AWARD SEASON
Rail freight giant Norfolk Southern suddenly became a household name this past February after the disastrous derailment of a massive 149-car train in Palestine, Ohio. The company grew even more notorious when reporters revealed that prior to the accident, they had spent millions lobbying against safety regulations [[link removed]] on braking, signaling, and crew sizes… while simultaneously sinking $3.4 billion into stock buybacks [[link removed].] and cutting staff by more than a third.
Now, less than five months after the derailment, Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw is being honored with the 2023 “railroad innovator” award [[link removed]] , “which recognizes an individual's outstanding achievement in the rail industry.” And sure, by a certain definition it’s pretty innovative for a company whose job is to keep trains running on the tracks and delivering goods to instead have dozens of cars derail and cargo get lit on fire… but is this really a guy who deserves industry accolades? The people issuing the award have an answer: they would like to reassure you that “ since the Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, NS has been making decisions in the best long-term interests of the community’s residents.”
Make it make sense.
Three Numbers [[link removed]]
$140,000 [[link removed]] is owed in back pay by a California restaurant which stole wages from employees [[link removed]] through unpaid overtime, missed breaks, and fabricated timesheets . When faced with a labor law investigation, the restaurant hired a fake priest to take “confessions” of workplace sins by employees — and who showed particular fervor about the sin of speaking negatively about your employer to federal investigators.
40,000 new positions [[link removed]] will be created at management consultant Accenture [[link removed]] to aid clients with Artificial Intelligence related tasks, according to an Accenture public relations push highlighting how good they are at aiding clients with Artificial Intelligence related tasks. From the steam engine to the internet, major disruptive technological advances have tended to create large numbers of new jobs as well as large amounts of concern.
$863 million [[link removed]] in taxes went unpaid by just five billionaires who exploited a tax loophole [[link removed]] by selling shares of a company which has lost value, and then immediately buying those shares again . The practice of harvesting tax losses through these kinds of “wash sales” was originally made illegal in 1921 , but creative new accounting techniques have since brought it back.
A Chart [[link removed]]
Just three years ago, there was a substantial partisan divide in how voters felt about key financial institutions, with Republicans expressing much more favorable opinions of banks and large corporations than Democrats did. But that gap has now collapsed, and negative opinions [[link removed]] are broadly shared across the electorate. Regardless of what motivated this sharp shift, it’s another blow to neoliberalism: if big banks and large corporations are now seen in a uniformly negative light, the politics of trickle-down economics just got a lot more complicated.
A chart showing Republicans' views of banks, large corporations have become much less positive since 2019 [[link removed]]
Blowing up the Groupchat [[link removed]]
While President Biden’s signature legislative accomplishments on infrastructure, semiconductors, and renewable energy have already resulted in hundreds of huge investments [[link removed]] across the country, some skeptics have questioned whether it all adds up to enough to really make a difference when you assess these positive outcomes at the massive scale of the U.S. economy. But as David Dayen argues in The American Prospect [[link removed]] , a closer look at the numbers suggests that these investments are a big part of why the economy has remained so resilient in the face of Federal Reserve efforts to slow growth by raising interest rates. The scale of new investment also serves as a compelling real-world rebuttal to the neoliberal belief that increasing public spending is, by definition, inefficient and will always necessarily result in reducing private spending . As we can see with our own eyes at construction sites across the country, government can, in fact, generate productive investment and grow the economy by growing the middle class.
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