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    Sean BrodyHamilton Nolan
    7/01/15 10:14am

    Almost immediately after the fatal shooting of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., several prominent corporate leaders, including the heads of Walmart and Sears, took steps to retire the banner as a public symbol of the South;

    Was it the shootings themselves or people subsequently having a shitfit that these stores still sold the flags?
    Unfortunately, the answer is lost in the mists of time.

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      MattSean Brody
      7/01/15 10:29am

      Perhaps I'm being a bit of a cynic, but I kinda think that part of the reasoning behind removing the flag for sale also had to do with the fact that they probably don't make much if any profit from them. Like in the past, they sold the flag but aside from a small minority of people, most people didn't give two shits either way if it was sold. The difference today being that they crunched the numbers and decided that they simply weren't making enough money off of the flag and flag merchandise to justify the grief. If Confederate flag merch had been a consistent hot seller, I'd lay money they wouldn't have removed shit.

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      Sean BrodyMatt
      7/01/15 10:32am

      The flag was the number one seller on Amazon in the days after the shootings. They were making the most you could make from that stuff.
      These corporations just don’t need to be associated with negativity on social media.
      Maybe if you’re a mom & pop you make those calculations, but when you’re a mega corporation, you have to play nice and avoid shitstorms.

      Or that’s my take anyway.

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    copyranterHamilton Nolan
    7/01/15 10:08am

    If you read it as satire, it’s...still pretty bad.

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      punxsutawneyphilcopyranter
      7/01/15 11:26am

      It’s the first in a series, preparing you for the bolder gambit of Frank’s forthcoming columns. His point is that there are corporations out there doing extraordinary things, corporations that are people in the post-Citizens United world. Frank Bruni is a person too, a person that’s just in awe of what these other people are doing. And who’s to say it’s wrong when, under the spell of time’s gentle song, that awe blossoms into something else, something that a man paid to articulate ideas with words finds inarticulable? Frank Bruni loves a corporation and though he’s not going to name names with the relationship still friable in its first flushes, he’s imagining a time when that love can be realized and recognized.

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    blameitonthecroutons goodbye tourHamilton Nolan
    7/01/15 10:10am

    Wait until Frank Bruni hears about these things called charities. It might blow his fucking mind.

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      KennethConwayblameitonthecroutons goodbye tour
      7/01/15 10:16am

      And poor houses ... and debtors’ prisons ... Bruni’ll cream his pants when he hears about them.

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      blameitonthecroutons goodbye tourKennethConway
      7/01/15 10:59am

      He’ll cream his pants about private prisons making a buck of prison labor, if he hasn’t already.

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    dothedewHamilton Nolan
    7/01/15 10:22am

    Corporations are merely a form of organization of an entity. The problem with corporations as a structure is that corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. They can only justify doing these “charitable” things in the name of maximizing profits and value. If Bruni wanted to write an interesting column about this, he should have written about public benefit corporations, a new structure that has all the limited liability benefits of a regular old corporation, but is allowed to have as part of its charter that it can have social goals that do not necessarily maximize shareholder value. Otherwise, this is just a regurgitation of Milton Friedman, which sounds great in theory, but doesn;t quite work, in practice, as one would hope.

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      ARP2dothedew
      7/01/15 10:44am

      Great summary, and Bruni is right that on occasion, maximizing shareholder value and doing what’s “right” are sometimes aligned. But they are often not aligned at all, which Bruni conveniently fails to mention.

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      TacitAgreementdothedew
      7/01/15 10:45am

      Totally agree. There was an interesting column that could have been written about the natural tension between the profit goals of a corporation and the fact that corporations are comprised of individuals who want to use the resources of the corporation to support social justice (I speak as one within a large multi-national corp) but Frank certainly is not up to the task. How does the NYT get such lame columnists? In a funny way, I think they hire the Friedmans and Brunis explicitly because of their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value—making words on a page that say nothing probably feels less risky than making any kind of complex point.

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    ARP2Hamilton Nolan
    7/01/15 10:13am

    This is a variant of the same tired argument that libertarians throw out, which is that you can simply “vote” with your dollars and that corporations will naturally bend towards the will of the people or that you have a meaningful choice not to buy corporations [X] products and services. Often that’s not the case given the quasi or real monopolies that many of them hold.

    They somehow still think that there are two family owned blacksmiths in a village and the one with the best price and the best customer service will naturally win.

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      Robert ElessarARP2
      7/01/15 10:38am

      Libertarians live in a fantasy land.

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      SiphanARP2
      7/01/15 11:02am

      The fools only go as deep as the individual because that is their natural state of experience. Libertarians are too misanthropic to understand that things don’t work out. Too prideful to believe that they can be manipulated by advertising and commodity fetishism. Too cowardly to admit they might need the help of others from time to time.

      Thankfully, corporations/society/capitalism are disenfranchising economically the only portion of the population that you historically never disenfranchise. Young people aged 16-25. What happens to all societies when the group aged 16-25 no longer believes in your society??

      History will oft repeat itself.

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    Kdub1370Hamilton Nolan
    7/01/15 10:14am

    I know Gawker exists primarily to bitch about how horrible journalists, and particularly NYT journalists are, BUT… God Bruni is dumb. And I can’t help but think that a lot of this is a direct response to all the rainbow-washing all the corporations did last week.

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      amgarreKdub1370
      7/01/15 10:25am

      Yup. This is pretty much what is wrong with single-issue politics. It creates a helluva bind spot. If corporations had come out against gay marriage, he would have written the exact opposite. And some have. What does he have to say about Chick fil-A and Liberty Mutual?

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      HecateBarTheDoorKdub1370
      7/01/15 11:00am

      And lazy. He’s less of an “opinion” writer and more of a “personal whim” writer like the awful and useless Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman.

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    AlloHamilton Nolan
    7/01/15 10:13am

    I remember having to read his columns when I had committed to reading the NYT in print cover to cover for period of time.... I remember also canceling my subscription.

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      Lion-OJrHamilton Nolan
      7/01/15 10:35am

      Ever notice when someone says. “The list goes on,” the list doesn't really go on?

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        GartrelleGordonLion-OJr
        7/01/15 2:09pm

        This just might be Comment of the Yea — ok, Week.

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      Snake LipssynkHamilton Nolan
      7/01/15 10:22am

      Sometimes the bottom line matches the common good,

      That’s either when the elite believe they represent the middle class, like now, or when public/private union membership was 60%+ and there actually was a (large) middle class.

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        ARP2Snake Lipssynk
        7/01/15 10:46am

        They key word here is “sometimes.” Also “sometimes” wearing a seatbelt is safer than not wearing a seatbelt. But, if you were a betting person, what would you choose?

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      Rom RombertsHamilton Nolan
      7/01/15 10:16am

      Ham, have you ever attempted the purchase of an industrial earth moving machine from your government representative? No! If you need to move earth, you call Caterpillar Earth Moving Solutions, not Bern Sanders. Think! In this vest of logic and reason, I am impenetrable.

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