I originally started this as a comment on AliceDem’s fine post Exec. pay consultants, Agents of excess, and it grew.
Her post was a short one regarding this article: Study: eight of the surveyed companies underperformed on S&P 500 but give high payouts.
Which is only one of literally thousands of various forms of studies, articles and other comments upon the Enron-ization of American business. None of which apparently make a damned bit of difference other than putting some infinitesimal percentage of the crooked executive class in prison for a minute as a news sop to the huddled masses. Huddled around their TV sets, waiting for American Idle to come on in one of ITS thousands of network incarnations.
Read on for more.
Well, Alice, all I can say is:
Business as usual.
The VERY FIRST LINE OF ROT in this country is the grossly overweighted pay scale system.
It goes right to the head of the class…the Federal Government.
All three branches are run by incompetent millionaires, by and large. The higher you go in this system…business OR “government”, which is in reality just another business…the less real product you must produce to earn your money. Executive work is essentially fail-safe past a certain level. The only REAL work that needs to be done in most high executive positions is to fend off attacks from other wankers who want your spot.
At the bottom…say a schoolteacher or landscape or factory worker…your product is the fruit of many hours of hard work. AND IT MAKES LITTLE OR NO DIFFERENCE TO YOUR EVENTUAL SUCCESS IN THAT POSITION IF YOU DO THAT WORK WELL OR POORLY. Why? Because there is no one home up above. They are out politicking or on vacation. So you end up doing the bare minimum. JUST enough so’s the lawn doesn’t die, the kids get bumped up to the next grade and the wheels do not fall off the car. And if you DO try to excel, the chances are quite good that you will be punished for it. The boss system as it now strands by and large does not like complications. Just get in line, push that wheelbarrow where you are told to push it and shut the fuck up.
This is not how America rose to power. Bet on it. But it IS how it is going to fall. Bet on that as well. I see almost no chance of a spontaneous change happening here in terms of the way things are set up. The system is too massive, too rich, and the information that would be needed to force the awareness of a need for such a change into the minds of enough Americans to create a likely possibility that it might happen will not be disseminated by the media simply because the media themselves are creatures of the same system.
Catch 22, over and out.
Short of a miracle of some sort.
A spontaneous sea change in the minds and spirits of the electorate in 2008 is our last (or at best our next to the last) chance, in my view.
Business as usual after the next election? No truly inspiring leader to goose the country forward? No change.
No change? The Decline And Fall of the American Empire.
Watch.
Both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama could be that leader, that agent of change, if either has the courage to take a chance that they might lose. So far…only Obama has even stuck his toe into the waters of such possibilities, and every time he has done so he has suffered massive attacks from the right AND the so-called center.
We shall see.
Without a literal cultural revolution, this country is doomed. There will be some sort of progressive economic collapse (perhaps hastened by environmental and/or terrorist factors) as hungrier cultures simply outwork, out-produce (and out-REproduce) us.
So it goes.
What Christ neglected to mention…or was not reported as mentioning, more likely…when he stated that the meek shall inherit the earth is that when they do come into that inheritance…which is basically what happened to some degree here in the U.S. when several waves of refugees from another set of devolved cultures landed on these shores and opened up a NEW treasure chest… then the meek will become arrogant, stupid and lazy.
And get THEIR asses kicked in turn.
So it goes.
George Santayana wrote “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“
WE cannot remember the past. Not even the fairly RECENT past.
Like, say…Vietnam.
Too busy watching the trials and tribulations of Paris Hilton.
So it goes.
Down.
So it goes.
Watch.
AG
