Corporation 2003 Quotes

Alas, my “fiddle playing” will not get me to Carnegie Hall — or even to a high school recital. Berkshire, on your behalf and mine, will send the Treasury $3.3 billion for tax on its 2003 income, a sum equaling 2½% of the total income tax paid by all U.S. corporations in fiscal 2003.

What Bjørnar fears is a version of ‘solastalgia’, the term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’. Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining activity on communities in New South Wales when he realized that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them by forces beyond their control. He proposed his new term to describe this distinctive kind of homesickness. Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Where the pain of nostalgia can be mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible. Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the Anthropocene – we might consider John Clare a solastalgic poet, witnessing his native Northamptonshire countryside disrupted by enclosure in the 1810s – but it has certainly flourished recently. ‘Worldwide, there is an increase in ecosystem distress syndromes,’ wrote Albrecht in an early paper on the subject, ‘matched by a corresponding increase in human distress syndromes.’ Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action: the home become unhomely around its inhabitants.

Oregon resident Gary Harrington was arrested for collecting rainwater and snow on his rural property. Authorities accused him of constructing three “illegal reservoirs” on his 170-acre property. Harrington said although the reservoirs are stocked with largemouth bass, they serve as a contingent against wildfires. “It’s totally committed to fire suppression,” he explained to the media. Initially the state allowed Harrington to collect water but reversed its decision in 2003, citing a 1925 law stating the nearby city of Medford has rights to Big Butte Creek and its tributaries. Harrington argued that his water came only from rainfall and snowmelt. The disagreement evolved into a protracted court battle over property rights and government bullying. “When something is wrong, you just, as an American citizen, you have to put your foot down and say, ‘This is wrong; you just can’t take away any more of my rights and from here on in, I’m going to fight it,’” explained Harrington. Nonetheless, he was found guilty.

Vioxx was believed to have caused more than sixty thousand deaths. Merck, the producer of the drug, is the second largest pharmaceutical corporation in the U.S., and profited tremendously from Vioxx, which earned $2.5 billion in sales in 2003 alone. When the drug was pulled due in large part to evidence that it contributed to fatal heart attacks and strokes, analysts anticipated that the judgment against Merck could run up to $25 billion. Yet the plea bargain reached in 2012 resulted in a fine of only $321 million, a mere blip on Merck’s bottom line.

2003 case before the Supreme Court in which Nike claimed that it had the First Amendment right to lie in its corporate marketing, a variation on the First Amendment right of free speech. (Except in certain contract and law enforcement/court situations, it’s perfectly legal for human persons to lie in the United States.

What makes it reasonable to accept anthropogenic climate change is not the fact that 95% of all climate scientists agree. It’s why they agree. Even non-experts can figure out that the experts agree: a survey of all peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject ‘global climate change’ published between 1993 and 2003 showed that not a single paper rejected the position that global warming is largely caused by human behavior. Climate scientists are not arguing about whether global warming is happening. They’re not arguing about whether humans are largely responsible for global warming. They may be arguing about what action to take. In that case, they should be considered as advisors by those who make policy. Unfortunately, many of those who make policy seem to be ignoring the climate scientists in favor of beliefs pushed by gas, oil, and other corporate interests. Those interests should be considered, but not to the exclusion of the science experts. A

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The sheer numbers associated with chronic disease, the magnitude of the medical and financial iceberg, make a mockery of this approach. The toll of the seven most common chronic diseases, in costs and lost productivity, was $4.2 trillion in the United States in 2012, up from $1.3 trillion in 2003.4 Chronic diseases account for more than 65% of corporate health-care costs. In a single year, there were almost 0.5 million new diabetes diagnoses for Americans ages twenty to forty-four, and 1 million new diabetics aged forty-five to sixty-five. Those are just the people who felt bad enough to see a doctor. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 79 million Americans are pre-diabetic, which means their bodies are teetering on the edge of a disease that leads to blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage, and limb amputations if it isn’t controlled.5 Those people can be pulled back from the brink to some kind of normal future if they decide to make some significant changes in their lives. Unfortunately, 65% of employers in a large 2011 survey cited the difficulty of motivating employees to change their behavior as their top health-care challenge.

Principal Management Corporation, the manager of the LargeCap Value Fund, actually provides no investment management services, focusing instead on “clerical, recordkeeping and bookkeeping services.” Responsibility for the day-in and day-out portfolio management rests with a subsidiary of Alliance Capital Management, Bernstein Investment Research and Management.17 The fee arrangement between Principal and Bernstein involves only a portion of Principal’s take from its investors. For the year ended December 31, 2003, Principal’s no-load Class B shares bore the burden of a 2.51 percent expense ratio, as detailed in Table 8.7. Investors paid a 12b-1 fee of 0.91 percent, other expenses of 0.85 percent and a management fee of 0.75 percent. Principal’s fees all but guarantee that investors will fail to generate satisfactory returns. The management fee arrangement between Principal and Bernstein provides clues to the economies of scale available in the money management industry. At asset levels below $10 million, of the 0.75 percent management fee, 0.60 percent goes to Bernstein and 0.15 percent goes to Principal. As assets under management increase, Bernstein’s fee share decreases and Principal’s fee share increases. At the final break point of $200 million in assets, of the scale-invariant 0.75 percent fee, Bernstein receives 0.20 percent and Principal receives 0.55 percent. The fee structure clearly illustrates scale economies in the investment management business. Bernstein, the party responsible for the heart of the portfolio management process, earns fees that diminish (with increases in assets under management) from 0.60 percent of assets to 0.20 percent of assets. Since Bernstein’s work changes not at all as asset levels increase, the reduction in marginal charges makes sense. It makes no sense that Principal’s mutual-fund clients accrue no benefits from economies of scale. Total expenses incurred by investors remain at 2.51 percent regardless of portfolio size. As Bernstein’s management fee declines, Principal’s management fee increases. For assets above $200 million Principal adds a management fee of 0.55 percent to other fees of 1.76 percent, bringing the egregious total to 2.31 percent for Principal and 0.20 percent for Bernstein. In this topsy-turvy world, Principal earns a marginal management fee of 0.55 percent for performing back-office functions, while Bernstein earns a marginal management fee of 0.20 percent for making security-selection decisions. As scale increases, Bernstein earns less while Principal takes more.

Repression in late capitalism does not typically involve the absolute expropriation of the subject typical of liberal or monopoly capitalism (the nationalism which violently excludes other nationalities, the sexism which expropriates women’s household labor on behalf of masculinized national corporations and power-bureaucracies, the racism by which the colonies and colonized are held in subjection to the colonists, and so forth) but what might be termed its relative immiseration on the multinational marketplace of identity: thus the celebrated media superstar whose very existence depends on the implicit devaluation of non-celebrities; the CNBC-style telejournalism which reduces the global economy to the chatter of wealthy white male stockholders retailing the retailing of retailing on behalf of even wealthier (and whiter) male stockholders; or the business culture of the giant multinationals or multis, which is open to any cultural group just as long as they swear fealty to the commodity form.

ON OCTOBER 28, 2003, a jury of the state supreme court in Manhattan watched a homemade video of the fortieth birthday party that L. Dennis Kozlowski threw for his second wife, Karen. The party, held on the island of Sardinia off the Italian coast, cost more than $2.1 million—or $28,000 per guest. Assistant District Attorney Ken Chalifoux introduced the video into evidence as part of one of the biggest corporate scandal cases ever. Kozlowski, the former CEO of the conglomerate Tyco International, and Mark Swartz, Tyco’s former CFO, were accused of grand larceny and enterprise corruption for allegedly stealing some $600 million from Tyco.1 The birthday celebration included nearly a week’s worth of activities, highlighted by the final poolside bash at the Cala di Volpe hotel.

In 2003, a law slid through Congress stipulating that Medicare, the world’s largest drug buyer, could no longer negotiate prices with corporations. The statute directed them to pay 106 percent of the companies’ average wholesale price.

Owing to my involvement in mental health treatment reform, the industrial complex that I am most familiar with is the “pharmaceutical-industrial complex.” Two high-profile politicians who have revolved between the doors of government and pharmaceutical corporations are Billy Tauzin and Mitch Daniels.6 When in Congress, Billy Tauzin, a Democrat turned Republican, played a key role in shepherding the Medicare prescription drug law into passage in ways that it would become a financial bonanza for Big Pharma. Tauzin fought hard—and won—the battle to ensure that the federal government would be prohibited from negotiating discounts with drug companies. The law was signed by George W. Bush in December 2003. A few months later, Tauzin announced that he was retiring from Congress to take the job as director of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a trade group representing giant pharmaceutical corporations. Through February 2010, Tauzin received an estimated annual salary of $2 million as head of PhRMA, where he became, essentially, Big Pharma’s leading lobbyist.

But two of Edison’s greatest inventions are seldom mentioned because, by their nature, they couldn’t be patented. One was perhaps his greatest invention of all, the industrial research laboratory. Edison established his own laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, and it was there that he created the phonograph (1877), the electric light (1879), and hundreds of other inventions. It was, in essence, an invention factory where engineers, chemists, and mechanics turned new technological possibilities into practical—and, most important, commercially viable—products. When General Electric was formed in 1892 by J. P. Morgan from the Edison General Electric Company and its major competitor, Thomson-Houston Electric Company, the new company almost immediately established a laboratory of its own at its headquarters in Schenectady, New York. It quickly became the model for a number of other corporate research labs that in the twentieth century would turn out an unending stream of inventions and practical applications of new technology. The list of the fruits of Edison’s seminal idea to industrialize the process of invention—to industrialize Yankee ingenuity—is nearly endless: cellophane, nylon, synthetic rubber, transistors, Teflon, and the microprocessor being but a few of the more important. In 2003 IBM alone would take out more than thirty-four hundred patents.