I've given up on world peace. But is a just country too much to ask for?

DEAR SANTA...

by Nick Paleologos

Dear Santa,

The last time I saw you—or thought I did—was back in 1962 on Christmas Eve when I scurried to our back door only to be told by my mother that you had just ducked into a cab and dashed off. That’s right, she said you took a cab. I now know that was baloney. You were actually in a sleigh on our roof at the time. But mom was feeding me a line of misdirection to cover your tracks. I get that. Mom doesn’t remember the incident. Actually, she doesn’t remember much of anything anymore. Which is probably for the best because it seems that her cab story was merely the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg of lies I’ve been fed ever since.

Mom was doing her best. She meant no harm. Neither did my teachers when, each and every school day, they had us all stand up straight and tall, beside our desks—hands over hearts--and pledge allegiance to “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Let me tell you Santa, the way things are going, God may soon be demanding a retraction.

Last month, the Registrar of Deeds for Southern Essex County in Massachusetts—a guy named John O’Brien—said that his office has been a “crime scene” ever since 2008. He said that 75% of the foreclosures sought by Bank of America, Wells Fargo & JP Morgan Chase (among others) were completely fraudulent. That’s 40,000 families being kicked out of their homes illegally in just one half of one county in one state in the country. Which means, Santa, if you’re delivering presents to any of said addresses (or millions of others like them), those families may not live there anymore.

Since nobody from any of the crooked banks will be going to jail for their crimes against America's middle class, can you please put them on your “naughty” list? While a piece of coal in their stockings is a small price to pay for what they did, at least it’s a start.

Also Santa, please be especially sensitive when you visit Staten Island New York, Cleveland Ohio, and Ferguson Missouri this Christmas Eve.

In Ferguson, there’s a lady named Lesley. She had a son named Mike Brown. He was a big, burly 18 year old kid who had just graduated from high school and—like a lot of teenage boys—got into trouble occasionally as he tried to find his way in this crazy world. He liked to play Call of Duty—Zombies and he never had a criminal record. Mike was killed by a police officer. The cop, who fired 12 shots—two directly into Mike’s head, said he had no other choice. Mike was unarmed. I don’t know what that policeman is doing this Christmas Eve. But I’m pretty sure Lesley will be crying.

Also Santa, there are six kids on Staten Island who will never see their father again. Their dad’s name was Eric Garner. He was jumped by a bunch of policeman while he stood on the sidewalk with both arms raised. They wrestled him to the ground and choked him to death. I know because I saw the video. It’s very tough to watch. While being choked, he pleaded with the cops. “I can’t breathe,” he kept saying. He said it eleven times.

When you finally get to Cleveland, Santa, I know you were planning to leave a little something under the tree for twelve-year old Tamir Rice and his fourteen year-old sister. But now he’s gone too. You see, a few weeks ago he was at the park across the street from where they lived, playing with his toy airsoft gun, when a Cleveland cop pulled up in a squad car and shot him dead—no questions asked. The boy’s gut-wrenching murder—which was also captured on video—happened in less than three seconds.

Santa, do you remember when my son was a teenager and you brought him a toy airsoft gun and a zombie video game? In those days, he too was a big burly kid, who occasionally found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time when the local police in our tony Boston suburb showed up. But everything worked out fine and he’s graduating from college next year.

Then again, he’s white.

I’m an adult now Santa, and I know you have your limits. You can’t bring that Cleveland boy (or any of those other victims) back to life, or fill the heartbreaking void their families will endure from now on. I’m also pretty sure that even you can’t make the words “justice for all” ring true for me again—the way they used to when I was nine. And I’m kind of sad about that.

Still Santa, I do have one small request this year--which is definitely doable. If there’s any coal left after you finish with those weasel-y Wall Street bankers, please put the rest of it inside the stockings of a few select police union chiefs. You know the ones I mean. Just maybe, coming from you, the message will finally sink in: that they disgrace the uniforms of the vast majority of decent American cops by standing in front of TV cameras making excuses for the murderers in their midst.

Movie $$ Boosts Biz In Hard Times

Suburban businesses cash in when Hollywood comes to town

PHOTO BY WENDY MAEDA/GLOBE STAFF /FILE: Cast and crew from “Tumbledown” took over a street in downtown Concord while filming an outdoor scene in April.

By Katheleen Conti

GLOBE STAFF  NOVEMBER 30, 2014

Losing the lease to the family bakery’s landmark location of 61 years in a central part of Quincy and moving to a less traveled part of town four years ago has been difficult on Brian Jackle .

Foot traffic once attracted to O’Brien’s Bakery by Jackle’s concoctions, like the doughy fusion of peanut butter, banana, and chocolate he dubbed Elvis Bread, is much harder to come by at its new location on Vernon Street.

But like a Hollywood fairy tale, Jackle got a break a few months ago when a baker friend of his in Somerville recommended O’Brien’s to the craft service team in charge of feeding the crew on the set of “The Finest Hours,” a multimillion-dollar Disney production filming in Quincy and Duxbury.

“They were looking for six-foot subs,” Jackle said. “The guys from the movie called me and asked me, and I said I can make them.”

Four hours of giant sandwich-making helped establish a relationship between Jackle’s family-run business and the film’s food and beverage contractors, who have continued to place orders with the bakery, including a recent request for 100 bread bowls to go with 4 gallons of steak chili and 2 gallons of broccoli-cheddar soup made by Jackle’s mother, Muriel.

While the latest report from the state Department of Revenue indicated that most of the spending attributed to the Massachusetts film tax credit in 2012 went out of state, proponents of the initiative say that an increasing number of locally filmed productions have spread out beyond Boston, helping small businesses and tourism in the suburbs from Lincoln to Quincy to Saugus.

The number of major productions — those with budgets over $250,000 — filmed in the state annually has more than tripled since 2011, going from nine to 30 this year, according to the Massachusetts Film Office. And from 2011 to 2013, film production took place in 108 Massachusetts communities, boosting local businesses from restaurants to hardware stores, said Lisa Strout, director of the film agency.

“Non-film-specific businesses are so surprised when [film crews] are in a town for a week and they’re buying 300 bagels every single day, or pizzas,” Strout said. “It goes across all economic sectors. Car rental folks are very cognizant of the movie industry, [as are] our lumber yards.”

One indicator that Massachusetts is coming into its own as a filming destination is the construction of the $41 million New England Studios, led by Chris Byers and a group of investors.

The complex, which opened last year and now is on its second movie, features four sound stages totaling 72,000 square feet in the former Fort Devens Army base, which straddles Ayer, Harvard, and Shirley.

“We were losing parts of movies to California or to other states to do their sound-stage work because we didn’t have anything that high caliber,” Strout said. “We’re really excited to see how this affects the movie industry here.”

For Jackle, getting the call from craft service for “The Finest Hours,” which is scheduled to continue filming locally until January, has turned into an unexpected lifeline. Any time an order comes in from the set, it’s in the hundreds of dollars, he said.

“It’s helping a lot,” he said. “It’s been tough.’’

If film productions “do more business from people like me and small businesses, it’s great.”

The mobile, unpredictable nature of the movie-making industry makes it difficult for the state film office, local chambers of commerce, and visitors bureaus to measure a production’s full economic reach in the communities where they film, Strout said. But one indicator, she said, is the growth in membership in local film and television unions, among them the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees Local 481 , headquartered in Woburn.

In 2006, when the state’s film tax credit went into effect, the union, representing behind-the-scenes workers such as set builders and electricians, had 325 members. It now boasts about 900, said business manager Chris O’Donnell.

O’Donnell contends it wouldn’t have happened if not for the tax incentive, which critics have said doesn’t benefit the economy enough. Under the incentive, filmmakers who spend more than $50,000 locally qualify for a 25 percent payroll tax credit; spending more than 50 percent of a project’s total budget or filming at least 50 percent of principal photography in Massachusetts qualifies projects for a 25 percent production tax credit and a sales tax exemption.

In 2012, the most recent year with data from the Department of Revenue, the film tax credit cost the state $78.9 million in revenue, while only a third of the $304.4 million in spending driven by the credit occurred in Massachusetts. But O’Donnell said agency’s report “is a very small slice of what impact the film industry has had in Massachusetts.”

One example, he said, is “The Equalizer,” a thriller starring Denzel Washington that opened in theaters in September. It was filmed last year, with locations including a former Lowe’s store in Haverhill. Members of Local 481 were in charge of the vendor lists for everything from set construction materials to props and food, he said.

“For ‘The Equalizer’ alone, there were vendors and businesses in 45 different communities that came off that list,” O’Donnell said.

Since 2008, members of Local 481 have made production-related purchases in more than 3,000 local businesses, many outside of Boston, O’Donnell said. Among those members is the duo behind Team Crafty , a Lincoln-based craft service business started by David Steinwachs in response to the growing local film industry, said co-owner Cam Goodrich.

Over the past four years, the men have been working nonstop on approximately 16 movie and TV productions filmed throughout Massachusetts, including the Whitey Bulger biopic “Black Mass,” “The Judge,” starring Robert Downey Jr., and “Grown Ups 2.”

A lot of the food and drink on set is purchased at warehouse clubs and local supermarkets, but Steinwachs and Goodrich try to get as much as possible from small businesses and restaurants, Goodrich said. On average, their food budget is $950 to $1,900 a day to feed 100 to 200 people on a set, he said.

“It’s a fat wad of cash usually. . . We’ve been given the golden ticket to help people out,” Goodrich said. “On a movie like ‘Grown Ups 2,’ we would have to get a second meal every day of the week, and that was a different vendor every night. . . We really try to spread the wealth because they give us the wealth to spread.”

Paul Delios, president of the 60-year-old family-run Kane’s Donuts in Saugus, said he has delivered orders for 300 doughnuts on a weekly basis for the past three years to many of the sets where Team Crafty has worked, including current productions. Each dozen costs $16.

“It’s not a huge part of our business, but it’s a nice extra,” Delios said.

Even long after productions have wrapped, the local economy still benefits, said Taunya Wolfe Finn, owner of Wolfe Adventures and Tours in Newburyport. Since a movie-themed component was added about two years ago, Wolfe said, it now makes up 10 percent of her group tour business.

Wolfe Finn said she makes it a point to bring visitors to places where they can spend money, such as Woodman’s of Essex , a seafood restaurant where parts of the movie “Grown Ups” were filmed in 2009. If a 45-person tour group, for instance, has lunch there or at any local restaurant, it can easily add up to more than $1,000 for the business, Wolfe said.

“It’s amazing how far of a reach the filming industry has going into the local economy,” she said. “People want to see where things happened, where history happened, and where the movies were filmed.”

Once the state’s film tax incentive was enacted, Farshad Sayan, owner of Clevergreen Cleaners in Medford, and his wife tapped an industry-connected friend in Los Angeles to recommend their eco-friendly dry-cleaning business to anyone planning to film in Massachusetts. They got their first contract in 2007 with the movie “The Women.”

“We knew Hollywood was coming to Boston,” said Sayan, now working on his 45th or 46th production, including the recently filmed “Ted 2 .” “Ever since then, it’s just been one after another,’’ he said, noting that costume supervisors “have me on their contact list or I have them on my phone.”

Though movie contracts are only 3 to 5 percent of Sayan’s business, it can be a big help.

“This past summer having a movie like ‘Black Mass’ really made a huge difference for us during our slow time of the year — $35,000 to $40,000 for the total dry-cleaning bill,” he said. “Sometimes the movie industry is like an umbrella that you sometimes have to hold on to when it’s shiny, and you kind of wonder why you even carried it along, but when it rains you’re glad you carried your umbrella with you.

Katheleen Conti can be reached at kconti@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeKConti.

How local businesses have profited from the filming industry

PHOTO BY JOHN TLUMACKI/ GLOBE STAFF

A pizza restaurant was made over into a Cuban cafe on Revere Beach Blvd. across the street from Revere Beach to transform the look of the beach into Miami Beach where a scene from the movie Black Mass will be filmed there for the next several days.

By Katheleen Conti

GLOBE STAFF  NOVEMBER 30, 2014

A sampling of how some local businesses and organizations have profited from the local filmmaking industry:

■ Growth in membership of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees Local 481: From 325 in 2006 to about 900 currently.

■ Number of local vendors used for filming of “The Equalizer” by Local 481 members: More than 3,000 in 45 communities.

■ Of the 40 film and television productions that Local 481 members worked on since 2011, 70 percent of shooting days were outside of Boston.

SOURCE: IATSE Local 481

Major productions (with budgets of over $250,000) filmed in Massachusetts:

2011: 9

2012: 15

2013: 23

2014: 30

From 2011 to 2013, 108 local communities hosted film productions.

SOURCE: Massachusetts Film Office

Financial benefits for Massachusetts:

■ New state revenue generated by the film tax incentive program in 2012: $10.6 million

■ Of $304.4 million in spending generated by the tax credit in 2012, $100.6 million was spent in Massachusetts.

■ 98 productions filming in Massachusetts in 2012 received $78.9 million in tax credits.

SOURCE: Massachusetts Department of Revenue

Katheleen Conti can be reached at kconti@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeKConti.

Politicians ignore income inequality while it kills the middle class.

Rachel Rocks

Rachel Maddow: Best New Thing In The World Today

By Nick Paleologos

OK, I admit it. When Rachel Maddow first cracked into a prime time slot on MSNBC, I watched for a little while and thought, geez Louise, are we going to devote every single show to The Gay? More than once in the early days I found myself changing channels while muttering, “I’m liberal. You’re gay. And there’s nothing wrong with either. I get it, already.”

Six years later, however, I swear this bookish newshound in a boyish do is a bona fide American national treasure. What exactly happened to me--an aging boomer--over these past six years? How is it that I now believe the phrase “must-see-tv” might as well have been coined to describe her show? When did 9pm EST become appointment viewing? Why--if I miss Rachel on any given weeknight—am I listening later to the broadcast’s podcast on Stitcher before drifting off to sleep?

Certainly not because I’m feeling that much more secure in my own sexuality. Definitely not because of her nerdy sense of humor--which still rarely lands with me (although I do get a kick out of how much she gets a kick out of her own goofy jokes). When interviewed by somebody else, she’s just ok—not great. As part of a round table discussion, again she’s nothing special. But somehow when that red light goes on at 9pm--and its just Rachel, me, and the news of the day--an incredible transformation happens.

First of all, she never begins in the present. When congress bailed out on the war powers vote, Rachel opened her show in the Gulf of Tonkin—50 years ago. When gun control was on the front burner, Rachel began with congress killing President Kennedy’s bill--which would have outlawed the very gun that ultimately killed him. She does this kind of thing all the time. Rachel Maddow knows how to tell the whole story—which is what true journalism is supposed to be about.

By doing something so basic, so seemingly obvious, as putting each story in its historical context, Rachel stands absolutely alone among network news anchors. No matter where else you go on television, stories are popping in and out of existence like sub-atomic particles. Now you see them. Now you don’t. Who knows where they came from? Or why? No wonder we understand less and less about more and more than we ever have before.

But that’s not all that sets her apart.

On the rare occasions when she does get something wrong, she practically flogs herself on her own show. It’s as if the degree of self-inflicted punishment must be more severe for her in order to preserve the sanctity of the accuracy standard to which she holds everybody else. Whenever she introduces an expert guest by summarizing an issue, she invariably asks, “Did I get that right? Did I leave out anything important?”

Who else does that? Nobody. That’s who.

Even her loopy diversionary segments like “Best New Thing In The World Today,” “Debunction Junction,” and the occasional Friday closer, “How To Mix My Favorite Cocktails” have all managed to grow on me over the years--because what happens in between is unlike anything else available on television for citizens who flatter themselves into thinking they’re well informed.

Let’s clear up one more thing--once and for all. Rachel Maddow is not the Loony Left’s answer to Sean Hannity. She is much more important than that. Both have strongly held (and mostly opposing) worldviews. The difference—which is on stark display every weeknight—is that Maddow actually cares more about getting it right than about being right. She believes the facts should shape her opinion--not the other way around. And that, my friends, is what separates a journalist from a buffoon.

Watch this space.

John Oliver explains student debt.

LABOR DAY: Record Profits Leave Workers With A Whole Lot Of Nothing.

Labor Today: Wages and Salaries Still Lag as Corporate Profits Surge

NY TIMES EDITORIAL

AUG. 31, 2014

        

In the months before Labor Day last year, job growth was so slow that economists said it would take until 2021 to replace the jobs that were lost or never created in the recession and its aftermath.

The pace has picked up since then; at the current rate, missing jobs will be recovered by 2018. Still, five years into an economic recovery that has been notable for resurging corporate profits, the number and quality of jobs are still lagging badly, as are wages and salaries.

In 2013, after-tax corporate profits as a share of the economy tied with their highest level on record (in 1965), while labor compensation as a share of the economy hit its lowest point since 1948. Wage growth since 1979 has not kept pace with productivity growth, resulting in falling or flat wages for most workers and big gains for corporate coffers, shareholders, executives and others at the top of the income ladder.

Worse, the recent upturn in growth, even if sustained, will not necessarily lead to markedly improved living standards for most workers.

That’s because the economy’s lopsidedness is not mainly the result of market forces, but of the lack of policies to ensure broader prosperity. The imbalance will not change without labor and economic reforms.

For instance, new research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that from the first half of 2013 to the first half of 2014, hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, fell for nearly everyone. An exception was a small gain for the bottom 10 percent of wage earners, which was because of minimum-wage increases in 13 states this year.

That’s clear evidence that raising the federal minimum wage, while only a first step toward better pay, would have a powerful effect. A lift from the current $7.25 an hour to the modest $10.10 called for by President Obama and Democrats in Congress would put an estimated additional $35 billion in the pockets of affected workers over a three-year phase-in period.

Unionization is also associated with higher wages and benefits, especially for low-wage workers, which argues for greater legal enforcement of the right to organize without retaliation.

Similarly, stronger enforcement of both labor laws and antitrust laws is needed to ensure against wage theft. Once assumed to be mainly an issue of unpaid overtime or other wage violations, wage theft became a white-collar issue this year, when it was revealed that collusion among the biggest companies in Silicon Valley had suppressed the pay of software engineers by an estimated $3 billion.

The pay of middle-income workers has also been diminished. Decades of outsourcing government jobs to the private sector has undercut public employment, once a mainstay of middle-class life, even as evidence has mounted that outsourcing often does not save money or improve services. What’s needed is a systematic review of government contracts with the private sector and a willingness to end those that are counterproductive.

Another threat to middle-class wages is rampant misclassification — of employees as independent contractors and of workers as supervisors — a tactic that employers use to deny pay and benefits that would otherwise be due. In a promising development, a federal appellate court recently ruled that drivers for FedEx in California are employees, not independent contractors, an example of the courts stepping in when the other branches of government have let an injustice persist.

There has been progress since last Labor Day. Mr. Obama has signed executive orders to improve the pay and working conditions of employees of federal contractors. The Labor Department is revising rules on overtime pay; simply updating them for inflation would make millions of additional workers eligible for time-and-a-half for overtime.

What is still lacking, however, is a full-employment agenda that regards labor, not corporations, as the center of the economy — a change that would be a reversal of the priorities of the last 35 years.

The Meaning Of Market Basket

Does Any Of This Sound Familiar?

What’s In A Name?

By Nick Paleologos

August 27, 2014

There was this guy named Rick Blair. He died very young--at age 47. During his lifetime, which ended in 1950, he went off and voluntarily lived in a variety of different ghettos under a bunch of assumed names. He also wrote extensively based on those experiences.

His last book, published in England a year before his death, was a real doozy. In it, he imagined a creepy future just three or four decades hence in which any semblance of civil society has been snuffed out by a single-minded minority using their immense wealth and power to re-label nasty things with nice names.

These horrible human beings work inside a giant pyramid called “The Ministry of Truth.” Carved into the concrete on the outside wall of their headquarters are the following three slogans: War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; and Ignorance is Strength.

Crazy, huh?

In Blair’s imaginary world, information is filtered through people whose belief that the strong should prosper and the weak should perish is relentlessly pedaled under the “Fair and Balanced” banner.

An immigrant is an “alien.”

Brutal torture is “enhanced interrogation.”

Financial instruments involving huge risk are called “securities.”

Bone-crushing debt is actually a generous gift of “credit.”

Mass murder is “ethnic cleansing.”

Kids killed in a UN sanctuary are “collateral damage.”

Soldiers killed by their own troops are victims of “friendly fire.”

That last one really fractures me. I mean the only thing missing from such a grotesque bit of re-branding is a smiley face on the body bag.

In the frightening world of Blair’s book, rational decision-making by the public is virtually impossible because the plain, unambiguous meaning of practically everything has been intentionally twisted to serve the selfish interests of a privileged few.

The more I think about it, I may have mixed up some of the actual details in my description of Blair's harrowing book---except for the part about a Ministry of Truth. But the rest isn't far off from what he actually wrote. Anyway, you should definitely read it. It is guaranteed to scare the bejeezus out of you even though it was published 65 years ago by a guy from another country!

By the way, this book will make you incredibly grateful to be living in the good old US of A in the year 2014—where the people in power always tell the god's honest truth. Because if they don't, there's hell to pay. And where every single one of us gets a first rate education so we can call things like we see them and let the chips fall where they may.

You’ll have to forgive me for drawing a blank on the book's title because it’s been thirty years since I last read it. But you can look it up under the author’s full name: Eric Arthur Blair. If you can’t find it under his real name, try one of his pen names: P.S. Burton; Kenneth Miles; or H. Lewis Allways.

Oh wait. There was one other name he used.

George Orwell.

Since 1978, cost of college eclipses all. Nothing else is even close.

When Capitalism Worked For All

By Robert Reich,  August 9, 2014

In recent weeks, the managers, employees, and customers of a New England chain of supermarkets called “Market Basket” have joined together to oppose the board of director’s decision earlier in the year to oust the chain’s popular chief executive, Arthur T. Demoulas.

Their demonstrations and boycotts have emptied most of the chain’s seventy stores.

What was so special about “Arthur T”, as he’s known? Mainly his business model. He kept prices lower than his competitors, paid his employees more, and gave them and his managers more authority.

Late last year he offered customers an additional 4 percent discount, arguing they could use the money more than the shareholders.

In other words, Arthur T. viewed the company as a joint enterprise from which everyone should benefit, not just shareholders. Which is why the board fired him.

It’s far from clear who will win this battle. But, interestingly, we’re beginning to see the Arthur T. business model pop up all over the place.

Pantagonia, a large apparel manufacturer based in Ventura, California, has organized itself as a “B-corporation.” That’s a for-profit company whose articles of incorporation require it to take into account the interests of workers, the community, and the environment, as well as shareholders.

The performance of B-corporations according to this measure is regularly reviewed and certified by a nonprofit entity called B Lab. To date, over 500 companies in sixty industries have been certified as B-corporations, including the household products firm “Seventh Generation.”

In addition, 27 states have passed laws allowing companies to incorporate as “benefit corporations.” This gives directors legal protection to consider the interests of all stakeholders rather than just the shareholders who elected them.

We may be witnessing the beginning of a return to a form of capitalism that was taken for granted in America sixty years ago.

Then, most CEOs assumed they were responsible for all their stakeholders.

“The job of management,” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in 1951, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups … stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.”

Johnson & Johnson publicly stated that its “first responsibility” was to patients, doctors, and nurses, and not to investors.

What changed? In the 1980s, corporate raiders began mounting unfriendly takeovers of companies that could deliver higher returns to their shareholders – if they abandoned their other stakeholders.

The raiders figured profits would be higher if the companies fought unions, cut workers’ pay or fired them, automated as many jobs as possible or moved jobs abroad, shuttered factories, abandoned their communities, and squeezed their customers.

Although the law didn’t require companies to maximize shareholder value, shareholders had the legal right to replace directors. The raiders pushed them to vote out directors who wouldn’t make these changes and vote in directors who would (or else sell their shares to the raiders, who’d do the dirty work).

Since then, shareholder capitalism has replaced stakeholder capitalism. Corporate raiders have morphed into private equity managers, and unfriendly takeovers are rare. But it’s now assumed corporations exist only to maximize shareholder returns.

Are we better off? Some argue shareholder capitalism has proven more efficient. It has moved economic resources to where they’re most productive, and thereby enabled the economy to grow faster.

By this view, stakeholder capitalism locked up resources in unproductive ways. CEOs were too complacent. Companies were too fat. They employed workers they didn’t need, and paid them too much. They were too tied to their communities.

But maybe, in retrospect, shareholder capitalism wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Look at the flat or declining wages of most Americans, their growing economic insecurity, and the abandoned communities that litter the nation.

Then look at the record corporate profits, CEO pay that’s soared into the stratosphere, and Wall Street’s financial casino (along with its near meltdown in 2008 that imposed collateral damage on most Americans).

You might conclude we went a bit overboard with shareholder capitalism.

The directors of “Market Basket” are now considering selling the company. Arthur T. has made a bid, but other bidders have offered more. Reportedly, some prospective bidders think they can squeeze more profits out of the company than Arthur T. did.

But Arthur T. may have known something about how to run a business that made it successful in a larger sense.

Only some of us are corporate shareholders, and shareholders have won big in America over the last three decades. But we’re all stakeholders in the American economy, and many stakeholders have done miserably.

Maybe a bit more stakeholder capitalism is in order.