Fairness?

Some of our bwanksters have been subject to not getting bonuses based on selling fraudulent loan protection.  The BBC broadcast that this was new.  In fact ‘claw-back’ is a common feature and dread for salespeople in financial services and especially insurance.

Zerohedge – http://www.zerohedge.com/news/its-official-greece-unveils-negative-salary – shows just how tough things can get for ordinary, non-bwankster folk.  Teachers face not just cuts but working for nothing or negative salary for a while in Greece, then at much reduced rates.

The real economic truth is that a bunch of rich, idle, peculiarly libidinal bastards have had it away with our hard-earned and politicians have aided and abetted them whilst collapsing our vital work economies.  I have often alluded to sending manufacturing to China as ‘selling whiskey and guns to the Indians’ – in fact we sold them the manufacturing facilities and distilleries.  The analogy is purely to film – the conquest involved was vile and genocidal via scorched earth (buffalo eradication) and disease.  ‘We’ were the bastards.

Marx called for worker of the world to unite – in fact the world’s rich have.  Double standards are everywhere.  We are still debating whether bwanksters are worth their pay and bonuses whilst ordinary workers’ conditions are summarily reduced to “negative pay”.  More than 50% of US citizens receive some form of welfare and we still harp on about the triumph of western capitalism.  Millibore the Ineffectual can pass himself off as a Labour leader in this amoral climate.  We claim to be democratic as, at every turn, we weaken worker pay, conditions and rights in order to be able to bully them down to the status of Chinese worker-serfs!  Human resource management, once about making conditions in your firm so good no one would be arsed with union crap, is no a vile set of evil rhetoric.

We need a New Deal (and not some Nulabour piss) across the globe.  The key is in the idiot propaganda film ‘300’ when the hero uses the great line ‘You are fighting free men, not slaves’.  Shite as the film was as a distortion of history (the Persians were probably a lot less brutal than the Greeks and the film should have shown arse-banditry amongst the Spartans) – this line is the point, if suitably de-sexisted.

We currently talk of hard work and self-reliance when the job market has collapsed – largely because technology and organising systems have improved productivity – and more are due.  All the politicians available to vote for prattle on about “growth” and fiddle with what is a simple neo-classical (i.e. failed) economic spreadsheet.  What we need is structural change.  This has to start in completely new thinking on work and reward.

Banking should not attract salaries higher than anywhere else.  All the excuses given are rot and based on two wrongs making a right.  If Rooney is worth his money, so is Fred the Shred.  Bolloxs!  All sports could be run with a salary cap and this could be based on what we think the job is worth.  In the old Rugby League dressing rooms we all got the same match fee.  Tell me the 1978 cup final wasn’t as good as last years.  Look what just happened to Spurs on a wet and bobbly Stevenage dung-heap last week.  Tell me who was worth more than the game lad playing right back for the minnows.

In real consideration on pay we should consider what letting people get rich really does. The most obvious is that they get control of all sorts of stuff they have no right to and they always seek to maintain their advantage, giving their kids unfair advantages through education and networking.

Whatever the secret of success is, I’ve never seen any non-dross explication of it in more than 20 years as an academic.  As a manager it was very noticeable how many other managers were some fucker’s brother-in-law.  In studies I’ve read, researchers were unable to find anyone ‘unconnected’ in the fancy business school I was once a visiting lecturer at.

Even when we talk of rewarding success, we don’t really get anywhere, because ‘success’ can be produced by false accounting.  Why are the bwanksters not repaying all the money they lost (in fraud) by lifetime indenture on negative salary – that is, what we are doing to Greek teachers?

Only an unwise man would have tried to part me from my winning pay – but one can see direct links there.  In detailed analysis, one can make direct links between CEO pay and the collapse in worker wages.  Why do we let these creeps choose their own targets – how are we suckered into letting the consideration of performance stop at bottom lines so easy to fiddle to the purpose of one small set of interests?  These are not good people – just a bunch of scheming fucks no better than animals.  It’s common in animal herds for a “king” to live in luxury whilst keeping others downtrodden.

Arguments from the bottom line might hold if bottom lines weren’t so easy to fiddle and if the myth of competitive innovation, working smarter and others were true.  Britain and the UK would now have vast numbers of ‘smart workers’ in ‘smart jobs’ – the truth is the opposite with much skill now embodied in machines – amazingly not much of the banking and education that could be.  It makes sense in this nonsense to strip workers of pay, decent conditions and pensions AND pay CEOs massive amounts.  In 1980, the bottom half has 14% of liquid assets – this is down to 1% – and this process hardly produces a wealthy population to spend money on growth.

We should raise living standards across the globe by identifying the work needed, being prepared to police it to prevent local thugs and money-lenders getting in the way.  Global government should be presenting ideas on what the responsibilities of citizens in such a society are.  Population control, aims towards sustainable energy and renewal, agriculture – and what politicians and leaders should do.  To get to any of this I think we need to start thinking of “leadership” as the main block to progress.  Just look at some of the absolute bastards history has thrown up.  Hitler (a rather nice chap to those around him), Stalin, any number of Romans, religious weirdos and utterly peculiar arses like Churchill, Blair, Bush and DSK!  Even Gandhi ended up in bed with kids laying claim to be saving the world through his abstinence.  The GOP can’t even put forward a non-loony and Obama is clearly bought and paid for despite his Internet campaign funding stuff.

Anyone who has tried herding cats in unstructured groups, or to get recruits still raw from basic training to one side of a street to another under fire (etc.) knows people don’t generally cooperate well without direction, training, drills and the rest.  None of this means we should give up to “great leaders” and their arrays of bullshit and bullying.

How pathetic is it that we can standardise the rules and playing conditions of sports across the globe and yet not have a quality of work-life set of rules for international economic competition and cooperation?  We had the idea long ago – just no practice.  All our managers and politicians have shown over the years is they have no moral fibre and cheat on what should be rights for all at the drop of the ‘it’s a global competition out there’ hat.  In fact it is in no way a global competition in the way FIFA soccer is with level playing fields and strict refereeing.  This was managed, admittedly imperfectly, even though Blatter an his cronies run it!

We probably know enough about bureaucracy now to avoid the pitfalls of gonadotrophic thinking like dictatorships of the proletariat and politburo.  A decent world isn’t with us because we have been conned into thinking we can’t organise one.  I’m no leftie and believe in an international service solution linked with enterprise.  I do believe the rich have done so much damage they should spend the rest of their unworthy lives in negative income atonement.

Advertisement

We Need New thinking On High Earnings And Wealth

In 1989, the CEOs of the seven largest banks in the US earned an average of $2.8 million, almost a hundred times the annual income of the average US household. In the same year, the CEOs of the largest four UK banks earned £453,000, fifty times average UK household income. These are striking inequalities. Yet by 2007, at the height of the financial sector boom, CEO pay at the largest US banks had risen nearly tenfold to $26 million, more than five hundred times US household income, while among the UK’s largest banks it had risen by an almost identical factor to reach £4.3 million, 230 times UK household income in that year.

People who have benefited from such obscene ‘pay’ often get any debate on it steered towards the idea they earned the money and the chance to do this was central to their ‘motivation’.  Yet the evidence may be that they were making negative contribution to our economies all the time, fuelling bubbles that would inevitably burst.  And the creation of this super-rich class has also confounded what we thought were our democracies.  I doubt it’s now possible to vote anywhere for candidates not sullied by the money-grubbing.  Blair is a classic example, but across the pond politicians can legally trade on insider information and beat the markets in their personal dealings by 12%, way in excess of traders like Soros.  The classic study on this is –  “Abnormal Returns from the Common Stock Investments of the U.S. Senate, Alan J. Ziobrowski, Ping Cheng, James W, Boyd, and Brigitte J. Ziobrowski, was published in the Journal of Financial and
Quantitative Analysis (Dec. 2004).

Many questions need to be asked before we are suckered into asking whether the right question is whether huge salaries are desirable or even necessary.  The first is what these payments actually are and how we pay for them.  Banking is not self-sustaining, and any moves have effects on the rest of us – what would be the point of the vast riches is they didn’t buy something off the rest of us?  My argument is we become indentured to them.

Many of us have not yet noticed the effects of quantitative easing and the rest of the bailout.  Some have seen their monthly pensions drop from (say) £1200 to £580 and no doubt some have lost jobs and the rest.  Greece is falling apart and Ireland is suffering.  Worse is coming.

Your standard BBC Bimbonews allows various propagandists to present the business-as-usual drivel.  We need to find ways to subvert this dross and get to the real arguments that aren’t hopelessly confined to academic journals.  We are committing our children and their children to debt peonage because we are dumbly satisfied that these mega-payments can be earned, and it really beggars belief we are better off by paying the piper.  If we had Daleks exterminate them all overnight, the system would be running again in days if not hours – sadly much as it always has.  Munich did not finish off Manchester United.

One would expect, had these bwankers been creating real wealth, that there would be plenty of it around for public services and pensions.  Instead we face austerity whilst the rich grow richer.  I conclude they were never producing real wealth and merely stealing in a complex fraud.  There have been massive rises in productivity and we should be living easier.  We’re being stiffed and can’t even talk about it, rather like abuse victims.  One can hardly imagine Albert Einstein saying, ‘I smarter than you bastards, give me all your money’!

Good Luck To Our Cops In Coming Difficulties

American friends tell me the protests seen as the Battle of Brooklyn Bridge are going national.  All my political sympathies lie with the protesters, though I never forget the cleft stick police are stuck with.  Something has to be done about the loss of our democracy and the looting rich.  The facts on this are now clear and anyone mooting the old left-right arguments as out of it in ideological denial.

Briefly, production per hour has trebled since 1980 – wages should have doubled and have, in fact, gone down across the board except for a 15% of ‘high fliers’ and a growing super-rich.

Money (banksters) has routed democratic control and it’s not worth most of us voting for anyone.  The vile Blair is the paradigm case of politicians we don’t want.  Name me one we do.  In the States, each side will spend over a billion USD on the 2012 elections. Politicians have to buy positional power – a bit like Ms May having to put up half-a-million to be Home Secretary.

The bulldung around on ‘the economy’ is as feckless as any ‘new paradigm, empowerment, digitise the penguin, learning lessons, strategic mission’ dross witless managers use.  The bankster problem is as big across Europe as the US.  We don’t want to believe our politics as corrupt as there but I sense it is.  The problem is broadly mass unemployment and that we are prepared to tolerate it and pretend their are educational solutions.  There aren’t – 50% of any population won’t benefit from ‘academic’ teaching and we can’t teach ‘smarts’ (though we could do more to prevent damage by ‘parents’).

We need a “New Deal” based in direct work with day-release or sandwich exposure to college.  No one is presenting one and the danger is they’ll offer Nulabour drivel and promises on private-sector innovation and all the old chestnuts.  Times have changed. We can do all the really necessary work much more efficiently – or could if we could invest in it.  The money has instead been going into speculative gambles and property bubbles that leave many without decent housing.  Research shows most so-called wealth since 1980 has mostly come in the stuff waiting for a pin-prick.

The Arab revolts have been portrayed as ‘bread riots’ but this isn’t true.  Their middle classes have been key, ripped off by stockmarket scams and sick of terror and non-representation.  We should all be occupying our streets demanding new politicians and a completely new system at the bottom of guaranteed work.

None of this is going to happen because our politicians are cowardly and more or less bought up by the rich – they talk to the banksters behind closed doors despite supposedly representing us.  They are already divided and ruled, scared to break ranks.  They deliver inept economics through a gullible ’embedded’ media on an austerity plan that can’t reduce debt as they claim and only make things worse.  Freezing council tax equates to about average spending on tinned soup.  What we need is a conspiracy of western governments against the banks, making them and their shareholders take bankruptcy in coordination with private (mortgage) debt relief and new 60-80% GDP public debt ceilings.

We will, instead, see street protest.  One hopes this will quickly become a mass movement across the US and Europe, but we are now idle, lack solidarity and are apathetic.  It’s likely all we’ll see to start with will be on the fringe around public sector strikes.  I fear police will be instructed to go in hard against this and the results will be violence and long-lasting distaste as the truth creeps into the public gaze.  I firmly believe we should not put our cops in this situation, but we are back in post-WW1 economics and the record from then is shameful.  Cops were on the wrong side and we lurched into the worst war of all.  Churchill was JP Morgan’s bag man then, as was Blair in the Iraq farce. We don’t give enough thought to who funded the Nazis and what the massive excess of the rich funds now.

I’m glad to be out of what may be coming for our police and the last thing I want is their politicisation – though this is what I see happening by default.  The political class know the bricks and injuries won’t be coming their way and police will be left to ‘defend order’.  I wish the blue line would give way when the time comes but it’s likely to brave for that. Strangely, much as most cops are decent people, they will not be protecting democracy, but the people who sold it for their own purposes.  I would, incidentally, still stand in the ranks myself if fit and take what comes.  We can’t have rule by brick.  But we shouldn’t have rule by banks and debt either.  What a bloody awful situation.  An American colleague has just been involved in a foreclosure of a former colleague’s house.  He went himself to offer a spare room to the family.  God save us and I hope to be proved wrong.