Breaking up is hard to do...

...but it's not as hard as cancelling your cable service.

Here is the story.

Here is the recording.

It's disturbing that the corporate mouthpiece for Comcast just blatantly lied when confronted.  Clearly the employees are trained to harrass and browbeat customers who try to cancel.

I tried for nearly a month to get a customer service rep at Time-Warner here in NC to talk to me about ways to change the service into a bundle, three years ago.  Never could even get anyone to talk to me.

But when I called to cancel, after I gave up and switched to ATT, I was immediately connected to an extremely aggressive and abusive guy who demanded to know what was wrong, and how they could fix it.  At least he did back off when I told him I was a consultant, and would be happy to discuss the many ways that Time-Warner sucked.  All that was required was a signed contract, $175/hour, 4 hour minimum, payable in advance.

In the meantime, though, cancel my service.  That didn't work for the guy above, though.  Amazing.

I should have said that I would be willing to talk to him sometime between 8 am and 2 pm, and I couldn't be more specific than that....

Utterly Wrong-Headed

Morals and Markets  

Armin Falk & Nora Szech 
 Science, 10 May 2013, Pages 707-711

Abstract: The possibility that market interaction may erode moral values is a long-standing, but controversial, hypothesis in the social sciences, ethics, and philosophy. To date, empirical evidence on decay of moral values through market interaction has been scarce. We present controlled experimental evidence on how market interaction changes how human subjects value harm and damage done to third parties. In the experiment, subjects decide between either saving the life of a mouse or receiving money. We compare individual decisions to those made in a bilateral and a multilateral market. In both markets, the willingness to kill the mouse is substantially higher than in individual decisions. Furthermore, in the multilateral market, prices for life deteriorate tremendously. In contrast, for morally neutral consumption choices, differences between institutions are small.

Even by the low and folksy standards of "Science," this is pretty lame.  Calling it a "market" simply means that responsibility is more widely shared.  Surely any collective body with large numbers would see the same result.  It's just the banality of evil problem, rediscovered and given the ideological twist that "Science" loves to give.  

So was it a $10 million Contribution, Then?

So, everybody was all excited that the Dems were going to have their convention in Charlotte.  NC is a key state and all (though the Dems ended up losing the state, in every way possible).

And there was some "formality" about guaranteeing a small loan, just $10 million (gulp!).  As we were told in the Democrat-owned press (i.e., McClatchy, the company tasked with writing ads for the Democratic party, thinly disguised as editorials or news stories):


Duke Energy Corp., whose CEO is leading the fundraising for the Democratic National Convention, is guaranteeing a $10 million line of credit for the event. 

The credit line from Fifth Third Bank is apparently the first time such an arrangement has been used by any Democratic convention organizers. A Duke spokesman said stockholders, not rate-payers, would be on the line if the convention's host committee defaults. 

But the head of the committee said it may never have to draw on the money. "It is just security in the event of a cash shortfall," Will Miller, acting executive director of the Charlotte organizing committee, said Friday. "The host committee is obligated to pay it back, and the host committee will pay it back." 

Some suggest the arrangement is tantamount to a large corporate contribution at a time when the party is touting new rules that bar corporate cash and individual contributions over $100,000. Democrats have pledged "a people's convention" and say the line of credit doesn't violate the new rules.

More after the jump... 

Corporations and Politics

Corporate Politics, Governance, and Value Before and After Citizens United

John Coates
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, December 2012, Pages 657–696

Abstract:
How did corporate politics, governance, and value relate to each other in the S&P 500 before and after Citizens United? In regulated and government-dependent industries, politics is nearly universal, and uncorrelated with shareholder power, agency costs, or value. However, 11 percent of CEOs in 2000 who retired by 2011 obtained political positions after retiring and, in most industries, political activity correlates negatively with measures of shareholder power, positively with signs of agency costs, and negatively with shareholder value. The politics-value relationship interacts with capital expenditures, and is stronger in regressions with firm and time fixed effects, which absorb many omitted variables. After the shock of Citizens United, corporate lobbying and PAC activity jumped, in both frequency and amount, and firms politically active in 2008 had lower value in 2010 than other firms, consistent with politics at least partly causing and not merely correlating with lower value. Overall, the results are inconsistent with politics generally serving shareholder interests, and support proposals to require disclosure of political activity to shareholders.

_____________________________________________

Corporate Policies of Republican Managers

Irena Hutton, Danling Jiang & Alok Kumar
University of Miami Working Paper, December 2011

Abstract:
This paper examines the relation between the personal political orientation of firm managers and corporate policies. Motivated by the theory of behavioral consistency, we conjecture that Republican managers who are more likely to follow conservative personal ideologies would choose more conservative corporate policies. Consistent with our conjecture, we find that firms with Republican managers have lower levels of corporate debt, lower capital and R&D expenditures, less risky investments, but higher levels of dividend payouts, higher retained earnings, and higher profitability. Republican managers are matched with firms that have conservative political environments, but even among those firms, higher levels of managerial conservatism are associated with more conservative policies. Further, around managerial turnover including CEO deaths, corporate policies become more conservative as managerial conservatism increases. In addition, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, corporate policies of Republican managers become more conservative as aggregate uncertainty increases. Overall, we show that Republican managers maintain and implement less risky and more profitable policies but the choice of lower R&D expenditures may dampen innovation.
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Nod to Kevin Lewis

Are Corporations People?

Dems love welfare, Reps love corporations. Result?

Corporate welfare.

"The Occupy Wall Street protesters aren't good at articulating what they want, but one of their demands is 'end corporate welfare.' Well, welcome aboard... Republicans, for their part, favor handouts to the nuclear industry. Over the years the feds have provided billions of dollars in loan guarantees and cut-rate insurance to nuclear plants, though even nuclear-utility executives say new plants may not make economic sense in a world of cheap and abundant natural gas. Last month House Speaker John Boehner backed a $2 billion Energy Department loan guarantee sought by USEC Inc. for a uranium-enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio...Yet the parade of subsidies gets longer each year, perhaps, as the old joke goes, because in Washington Republicans love corporations and Democrats love welfare. As House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan puts it: 'How can we save billions of dollars from unjustified subsidy and entitlement programs, if we can't get corporate America off the dole?'" (gated link to whole WSJ article)

(nod to Kevin Lewis)