Public corporation charity is a crock.
Public corporations, those with symbols on a stock market exchange, have a single master – share holder equity. Absolutely everything they (the executives in concert with the board of directors) do is with the intent to increase (or maintain) share holder equity.
Everything.
Including pretending to “care” for the environment, community or their employees.
Last week the public corporation for which I work fired 10% of the corporate headquarters staff (40 people) and 10% of the shop floor staff (1000 people).
I slipped by (||) that far from getting the ax. Unfortunately, the fellow with whom I work, everyday—side by side—on software projects got the knife. His Business Analysis partner was cut too. And so, with a single whack of their brain dead sword, corporate gutted the “tribal knowledge” of one of the more important software applications in use by two dozen repair shops around the country. “The rest of you developers will have to take on the load.” — yeah right.
The CEO, up to now, had been one of those who touted the “we’re all one big family” vibe at every quarterly all-hands meeting. — yeah right.
And so it was with incredulity that I received an email which explored how important it was for this corporation to account for all the volunteer time we had invested in the last 12 months, including how important we thought the environment, community and education was and how this corporation should pursue supporting such things.
What a crock.
No matter what a public corporation says to the world, despite all of its press releases, all of its so called public principles of business conduct, there is one tenet they must obey above all others — increase share holder equity.
Everything else is a lie.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
I’m late to this party, but I just stumbled on it, and it’s a timeless subject. I work for a retail corporation. Mind you I am a peon at the store level. The corporate greed and cuts don’t hurt anywhere more than at the bottom. Every time you think it can’t get worse, it does.
Re: charity. They practically hold a gun to your head and demand you donate money so they can brag about how much they contribute. Each manager is given a goal and they have to browbeat their people to donate–the saddest part is, many of the employees are beneficiaries of the charities they are commanded to donate to (food banks, for instance).
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We ourselves are just items on the stock market to be traded and eliminated whatever suits the bottom line. Our birth certificate number is in trade on the stock exchange and has tremendous value if you are working and have the capability of making money for the country. Our value does diminish as we age and are no longer viable.
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Indeed we are just a commodity.
Where I work they have a system called Dynamics AX. It’s an ERP system and I get the (unpleasant) job of programming it. In it they have a set of tables labeled “HCM…”.
HCM, I wondered? Human Capital Management. Boy, I sure felt small after learning that.
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We are the herd, the livestock for the animal farm 😊
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And then there’s private companies, fraught with nepotism and incompetence. Jimbo Jr can’t find his ass with either hand, throw him a party, here’s your new VP. What, Janie and her husband need a 4,000 sq ft house cause she’s pregnant? Lay off a couple of people in marketing, put us on a buying freeze for 90 days, fuck the sales people, they can sell the shit Jimbo bought that nobody wants.
How about the do gooder corporations? You see the salaries for “charity” organizations? 90 cents of every dollar donated goes to globe trotting vacations wrapped up in “humanitarian fact finding.” If you’re working for somebody you’re fucked already, or on the conveyor belt to a fucking. Offering the bastards 15% of what’s yours to do what you do at the same level. Yassah, massa, thank ya massa for the whuppin,. Can I have another? Fuck them. They feel the squeeze, adios mother fucker, thanks for putting us on the map but baby needs new shoes.
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I wish it were that easy — sayonara, adios, so long — I wish. Baby needs health care and an income to keep the lights on and the beer flowing. This is the sole reason I beg the fates for an authentic apocalypse. Drive everyone to their knees and see who comes up suckin’ dick. Not me.
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The cosmos will fuck with us, toy with us, the way a cat kills a cockroach. Limb by limb, a razor edged nail slicing away chunks. No easy way out. Suffering, cultural torture, death by angst and xenophobic driven suicide. No meteor, no tap outs, no everybody gets the purple kool aid pandemic, no mass deaths by poisoned taco diarrhea. No, this place, if not hell, if not already, will be a purgatory of slow torturous shattering of beliefs, daily incredulity.
Soylent green is people!
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Need to print and frame that comment, there, I say. Life snuffed with a whimper.
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As Michael Douglas’ character of Gordon Gekko said in the 1987 film Wall Street, “We do it all for… lack of a better word… greed. Greed is good.”
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Greed is indeed good — to a degree. In my opinion it is society (read: government)’s job to design the rules under which greed can flourish while ensuring that society benefits from the byproducts greed produces — namely progress.
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I think the screenplay writer was being sarcastic when he wrote those lines.
Saying that greed is bad.
Greed implies something that goes beyond a fair profit.
I agree with the screenplay writer that going beyond fair profit (excessive profit in the case of most multinationals) is bad.
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That’s where society needs to step in. Obviously, humans cannot *generally* control the extent to which they accumulate wealth. What is too much? Only society knows, not the individual.
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Someone should write a book, if one hasn’t been written already, about the complete absurdity of layoff rituals. TRW had what they called an “availability” list. You made this list if you were between projects to bill your time too. Managers would tout this list as your chance to stay with “TR Wonderful” … you just had to relocate to Fargo and take a pay cut. I don’t whether it’s worse to be let go or to watch friends get the ax.
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Damn, you picked at an incredibly thin scab here…
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The boils of society show darkly when malaise is the soup of the day.
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Ha! Yup! I’m glad you still get to keep your job but sorry for your comrades. This entire thing will be a brilliant excuse for layoffs and no raises for years to come.
Whenever I hear people buying this or that brand because they care about the environment or something else like that, I roll my eyes. It’s always about the $$.
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Great post! My only quibble is the last line. It should read, “Everything is a lie.” Like Crud Mud, I feel that would get at our incurable disease . I’m just about written out. No hope. We’re fucked. I’m dizzy laying down. Thanks. Duke
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Styx’s new album “The Grand Delusion”.
It’s the dementia I’m wary of… What was that word? More like, what were those words.
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That’s what I hate about corporations–they whine about how hard-done-by they are and “lay people off”, while the execs at the top still rake in their bonuses. This just happened to my brother-in-law and now at the age of almost 50, he has to find a new job.
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One of the more insidious trends is that capitalists have convinced the EveryManJoe that their 401k, now fully invested in the stock market, is integral to the health of capitalism itself. Yet the fact remains that the pittance of equity each of us might think links us to society’s general economic well-being is really just alms from the overflowing table of the capitalist rich.
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The modern feudal system at its finest.
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All true, but specifics such as corporate malfeasance have lost their relevance for me. Our entire species is odious and instinctively self-defeating and in serious need of being eradicated from the surface of this otherwise beautiful planet. A small part of me is sort of hoping for an Orangina victory in November just so I can throw in the towel for real and get back to the business of drinking myself to death that I so foolishly abandoned years ago.
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My youngest sister just turned 50, so the both of you might get to enjoy the eventual fruits of Marxist revolt due to the automation of work.
The shakeout of the Covid aftermath with regards to our rentier society will be both ugly and curious. Property owners demanding rent from 40 million unemployed, rent that flows straight from the government now, will need to either be reduced or subsidized by continued handouts.
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The hypocrisy is so blatant, so thick, so dark, you cannot even make this shit up. A corporation may spend some chump change “donating” to a cause, then millions promoting what a great thing they did and how much they helped! . It’s so pathetic out there…makes me want to go to another planet. (Inside joke…lol!) I suppose I should say congrats on keeping your job?
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If the “proper” apocalypse is not going to materialize, then yeah, good to still have a job. I communicated to my direct superiors that I’d have sacrificed 15% of my salary to keep the team together — after the fact — as the fact came with no prior announcement. Fuckers!
Public corporations are the bane of human existence.
(Another planet… gotcha.)
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I feel your anger!!!
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We gotta take down Capitalism completely!!!
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Eventually, the automation of work will do exactly that. With the Covid-Collapse and its 40 million unemployed, and the UBI’esque of unemployment subsidies, the masses will get a taste of what a world will be like. We may get to see it in our life times.
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