I work in the financial services industry, but I have never been all that interested in companies other than what I need for my job. So, I never understand the mentality of the “investor,” and companies’ slavish intent to do anything for them. Through mutual funds, I guess I am an investor, but not an active one, and I am not expecting to become rich off my investments. If I can retire and put the Indignant Children through college, I’ll be happy.
For years, there have been articles that corporations and their CEOs are basically psychopathic beings, willing to do anything for the almighty bottom line include cut corners that could hurt or kill people. The oil companies that are putting their profits above the planet in refusing or fighting off the effects of climate change.
A few weeks ago, it was intimated that Walgreen Company in acquiring the remaining 55 percent of Alliance Boots would move the headquarters of the new company to either the U.K. or Switzerland in a bit of financial sleight of hand called a tax inversion that would allow the drug store company to take advantage of a lower corporate tax rate.
I posted here, and there was considerable political pressure that in making more money for its “shareholders” and paying less in taxes in the United States, still the company’s main market, would make me no longer do business with them. The Senate is considering a law to make the move illegal, and even billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said that he would divest of Walgreen and any other company who did a tax inversion.
Simply, the investors earn more money and the U.S. gets less in taxes. The point is that democracy is a shared experiment – we get the benefits of services in return for paying our taxes. That is what these Tea Party morons don’t understand – they want their garbage picked up, and the police and fire departments, and schools, and army, and safe food and water, but no one wants to pay for it. Walgreen was going to get all of the positives it has gotten for over 100 years, but not pay for it, and people (myself included) were angry about it. So, bowing to the pressure, it was reported by United Kingdom-based SkyNews, citing unnamed sources, that Walgreen “is likely to disclose” that it will not pursue the tax inversion.
Good news, right? Not to the “almighty” market – shares of Walgreen Co. fell as much as 7 percent in early afternoon trading on Tuesday following the report that the Deerfield-based company will maintain its tax headquarters in the United States.
This has long been my problem with “the market” – the undue importance placed on the opinions of the Wall Street analysts. CEOs and CFOs report to the Wall Street analysts to get them to “approve” their moves. The problem is that all of their analysis is based on minute-to-minute, day-to-day, quarter-to-quarter performance of a company. When I was a kid, my grandfather had GM stock. We held on to it, getting dividends on our return periodically, but we didn’t pay attention to the daily moving of the market. We weren’t going to buy or sell immediately. Of course, the information age has made this information readily available, and so, the markets are nothing more than high tech betting parlors, where “investors” try to buy and sell quickly to make money off insanely fast changes in stock price. And the C-level people’s gargantuan salaries and bonuses are tied to how the stock price changes.
I have long said that if I was the CEO of a company, I would hope to take a longer view of my company. For example, if I had a profitable quarter, say I generated $0.20 per share in profit, but my company’s stock got hammered because some snot-nosed 24 year old MBA estimated that my company should have earned $0.24 per share for the same period, I would tell the little bastard that he is in the wrong business, he should come over and run the company if he/she knows so much.
So because Walgreen will earn $2.4 billion in net income instead of potentially $2.7 billion because they are paying their share of the taxes to keep the country, states and municipalities going, “the market” blasts their shares. What’s good for the country is bad for the investor.
It’s crazy and often I wonder if anyone in “the market” has any morals at all?

The reigning NBA Champion San Antonio Spurs have this reputation for being a class organization. They have a class coach who doesn’t always go along with the (NBA) party line. Gregg Popovich has benched his starters in meaningless games, is a provocative interview, and will ignore or belittle an interviewer with a dumb question.
Tim Duncan, headed for the Hall of Fame when his career is over, is a stoic, no nonsense leader. Tony Parker and Manu Ginobli play old fashioned, unselfish basketball.
So, I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that they made a historic move today – hiring retiring WNBA player Becky Hammon as an assistant coach, making the first female coach in NBA history. Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich invited Hammon to attend his team’s practices last summer while she was recovering from knee surgery. She also attended film sessions and sat behind the bench for several games last season.
There have been women in front office positions, but none have been officially assistant coaches. Lisa Boyer was a volunteer assistant on the Cleveland Cavaliers’ coaching staff in 2001-02 but didn’t sit on the bench during games or travel with the team. Natalie Nakase recently served as the Los Angeles Clippers assistant video coordinator during Summer League.
Someone will say something stupid about her being in the locker room, and with the maturity level of many players and fans, that will be the first question for a while, but the Spurs are all about winning, and I’m sure she will be treated with respect.
It is long past time for a woman coach. There were rumors that now-retired University of Tennessee Women’s Head Coach Pat Summit, the winningest head coach in all of college basketball, men’s or women’s, would be lured to take an NBA job. Not a WNBA job, but a pro job with the men. I have little doubt she would have been successful if she had made the leap.
So, here’s another reason to respect the Spurs team and organization and I wish Ms. Hammon the best of luck.

My regular job places me in downtown Chicago, and short waves went through the whole downtown when there were reports of a shooting at one of the buildings in the Loop last Thursday.
Last Thursday morning, Steven Lavoie, CEO of ArrowStream, a company that focused on technology for food service companies that shipped freight had a meeting with long time friend and colleague Tony DeFrances, who was chief technology officer for the company LaVoie founded in 2000. DeFrances, 60, had been told a week earlier that he had been demoted as part of downsizing and told LaVoie he wanted to talk about it. DeFrances pulled a German revolver and shot Lavoie in the stomach and head then shot himself in the head. DeFrances died, but Mr. LaVoie remains in critical but stable condition.
This is of course, a terrible tragedy for the LaVoie and DeFrances families and I of course, hope that Mr. LaVoie has a full and speedy recovery. However, I haven’t read one article that was my first reaction – that this should be a warning signal for every CEO.
Times have been hard, and the gulf between the average worker and the C-suite of officers is now a yawning chasm, with many CEOs making 500-600 times the average worker at their companies. The “middle class” has disappeared and the years of chipping away at unions and the governmental safety net has people edgy and when one major party seems prepared to do everything for corporations and the 1% of earners in this country, they feel that the game is rigged against them – no matter how hard they work, and strive.
Recently, self described plutocrat Nick Hanauer, an admitted member of the 0.01% of wealthy people in this country wrote in Politico.com: “And what do I see in our future now? I see pitchforks. At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.
But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.”
The discussion that too many people are having these days are from the angle of the “we” and the “them,” with the them not worthy of being taken care of or sacrificed for at all. The uncertainty in modern life has whole groups of people, entire nations, entire religions making an argument of who are humans and who aren’t. There is no value judgment – THERE ARE NO PEOPLE, NONE, THAT ARE BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE. We see it in Gaza with people who have already been called sub-human and nearly exterminated saying many of the same things about Muslims. When Ted Nugent calls the president “sub-human” it is no different that the attitude you have to have to support Jim Crow, apartieted, ethnic cleansing, or just plain genocide, in effect any policy that sets one group above another and permits people to segregate, economically disadvantage, hurt and even kill other people.
Someone on Facebook made a comment that they were surprised at this – after all, Mr. DeFrances was only demoted, not fired. He still had a job and probably a fairly well paying one, so they could not fathom it being worth shooting someone over. Again, I am not saying this was a justified incident, far from it, but many people gain a great deal of self-worth from their jobs. I was out of work for 13 ½ months between 2004 and 2005, and even though money was not an issue, I was devastated. In retrospect, I should have taken it more easy and believed that things would work out (they did). But look at the number of suicides from the global economic crisis we just experienced. All over the world, people who lost jobs, houses, marriages, decided that the easiest thing to do was to end it all. Some of them, decided to take other people with them, for which I blame Fox News and the rest of the mainstream media, who make billions of dollars finding someone to blame for your condition without ever holding up a mirror to account for your own accountability in your situation.
I am not advocating the 99% taking arms against the 1%, and like I said, I am sad for Mr.LaVoie and his family and Mr. DeFrances’ family. And I am also not saying that Mr. LaVoie demoted Mr. DeFrances for no reason, or in a harmful or hurtful manner (knowing their friendship, I would doubt that the demotion was anything but tied to business problems and handled as delately as possible). But no one has picked up on this angle – people are angry, for reasons real and imagined. A condescending or contemptuous attitude toward the 99% won’t last long. Ask the French nobles.

As an afterward to my previous story, I have to include this story. There were reports that an experimental drug was being used on the two American medical workers who contracted the Ebola virus. The drug has reportedly worked very well on the two Americans, which is a good thing.
My question is: what were you waiting for to roll this drug out on the hundreds of Africans currently stricken or the over 400 people who have died from the more recent outbreak? Was it because the victims were African? Dark-skinned compared with the Caucasian doctors? Since a good portion of Africa is poor or at war or under the iron fist of terrible dictators and vast corruption?
As I wrote above, NO ONE IS OF MORE VALUE THAN ANY OTHER HUMAN BEING. If there is not a damn good reason for the delay in pulling out this miracle drug to fight Ebola, someone should be held accountable.

There is hardly any sports fan that hasn’t seen the gruesome leg injury suffered by Indiana Pacers guard Paul George while playing for Team USA in preparation for the World Championships. It ranks right up there with Joe Theisman’s broken leg and Robin Ventura’s ankle break for severity and gross out from the television footage factor. As a result, there are calls for NBA players to once again withdraw from international play.
This view is short-sighted. Players now have grow up either seeing or hearing about the original Dream Team and the other NBA filled teams that have played international play ever since. To many, this is something that they really want to do, boosted by Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo’s efforts to make sure the US has if not the best team, one of the top 2-3 teams in the sport together for play.
And, unfortunately, life is a risk. Chicago Bulls fans are holding their collective breath worried about the health and skills of Derrick Rose. To an NBA owner, this is a multi-million dollar asset being risked. George is certain to miss all of the 2014-2015 season and the Pacers, one of the better teams in the league, now need to find a replacement for one of the game’s best point guards.
But George could have hurt himself playing a pick-up game, or falling in the shower, or any of a billion other ways. I hardly ever read Dear Abby, but its funny that I saw an article today in a similar vein. A 26-year-old woman wants to have children, but in light of diseases, human misery, crime and bad people, she wonders whether she should have children.
Of course, the columnist suggests therapy, but life is a gamble. Tomorrow is promised to no one. As soon as the Indignant Children came along, I paid much more attention to what happens to children and often I shudder, thinking about what could happen to them. Every story about an abused child or kids caught in war (the children at the US border and the Palestinian children being maimed and killed in Gaza are the latest horrors) that I see are like little pins being stuck in my heart. (Sandy Hook was one of the saddest days I can remember.) But my girls are here, run the risk we all do, and they cannot be hermetically sealed from all possible harm – they have to be allowed to live. The joys they bring are more than worth the risks.
It’s the same with basketball players. Paul George wanted to play and he suffered the terrible injury. I think I can speak for everyone in saying that we hope he makes a full and swift recovery and returns to the pinnacle of his sport, but the NBA has to let its kids play.

The Green Bay Packers announced that they will induct quarterback Brett Favre into the team Hall of Fame and retire his No. 4 jersey. Reportedly, the Hall of Fame induction will occur in 2015, and the uniform-retirement ceremony also will happen in a future year, not 2014.
As a fan, I can understand holding a grudge (I have always disliked John Elway and Eli Manning even though they didn’t turn down my favorite team, the Bears), but the Favre/Packer “feud” has always been ridiculous. Favre retired from the team at the end of the 2007-2008 season, and the team was happy for that since they had drafted Aaron Rodgers two seasons before. Rodgers, as we know, was also a rare talent (and perhaps a Hall of Fame shoo-in like Favre already is), but Rodgers was ready to show what he could do. Favre’s heart wasn’t in retirement though – he thought, like the gunslinger he is, that he had at least a couple more good years remaining.
This put the Packers between a rock and a hard place. From a PR standpoint, Favre was the team’s golden boy – leading the team to two Super Bowls, winning one. But, with Rodgers in his prime and a top quarterback prospect, if the Packers had kept Favre, Rodgers would have demanded a trade or waited for free agency.
So, Favre asked the team to give him his unconditional release, but the Packers held on, eventually trading him to the New York Jets, and ending up playing for the Packers’ other nemesis (besides the Bears) the Minnesota Vikings. As a casual observer, it was humorous to watch the mainstream media’s continual obsession with the annual “will he play or retire” questions for Favre. For the Packer faithful (slightly unhinged anyway), he committed the ultimate betrayal, even though Rodgers won his own Super Bowl and remains in the top 3 quarterbacks in the league.
It is long past time to let bygones be bygones. Favre just wanted to play some more football, and the Packers had his replacement ready to go. It never lessened his importance to the team for all those years.
As a lifelong Bear fan, I hate the Packers. You need look no further than the top of this site to see that. But I had respect for Favre as a player, and think that Rodgers may be one of the best QBs I’ve ever seen. But I hate them, and always will. Still, it’s time.

The NCAA announced that it has reached a settlement in the litigation that began when a dozen college athletes accused the NCAA of putting their health at risk by leaving concussion policies up to individual schools.
The settlement is for $75 million, a drop in the bucket compared to the NFL’s $750 million settlement, but it does establish a new procedure for handling concussions. Under the agreement, players will not be allowed to return to action the same day they receive a concussion. All players, coaches and trainers will receive concussion education, and doctors trained in concussion diagnosis will have to be present for all games played in contact sports such as football, soccer and basketball.
Seventy million of the settlement will establish a medical monitoring fund that will allow any athlete who played NCAA sports to get a free evaluation of possible concussion-related symptoms, ranging from motor problems to cognitive issues. Ex-players will first have to fill out a survey to see if they qualify for the evaluation. The evaluation results will be forwarded to their doctors, but the settlement does not call for the NCAA to pay the medical costs of any athlete deemed to have concussion-related problems. The remaining $5 million will be a contribution toward concussion-related research.
As I wrote earlier, the evaluation will be performed, but the NCAA nor the schools are obligated to pay for medical costs nor pay any damages to current or former athletes, which was one of the issues behind the Northwestern unionizing petition a few months ago – an injured player who can no longer play a sport can lose his/her scholarship and any health benefits/treatment after being dropped by a university. For athletes who play professional sports, their ability to prove injury in college as opposed to the pros will be difficult. For everyone else, we will diagnose you, but you’re on your own, says the NCAA. So, let the lawsuits commence.
A bigger issue is whether or not there will be an NCAA to deal with long term. As I posted here a couple of weeks ago, the NCAA is scheduled to vote on whether the big conferences can establish their own rules regarding student compensation and other issues that the big schools can afford, but which is blocked by the larger number of small schools who cannot. It has been said that if the NCAA votes against this measure, the big conferences may break away from the NCAA.
This settlement and certainly the new rules are a step in the right direction, but I have a feeling that, like the NFL’s 10X larger settlement, will be woefully inadequate to provide any support to its athletes.