very helpful. Clearly the world wouldn’t immediately end if we lived as we do today, because, well, we’re still here. You need some sort of time element to suggest the point at which it becomes unsustainable on current terms.
Fair point. Maybe the graphic shows what would be needed for things to be in balance, in the sense of resources regrowing instead of diminishing?
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In 1968 Stanford U professor Paul Ehrlich released the controversial book Population Bomb, which created the first real scare about global overpopulation. Somehow the Earth and its inhabitants have managed to survive another 50 years since then, and quality of life has actually improved in general. Still, someone at this very minute is probably preaching that the Coronavirus is nature’s way of culling the population.
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Still, someone at this very minute is probably preaching that the Coronavirus is nature’s way of culling the population.
Probably an anti-vaxxer, fresh from successfully reviving measles.
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Youll never convince me that making efforts to run morally conscious regimes on a macroeconomic svale is a waste of time and resources. Implementation issues i get but conceptually, no.
Do you think companies will in the long run actually become more socially/morally responsible? I tend more towards the view that the regulations have to come from the outside, that laws should be far stricter when it comes to these issues.
I have also been wondering whether it would be possible to engineer a social/moral resposponsibility into the legal framework of a corporation itself.
A sizeable portion of my job is running advisory sessions with accountants, business advisors and marketers to enable corporates to do this. You cant just run the legals, which do consist of drafting the governance documents – shareholders agreements / constitution s / deeds of trust to put checks and balances in place and balance the rights shareholders have to action CSR initiatives. Its a bespoke process depending on the context of the corporate and what needs to be done but these agreements are not simple. Theyre hundreds of pages each and shareholders are usually very limited in their rights. Most corporates have one or two holding companies which make thw supermajority and we usually draft side deeds for those guys for additional governance.
The companies have to want to do it, but a lot of companies are making that election.
BPs environmental sustainability program is an example. They put out annual reports and forecasts explaining how theyre reducing emissions and they have to otherwise they are in breach of certain laws theyve decided to impose on themselves and the shareholdets have a right of action.
Tje agreememts do need to be well drafred and context based, and an audit process needs to be implemented. I mentioned Nestle for a reason because they wanted to reduce child labour in cacoa bean farming and told their shareholders they were sucessful, only for a separate invesrigation to reveal they were not and they lost a whole bunch of shareholder actions
Charities, like the McDonalds house Gareth mentioned are not the same thing. Theyre usually owned by a Trustee and are run as a nfp and are taxable as such. Its a structure thing, not genuine CSR, and can actually be a lucrative asset with some clever accounting.
Do I think there will be long term gains? Yes and no. Theres a certain degree of free market thinking that needs to be adopted and there are other factors too not just relayed to top down regulation and government regulation. This is probably all I care to say sbout the topic currently.
Gareths point about forcing staff to do things and just doing it for marketing reasons doesnt really change my mind. That happens and thats marketing and abusing a concept but its far from the worst thing that those companies do. If staff are irritated by doing their job then find another job,but there are massive employment law implications in what Gareth implies. It sounds like it could be implemented better, if true, and id be surprised if that shits in the employment contracts. Based on firms I know that do do that stuff its probably a voluntary committee that runs rotational appointments so you give up half a Saturday once every two months. Anecdotally, the people i know that volunteee at soup kitchens on behalf of their firm genuinely want to do it and arent whinging into a cup of coffee the next day about being forced to. I If thats the onlt point to make about the worthlessness of the concept then youre welcome to make it
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You get paid to help people and make genuine change for the long-term better. How could that ever be a waste? You have the best job. Thank you, sincerely. I’m so sorry if you thought I intended otherwise.
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Quite commonly there’s a software package where you need to enter your hours volunteering, it’s an off-the-shelf package so used by multiple companies to track the contribution. I was tasked with 10 hours a quarter as part of KPIs and that is typical of many companies. So if you do quit you may well find the next job does exactly the same thing.
Now you are right that many people want to do it, some record down activities they’d be doing anyway and nobody is going to go to employment law to stand up as the one who doesn’t want to do community/charity work. That doesn’t change the fact that in many, many cases the CSR clauses and commitments are essentially a con. You go and do a sponsored walk at your church or youth group which you’d have done anyway and that gets reported in annual statements as the contribution of BigCorp Plc. It’ll get raised when accusations come about tax avoidance and the like “BigCorp contributed 700,000 hours to CSR causes raising $2.6m”.
So it’s easy to frame this as ‘miserable git hates doing charity work’ but the point is that the end result of high principled CSR commitments is basically the absolute bare minimum commitment from a company. If they just gave that 10 hours as time off to do the work then they’d be sacrificing something but in my experience they usually don’t. The argument is not against doing it but the high level of kudos it’s easy for them to achieve by doing virtually nothing.
Edit: I started writing this before Tim said he wants to move on!
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Thanks, Tim, that was very interesting. I wasn’t being facetious, by the way, but rather honestly curious about the process, and it is interesting to hear from somebody who has more of an insight. Maybe we can get back into this at a later time when we’re coming at the subject more neutrally from the start; I do think that changing corporate behaviour is possibly the most important issue of our times, and would like to spend some more time discussing it. But I also realise that it can be taxing to talk to people on this board about your field of expertise, especially when it’s tied to a controversial topic.
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By the way I don’t want to challenge Tim’s knowledge here at all either. It’s just looking from two different vantage points, the documents of intent to the implementation on the ground.
It can also differ with time, before the 2008 financial crisis the bank I worked for gave paid sabbaticals for staff to do environmental work. My problem with the pressure the need for perpetual growth has on listed companies is that was the first thing to take a hit when the profits reduced. In that particular case from all my knowledge of staff still there, it never came back.
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Pete Buttigieg drops out of the Democratic presidential campaign
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Pete Buttigieg drops out of the Democratic presidential campaign
So long,Ratboy.
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