Word: profitability
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...effects of a shaky centerpiece on the world economy are evident. Businessmen, who feel they cannot predict the value of their currency tomorrow morning much less a year from now, have grown overly cautious. Instead of marketing the new product that may (or may not) bring a profit in three or four years, they are gambling in the currency markets in hopes of making an overnight gain on a falling dollar or rising yen. That is one reason why business investment and economic growth in most Western industrial countries are running at only half the level of the 1960s...
...community and worker control, of the shut-down Youngstown, Ohio, steel mill. Alperovitz's analysis of the much-ballyhoed "steel crisis" last year shows that corporate greed was the core of the problem, the catalyst for throwing Youngstown out of work. Youngstown Sheet and Tube, locally-owned and highly-profitable in the '60s, was 1969's Ripe Takeover of the Year. Lykes Steamship Company, based in New Orleans and one-seventh the size of Youngstown, borrowed the buy-out capital from Wall Street and elsewhere, using Youngstown's positive cash flow as collateral. Since 1969, Lykes invested next to nothing...
...increased welfare benefits over the next three years in Youngstown alone. Alperovitz puts it this way: A corporation would never be satisfied with a 3 per cent return because it could make 8 or 10 per cent elsewhere. But owners from the community or workforce mainly want the jobs--profits matter only in so far as they help pay for modernizing. It's the classic case of the counter-productive profit motive...
ALPEROVITZ's other major research project also concerns counter-productive profit motives, in regards to inflation. Contrary to Keynesian and neoclassical theory, Alperovitz believes government budget deficits have had little to do with the inflation of the past six years. The four necessities--food, housing, energy, and health care--account for over 80 per cent of inflation, he maintains. In health care, for instance, there is no check on greed--third parties, the insurance companies, pay for most treatment, and doctors and hospitals charge whatever the "market" will bear. The result: spiraling insurance premiums and profits, soaring medical costs...
...abroad in Havana or at the United Nations, his harangues often sound like those of a Communist, but at home he does not always act like one. He has eagerly signed aid deals with the U.S., Japan and the World Bank, which is setting up fruit-export agencies on profit-making lines. In an interview, Amin insisted that the Russians would never manipulate his country or its economy, and disclosed that he had told both U.S. and Soviet ambassadors that "we want to retain our free judgment." But a shopping list of expensive prestige projects is being compiled...