Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 30, 2021

Steve Forbes’s supporters can’t get self-righteous with profit motivated businessmen.

Mike is being confronted with his own hypocrisy. I think he’s going to find it uncomfortable.

It’s NOT hypocrisy to find yourself in a different society andhonestly attempting to ‘pass’.

Nice to see them take stock of the situation!

Youthful ideals meets cold hard adult reality.

Mike’s one of them…as may well be a bunch of union pension funds…

A good thing to remember, that. Hippies became Yuppies. Love is free but life costs. The love may fade but bill collectors don’t forget.

He’s got a responsibility all right but it’s to the stakeholders not just to the stockholders.

Of course, the “need” for downsizing often relates to excessive executive compensation and dividend payouts to boost share prices.

When the CEO earns enough to pay a thousand employees, can “downsizing” ever really be necessary?

Hahaha

It’s also a part of his responsibility to create and design profitable work for the people he’s hired. CEO’s never forget their responsibility to investors, but often forget their responsibility to their workforce.

My roommate had a teenage son visiting. He told us “The Revolution is coming.”

I laughed along with his father.

“Why are you laughing?”

His father said, “When I was your age I also thought The Revolution was coming.”

“What happened?”

His father and I looked at each other before I said, “We bought stock.”

Originally, I was going to post “When did ‘Up the Establishment!’ become ‘Up, the Establishment!’?”, but the only Google hits I got on “Up the Establishment” were for a German movie and something about smoking banana peels. I could have sworn that was an anti-Establishment saying in the sixties, meaning like “Up yours, Establishment!”, turning into “Hooray for the Establishment!”, amusingly by the addition of a simple comma. Does anyone else remember that saying being used back then?

If you gut your company with layoffs, that creates less product out the door… which creates less profits… which do not serve your stockholders well either…

We all have to grow up sometime…

I am a stockholder. One of my companies, Fastenal, rocketed up my admiration list when they responded to a tough period by deciding to hire more sales staff. On the flip side, I vote against most compensation proposals.

Mike’s the marketing lead…put him in charge of figuring out a sellable product that those 60 affected workers can build…

Also reminds me of an excellent line from the movie SLC Punk—“I didn’t sell out, son. I bought in”

The first priority in business is to make money.