Moore: And General Motors, that year, made a profit of $4 billion. And yet they had just laid off another 30,000 people. Now, why would you lay people off when you're making a record profit of $4 billion?
I mean that was totally insane. But they thought, well, you know, we can make a bigger profit. Maybe we can make $4.2 billion if we move those jobs to Mexico. And so they're always, you know, we can make a little bit more money if we do this. By firing those workers, Larry, they got rid of the very people who buy their cars.Moore could've saved himself months and millions by simply pointing me out to the world, as almost a year ago HERE I wrote:
A coupla months ago I posted re: my spidey senses tingling on the bullshit of so many companies unloading so many employees at the same time so quickly.
Now, of course someone who knows much better than myself can explain how all big businesses are intertwined in a macroeconomic way, and they'd probably be right, but I'm also wondering if some businesses are taking advantage of the overall climate and daily deluge of bad news re: layoffs et al, figuring out that if they thinned out their own payrolls now rather than some other time, they'd get less shit for it. "Hey, it's tough EVERYwhere, sorry!" That whether they really NEEDED to make cuts or not, jumping in on the layoff bandwagon would be a very savvy move, and the "ooh! oooh! me too!" tactic is the way to do it.
A built-in excuse for unnecessary streamlining; making it that much easier for 5 guys at the top of a company to get an extra .004% return instead of keeping thousands of jobs alive.
And now today we're told about Pfizer merging with Wyeth to create a "drug behemoth," with Pfizer ponying up $68 BILLION for this. A maybe seemingly hopeful business move in this dark forest of late, peut-etre?
Then why is Pfizer about to cut 8,190 jobs, on top of 4,700 from last year? "Sorry, gotta cut jobs, gotta cut gotta cut...oh, snatch up our biggest competitor for $68B? No problem!!"
I'm not a business guy. I graduated Egg Foo Laude from a college that wasn't even the best school in our town of 7,000 people. I don't really have anything to lean on other than believing in my own brilliance even tho I ...oh, i already used the egg foo laude line.
Anyways. I hate to be a Pollyanna, but something stinks here and I question the validity of these drastic job cuts by companies. Look at the title of the article I linked: "Bloody Monday." Hmm. Really? Sounds a bit...MUCH, don't it? Or another example of the media pounding us with "crisis" so we become so inured to it we don't bother to raise a fuss no matter who/how many get axed? As I said before, "In short, my spidey-senses are telling me some companies are taking advantage of the current economic climate and our collective empathy during these times and are cutting jobs when they might not really need to."
The Pfizer example I pointed out is still shocking to me.
Capitalism itself probably isn't "evil" or a "failure," but, like anything else, it can BECOME a failure once in the hands of the wrong people. Somewhere along the line "capitalism" went from building a business that would hopefully last 100 years and make a ton of money for some and enough for others to building a business that could be cashed out as soon as possible, making a ton of money for a few and none for others. A handful of men in a boardroom are now happy to jettison the jobs of 1000 people if it means making $400M/year instead of only $399M/year. Maybe that DOES mean capitalism is inherently built to eventually be swallowed up by itself (in Monopoly, when does the game end? when one guy has all the money.) Or maybe it means people have just gotten bad at it. Or, worse, a tiny amount of people have gotten REALLY GOOD at it.
Anyway, I guess we're all divided into Gordon Gekkos and whatever the name of Martin Sheen's character was, and only the Gordon Gekkos are surviving. Which is too bad, cause now Darryl Hannah looks like shit.
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