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Real is Real

Posted on 2018.03.08 at 05:22

Dear corporations: I've always known that pleasing the customers is a better way to go, in the long run, than trying to please stockholders, banks or new investors. Just look at ultra-ergonomic Apple. But, ever since Ronald Reagan, there has been this insane frenzy to borrow, gamble, merge, vulturise, and, as a last thought, tell the customers what they are supposed to want. This is all a consequence of the Supply-Side philosophy, sanctioned by corporate Randianism. "If you build it, they will come!" Who would figure that, no, it's the other way around: Demand-Side?! The customer is always right.

Donald Trump recently announced tariffs on steel and aluminum, as a matter of national security. This is the sort of thing that Bernie was promising, and which Clinton was either aping or mocking - just like her vacillating stance on NAFTA. Well, it is not surprising to now hear a whole lot of Democrats declaring that tariffs will be the worst thing for the economy. Their tune would be a lot different if a Dem had enacted them which, as things have been going, they might never have done. Yesterday, one of NPR's shows focused on tariffs, and a foreign-sounding women took the stance that tariffs would start a trade war, and so on...

"If we allow countries to sell us their goods, then they will have dollars, which they will invest in us!"

And I just said, "That's bullshit." It was the same old supply-side argument we have been hearing for decades, and credit should go to an advocate on the show, who immediately piped up and identified this argument as being the self-serving hogwash that it is.

The fact is: REAL IS REAL. Please the customers, who help set the price, and so help manage resources. And stop looking at Wall Street for wisdom and inspiration, when Wall Street is full of international gamblers who are selling out our country. Instead of focusing on dividends, focus on JOBS. Give people jobs and they will become customers - AMERICAN customers. Remember the days when progressive radio hosts Thom Hartmann, Norman Goldman and Ed Schultz used to say these same things, emphatically?!

eScienceNews: Beat the stock market by satisfying customers

Satisfy your customers and win in the stock market, says a new study by a team of researchers from Michigan's University Research Corridor, who found positive stock returns on customer satisfaction far out-distance competitive market measures that have been in play for more than half a century. Using 15 years of audited returns, researchers from Michigan State University and University of Michigan found creating a stock portfolio based on customer satisfaction data achieves cumulative returns of 518 percent.

Instead of focusing on REAL PEOPLE - the customers and the workers - as being foundational to good economics, greedy CEO's have been going in the opposite direction: Demanding that their corporations be treated as if THEY were real people, in their moneyed 'speech', and in other aspects. That is about as unreal as you can get - but it is just the logical extension of the whole Supply-Side, trickle-down philosophy. It has been the decades of this philosophy which has profoundly shifted wealth up to a few families and monopolies at the top of the food chain, and now our rising worry is that they might hire robots to replace us all - as workers, as customers - as REAL PEOPLE!

Here's more, from the 'liberals' greatest magazine, the Atlantic:

'Corporations Are People' Is Built on an Incredible 19th-Century: How a farcical series of events in the 1880s produced an enduring and controversial legal precedent

Somewhat unintuitively, American corporations today enjoy many of the same rights as American citizens. Both, for instance, are entitled to the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion. How exactly did corporations come to be understood as “people” bestowed with the most fundamental constitutional rights? The answer can be found in a bizarre—even farcical—series of lawsuits over 130 years ago involving a lawyer who lied to the Supreme Court, an ethically challenged justice, and one of the most powerful corporations of the day...


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