Aubade
For the Rentiers
Monday, 20 June 2011
¶ Large American corporations claim that they’ll use “repatriated” profits — fund that they’ll shift to their United States balance sheets in the event of a tax holiday — to create jobs. As David Kocieniewski points out, “But that’s not how it worked last time,” in 2005, and there’s no reason to think that a replay would work out any differently. Those repatriated funds would almost certainly be shuttled into the arms of shareholders, and jobs be damned. ¶ David Carr tells a similar story in his unusual advance review of a book that’s going to come out next week, James O’Shea’s The Deal From Hell, a gruesome account of vicissitudes that the once-great Los Angeles Times has experienced since the Chandler family decided to sell it. Similar in that business considerations are grotesquely subordinated to short-term one-time gains.