If I had any left lmao.

Notice when she was telling people to go to China there was no sign saying "stop Asian hate" around

Should anyone remember in the negotiation period in the lead up to the contract deadline, Corporate UPS' negotiation team played chicken with the Teamsters Union to the point many large companies that were utilizing their services flat out stopped and moved to utilize other companies services to maintain their own stability.

This, in addition to the growth of costs from the company's abuse of part-timers being worked just under full-time hours being penalized under the new contract allowing them to make overtime after 5 hours, and the simmering escalation of the trade war against China by the Biden regime has caused a significant enough loss of revenue that - from my own sources in the company - corporate is planning to gut themselves to the bone even more than they're telling the news by firing employees to the point the company can minimally function.

Meaning that everyone that is not a part of upper corporate that is deemed unessential, regardless of length of service to the company, can be fired in the coming months.

Folks share your savory spicy sauces with the rest of us so we all can get the rumble rumble tum tum tums together!

Stolen from here: Favorites hot sauces by State (on instacart) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hot-sauce-by-state_l_65a99626e4b041f1ce6553d1

Also which state buys the most hot sauce

Greedflation 2: the greed never dies

First, there was the “greedflation,” then there was the hangover as companies refused to admit they had raised prices too far. That’s the story coming into view for the world’s central bankers: Nearly four years after the onset of pandemic-induced supply chain snarls, price hikes that exploded during the peak of the crisis have yet to come down to the Fed’s 2% target. With a plethora of studies demonstrating that corporate profits were excessive in the pandemic, policymakers are now worried about whether anything can slow the “greedflation” that’s run up costs of food and household goods.

I sometimes wonder if these dipshits arent taught in their faux econ classes that monopoly capital with its dominance over every stage of production can absolutely raise their prices on critical goods as much as they want and had to experience first-hand that they actually do hold society by the balls and can get away with literal murder.

Thomas Barkin, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, is concerned that, after decades in which makers of consumer staples were afraid to raise prices, those companies now have the upper hand, he told the Financial Times.

Got society by the balls but are afraid to squeeze?

“Big box retailers are pushing back on manufacturers to try to encourage them to begin to do more discounting. But their bargaining power is less than pre-Covid,” Barkin told the venerable “pink pages” of London, adding, “It’s going to take a while for them to negotiate price increases out of the system.”

Go figure. The middlemen are getting squeezed and want to continue making their profits by trying to cut costs instead of raising prices since they don't actually have as much leverege as commodity producers do.

Cost savings aren’t trickling down to shoppers

But piss is.

The proof is there in another inflation index, the Producer Price Index, or wholesale inflation, which has been falling below the retail pricing shown in the Consumer Price Index — meaning that cost savings aren’t being passed on to consumers.

Blah blah blah "cost of production" bullshit they still inflate that anyways without "greedflation"

The pandemic has made companies more willing to experiment with price increases, researchers at the Pricing Lab at Harvard Business School told the New York Times. Pre-pandemic, it was standard for companies to increase prices once a year, but now multiple price changes in one year are common, the outlet reported, noting that profit-hunting executives “are effectively running tests to see what prices consumers will bear before they stop buying.” A December survey from the Richmond Fed and Duke University found that 60% of company leaders are planning on price increases beyond pre-pandemic norms this year.

Gee I wonder why shoplifting is on the rise. Damn shame retailer middlemen corps primarily feel the nibble of shoplifting and not the producer corps.

That matters because the rate of inflation will determine how quickly the Federal Reserve cuts its benchmark interest rate, which is currently at a 22-year high. Corporate price increases are a substantial driver of inflation—accounting for more than half of the consumer inflation in the past year, according to multiple studies.

Blah blah blah feds begging fat cats to stop feasting

If corporations continue to hike prices to maintain the outsized profit margins they’ve gotten used to, it would substantially slow inflation’s return to its 2% target. On the other hand, if corporate profit margins shrink, companies will be incentivized to cut costs in other ways, including by laying off workers, economists told the Louisville Courier-Journal. Nationwide Chief Economist Kathy Bostjancic warned about this possibility in her 2024 economic outlook, writing, “as we cheer the cooling in inflation, it means that companies are losing the strong pricing power acquired during the period of high inflation, which boosted profit margins and profits.” If companies slow their price hikes but “do not receive an offsetting rise in the volume of sales, then revenue growth will slow, squeezing margins. This in turn will lead companies to cut expenses — notably labor costs,” she wrote.

Blah blah blah capital is in its fuck around boom phase, and it's find out phase is coming up and it's gonna fucking suck for us no matter what.

There is one way to get prices lower, and it’s a punitive approach some European supermarkets are taking: Refusing to carry products that they deem too expensive. The chain Carrefour has led this retailer boycott, dropping PepsiCo products from shelves in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Poland. But France is an international outlier in this respect, empowering its grocery giants to take on Big Snack Food. U.S. retailers have not taken similar steps to date.

Europeans doing nationalism but with treats. Lol. Lmao even.

Alternative title: Marx proven right yet again. Capitalist economy setting itself up for economic bust.

“We may be looking at the end of capitalism.” Those words, from the pen of the loquacious Albert Edwards of Societe Generale, shocked the Wall Street analyst set last April and set Alberts on his way to becoming a financial press favorite for his witty turns of apocalyptic phrase. He was commenting on the phenomenon of “greedflation,” an economic bugbear previously beloved of progressive economists, not quite venerable 160-year-old French investment banks.

God willing the bastards hang themselves with their own rope

But after falling from its blistering pace in 2022, consumer inflation has gotten stubbornly stuck in the 3% range—rising unexpectedly for the last two months even as wholesalers’ prices stay flat or fall. That is greedflation’s music, offering a clear bit of evidence that excessive profit-taking is happening above the raw cost of goods. And yet another progressive economic study, this time from the Groundwork Collaborative, sheds light on the problem, arguing that more than half of the consumer price price increases in the middle of last year were due to excessive profits, according to the findings. Corporate profits, by the way, remain at all-time highs.

Monopoly capital doing monopoly capital things. Big shocker

Corporate profits drove 53% of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third since the start of the pandemic, the report found, analyzing Commerce Department data. That’s a massive jump from the four decades prior to the pandemic, when profits drove just 11% of price growth.

Now that they gave the shareholders record profits, corporations now must continue their scalping in order to deliver on their fiduciary responsibilities even at the risk of causing another depression.

“Businesses were really, really quick, when input costs went up, to pass that on to consumers. [But] had they only passed on those increases, inflation would have been maybe one to three points lower,” Liz Pancotti, a strategic advisor at Groundwork and one of the report’s authors, told Fortune.

If it wasn't for the drive towards monopolization in the capitalist system of economics, the increase in input costs in the form of increased demand or reduced supply or a combination of the two would've promoted the growth of production for those commodities in order to profit off of the price inflation. Now there just a handful of cartels who can not just profit off of inflation of finished commodities, but also off of the process of commodity production itself as they have ownership over the entire process.

Less business, more money

In fact, corporate profits have been so good, companies may have backed themselves into a corner, Bloomberg Opinion columnist (and former Fortune editor) Justin Fox opined this week, citing Home Depot’s earnings, which saw an increase in dollar sales per square foot (thanks to rising materials prices) but also fewer transactions. Corporate profits have hit a new record in the most recent quarter, while the portion of national output going to workers is still below pre-pandemic levels, despite solid real wage growth.

Even with the Workers finally being able to feel some actual increases to their material conditions of existence, it immediately gets undermined by the cartels.

That high-profit, lower-volume dynamic is even hurting workers—who are being scheduled for fewer shifts to service fewer shoppers, who are themselves put off by ever-increasing prices, Bloomberg Opinion writer Conor Sen wrote. In the short term, that trend may manifest itself in some positive changes, like a four-day workweek. But in the longer term, companies will refuse to give up their fat profit margins without a fight, and will try to cut wherever possible. The tech industry, while a small part of the overall economy, is prime evidence of this dynamic, with Google, Amazon and plenty of smaller companies this month announcing plans to shed the less-profitable parts of their workforce as they pivot to the hopefully-more-profitable AI sector.

"Positive" changes because of the vicious cycle of the capitalist system or organization cannibalizing itself to maintain profit margins.

Meanwhile, consumer-facing companies have been upfront with investors about their price-raising strategies—and they don’t seem interested in a reversal. PepsiCo’s CFO Hugh Johnston said last spring the company could “increase margins during the course of the year;” construction materials giant Holcim said in October it would raise its margins to make up for falling demand, and consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble this summer boasted of an $800 million profit increase, thanks to falling commodity costs that it would not pass on to consumers.

See last comment on vicious cycles.

That all adds up to consumer-inflation rates that are, well, inflated, according to Groundwork. Company profits are “probably why we saw inflation in the realm of 7% to 9% for a while, instead of the 5% to 7% range,” Pancotti told Fortune. Now that “we’re in the 3% range, if you took corporate profits away, we should already be at the 2% target” that the Federal Reserve has set, she added.

MADE UP BULLSHIT TO MANIPULATE STATISTICS TO MEET MADE UP TARGETS TO MAKE IT LOOK LIKE YOURE ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING

After pandemic-era upheavals, “on the whole, things are really stabilized, but we’re still seeing significant gaps between consumer and producer prices,” she said.

YOURE GONNA KEEP GETTING SCALPED AND YOURE GONNA LOVE IT

It’s not just the left making this argument. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has also found corporate profits playing an outsize role in price growth. The Kansas City Fed, in a recent study, found that growth in markups accounted for more than half of consumer price inflation for 2021, a “substantially higher contribution than during the preceding decade.” Last month, the largest review to date of greedflation, from the Institute for Public Policy Research and Common Wealth, looked at 1,300 companies across four continents and concluded that profiteering by a relatively small set of companies pushed up consumer prices “significantly higher” than would have happened from the supply-chain shocks alone.

They're just repeating themselves now. "You're getting fucked by monopoly capital"

Societe Generale’s Edwards, in his takedown of greedflation last year, warned that corporations’ greed could lead to a revolt and social unrest. Calling profit-taking "unprecedented" and "astonishing," Edwards noted that he had never seen this level of corporate greed during four decades in the finance industry, and warned that popular unhappiness at companies’ “super-normal profit margins” could usher in price controls, of the type last seen decades ago.

If they want to actually concider breaking out the Olde State control measures to keep the gravy train going for record profits, now would be the time to fucking do it because if they wait until the hogs break loose it'll be too late

To be sure, classical economists argue that blaming companies for trying to boost profits is like blaming the rain for falling—profit-seeking is their mission, and it was to be expected, if anything, from the unleashed pent-up demand that exploded as the economy reopened post-pandemic. But increasingly, mainstream as well as progressive economists are making the case that the prices just didn’t need to go up this much.

And that's why capitalism must go.

Outside the U.S., corporations as well as governments have pushed back against price hikes. The European supermarket chain Carrefour, which first tried to embarrass PepsiCo by pointing out price increases on its products with in-store signs, last month said it would stop carrying PepsiCo products altogether. Belgian chain Colruyt also dropped products from Mondelez, the maker of Oreos and Philadelphia cream cheese, after price hikes.

Lmao national bourgeoisie are trying to wriggle their way back into the scene

Gen Z is prioritizing living over working because they've seen 'the legacy of broken promises' in corporate America, a future-of-work expert says

Truth be told, damn near everyone I meet that treats their job as a means of trying to enjoy life. Like sometimes I've heard stories of older people being told they'll be fired if they leave work (on time and not do forced overtime) to make it to their kid's recital or sports ball tourney and some of them bite the bullet of keeping their job vs risking financial instability for their family. But generally speaking the people that "live to work" tend to be people that have a hard time socializing outside of work and use work as a means of meeting their emotional needs or complete cranks that drank the corporate coolaid or ate a whole dumptrucks worth republican bullshit propaganda to the point that ideology overtakes reality.

Gen Z is choosing to "work to live'' rather than "live to work," like previous generations, because they're reaping fewer rewards for their hard work, an expert on the future of work told Business Insider.

"Expert"

Ravin Jesuthasan, the global leader for transformation services at the consulting giant Mercer and a future-of-work expert, spoke with BI at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week and touched on the topic of Gen Z in the workplace.

A future-of-work work expert who's never worked a day in his life

Gen Z "has some very different attitudes to work" from older generations, Jesuthasan said, because it's one of the first generations whose members won't have wealth greater than that of their parents or grandparents. Additionally, they have already experienced huge disruptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

If being able to make the most basic of observations can make you an expert that can give speeches at the Davos meeting of vampires, we'd all be fucking grandmasters here on hexbear.

Jesuthasan said: "I think they have more of an attitude of work to live as opposed to live to work that many of us grew up with. This is particularly true in the West. They have seen the legacy of all these broken promises. In the old days and in many parts of the West, they would promise you if you worked for 30 years, you have this defined benefit pension, you have retiree medical care, etc. None of that exists today.

See last statement.

"And so they've seen that get taken away from their parents or grandparents, and now there's a sense of, 'I'm only as good as the skills I have. I'm only as good as the value I'm delivering today, and so these are the terms under which I want to work, and you either meet them or not.'"

Dipshits giving a convoluted version of Moissaye J. Olgin's "Why Communism" section 1, who's first sentence is literally "YOU ARE A WORKER"

Gen Zers watched as millennials struggled through economic hardships, including multiple recessions and a pandemic, which put a dent in their income and dreams of homeownership. The increased cost of living, skyrocketing house prices, and student debt have locked millennials out of the housing market and made it difficult for them to accumulate wealth.

More statements of the obvious.

As a result, numerous Gen Zers are "quiet quitting" and taking a step back at work because they're painfully aware that their hard work could essentially amount to nothing.

STOP MAKING FAKE WORDS

"Many of us built, whether it's bought homes or whatever, based on this promise of stability," Jesuthasan said. "There was this expectation that the tail was bigger. And we took on liabilities and obligations early on because of that tail. I think this generation has seen that tail dissipate."

Fucker saying the vampires and ghouls knew the gravy train was gonna run dry, they just thought it wouldn't have happened so damn fast, as they ladle more wealth sauce down their gullets

Companies will have to start meeting people on their individual terms rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, Jesuthasan said.

You can choose pizza party or mandatory team building exercises. No asking for raises however.

This includes being able to "pick and choose" from a "portfolio of rewards," he added. Gen Zers have often received flak for their perceived flippant attitude to work. In one survey last year, 74% of managers said the generation was the most challenging to work with.

Fuck petty tyrant bosses.

Meanwhile, celebrities including Whoopi Goldberg have dismissed their economic struggles. She said they couldn't afford to buy a house because they're lazy and "only want to work four hours" a day.

CHOKE ON YOUR TONGUE AND DIE

However, Gen Zers are facing setbacks because of high levels of inflation and rising prices. They're even shopping less and eating at home more to save money, a Bank of America survey found in an August survey.

Great depression mindset grindset ftw

The members of the young generation have hit back at some of these accusations, saying that they're not prioritizing work because wages have stagnated, they're unfulfilled by the mundane 9-to-5 life, and they're burned out.

Capitalist exploitation fucking sucks.

The Alaska Friends Conference is set to issue an apology in Kake on Friday for the harm caused to the community by a Quaker mission they ran at the turn of the 20th century. The missionaries were also teachers at a government-run day school that forced Lingít children to assimilate into white culture.

The Quakers’ apology was planned for Kake Day — a day to celebrate Kake’s survival and the community’s cultural revitalization work. It’s on Jan. 19 this year.

Along with the apology, they’re giving more than $92,000 dollars to the community to help build a healing and cultural center.

This isn’t the first apology from the Quakers. In 2022, they came to Juneau to apologize for the Douglas Island Friends Mission school. Jan Bronson is a member of the Alaska Friends Conference. In an interview before traveling to Kake, she said it’s important to do more than apologize.

“It’s not enough to say ‘we’re sorry.’ We’re committed to listening, learning, and helping heal the trauma that resulted,” she said.

Kake Tribal Council President Joel Jackson says missions and schools like the one in Kake traumatized generations of tribal members.

“What our people were experiencing because of the boarding school era being passed on to generations, even up to now,” Jackson said. “Being forced into these schools and forced not to speak their languages and carry out their customs and traditions and their language.”

Jackson wrestled with these consequences for decades, first as police chief, and now as council president.

“We had some unfortunate high numbers of suicide in our little community,” he said.

Suicide rates plummeted after Kake leaders established a camp for youth 35 years ago that taught traditional food harvesting and art forms like carving. But Jackson said Alaska Native people are still healing from the forced assimilation that schools like the one in Kake brought.

Jackson and other tribal leaders are designing the new center to treat addiction with traditional values and food practices like hunting and fishing.

“It’s very important that we can at least try to give people an option to start healing from intergenerational trauma,” he said.

Last summer, local Lingít activist Jamiann S’eitlin Hasselquist and two elders, Jim and Susan LaBelle traveled to a Quaker conference in Oregon to talk about the harm the schools caused.

After, the Quakers asked Jackson what they could do to help healing in Kake, and he said that $75,000 for this healing center would be a good start. A Quaker group in the Pacific Northwest pledged $75,000 right off the bat. Other Quaker communities contributed nearly $20,000 more.

Jackson, the council president, says the healing center Kake is building with that money will help restore a sense of belonging and cultural identity to those who need it.