Excellent post.
The typical answer to the bolded is “not nearly enough, compared to the amount generated for people with a C at the front of their titles”. The GINI coefficient at least shows that it’s not a made-up complaint that highest-end wealth is growing faster relative to everyone else than any other time in living memory.
There’s a fundamental values difference, of course. I don’t think you’d see nearly the complaints about a company that held the differential between CEO and lowest-paid employee down to a two-digit multiplier, rather than the few hundred it is now for Fortune 500 companies. Historically, there was not nearly this amount of rage when the Fortune 500 ratio was closer to 50 in the 1980s.
It’s pretty much expressly a morals/values argument (“CEOs are, intrinsically, not worth THAT much more than worker bees”). Compounded by an inability, among the general public, to tell the difference between “bad companies” and “good companies that happen to have a competitive salary ratio to attract top-tier CEOs”.
Having said that, it’s my personal belief that A) CEO salary is artificially inflated due to structural issues and B) shareholders are responsible for doing something about that, except that the majority of shareholders (given the disproportionate amount of investment wealth held by the already wealthy) has no incentive to do so.
Hey, its great when they do that! It when they do that other stuff…
I’m sure that none of these sterling examples of American capitalism are motivated by malice, nor anger. They are motivated by a Darwinian instinct to feed, to grow, to defend itself. If they can make a buttload of money ensuring the health and well being of thousands of their fellow citizens, rest assured they will do it! If they can make twice as much money making the same people more miserable, they will do that.
If they can alter their behavior and their standards to such an extent that they are worthy citizens and a boon to their people, excellent, couldn’t be better. But if they must remain rapacious to survive, or simply because they’d prefer, they must be tightly muzzled and hobbled. Housebroken, or on a leash. One or the other.
But no more taking a dump on the kitchen linoleum. That’s right out!
Hey, Damuri might be correct. I was addressing the complaint about the lack of substantive demands by OWS. Unlike the turkies on the right, lefties don’t pretend to be jerks of all trades. AdBuster’s core competence lies is in optics, not policy. But as I said earlier, we don’t face a shortage of good ideas -Krugman, Warren, Franken, Waxman and Holt have plenty. To name a few. Union money should ensure a certain level of viability for We Are The 99% in the marketplace of ideas: whether this translates into votes is another matter.
To say that treating a corporation as something other than a person necessarily implies the end of limited liability is pure hysteria. The bongo drummers of Broadway have better logical skills than you.
Newsflash: Our corporate incompetents gave full financial backing to the Washington goons who brought the country to the brink of default last summer. If the stock market rises, these bozos collect millions with no effort of their own, due to contracts writted by their interlocking and compliant boards. If the stock market falls, their option contracts get reset. Heads they win, tails the taxpayer and OBTW shareholder loses.
Sure, investment, money center and shadow bankers garner the bulk of blame for this mess. But it’s not like the remainder have done anything other than whine about mild criticism and cheer bad policy, Warren Buffet excepted.
Your hero just made a piss-poor argument.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/07/imf-adviser-the-global-economy-could-collapse-in-two-to-three-weeks/
The head of the IMF says the European banks could collapse in 2 or 3 weeks. Why? Shapiro blames the CDOs that the banks hold in France, Germany and the UK. This would be more severe than the 2008 crash.
I guess being pissed off at the bankers who created these is just not a worldly view. It is those people who took loans they could not afford. All the poor misunderstood bankers did was sell swaps, which are actually insurance against the CDOs defaulting. They were not regulated as insurance because they called them swaps and convinced the politicians they were perfectly safe. I suppose selling 6 trillion dollars worth of them, equivalent to all the currency on the globe, was not risky.
The issue is diminishing democracy, you’ve grasped that much right?
Scylla, this was so buried in one of your posts that I’m not sure if anyone else saw it…but while I agree with you in regards to inflation I don’t agree with your assessment here.
Certainly the mortgage crisis is not as vital as it was in 2008, but it’s actually still a huge impediment to the U.S. economy. There are still a lot of underwater mortgages that are soon to go bad, and when they do housing prices are going to drop even further due to an even bigger increase in the housing supply. (How many mortgages are underwater is being debated, but I haven’t seen any number less than 10 million.
So while it’s not the only thing that’s keeping the U.S. in shaky territory, it’s still a big part…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-13/u-s-foreclosure-filings-may-jump-20-this-year-as-crisis-peaks.html
It is a huge problem to millions of Americans and it the reason bankers are trying to loot their customers for every nickel they can squeeze out of them.
I’m astonished that otherwise intelligent people are responding to these protests. Everything vie heard from them so far reminds me of a mob from the Simpson’s. This will soon die down.
I am amazed they people are too stupid to properly affix the blame for the financial crisis. Bitching about the people who took mortgages offered by high pressure salesmen who offered incredible deals including over 100 percent of the value of the home, with no money down, often getting money for signing and with mortgage originators faking wages and paperwork to get it through, is wrong. They did not dream these arrangements up. It was the bankers passing the info down to the mortgage companies. They wanted volume. They had no risk because they were packaging and selling them off immediately. The risk was still there, but it belonged to the American people, not the banks.
Then the pricks sold swaps which were insurance of the CDOs. They escaped regulation by calling them swaps instead of insurance and by paying off the regulators. They made mega billions of dollars in these schemes.
But some posters wonder how you can question Harvard MBAs. They are the best of the best,don’t you know. In many cases Harvard MBAs = crook on a grand scale. It has to be the fault of the stupid people who took out mortgages they could not afford. Actually in most cases they could. But when our mortgages hit the fan being plugged in by the bankers, suddenly they could not. Then they found out what the clauses in the huge pile of complicated paperwork actually meant.
:eek: OMG—clauses! A legal document had CLAUSES in it!!! The people should rise up and DEMAND that legal documents be CLAUSE-FREE. And while we’re at it, take those damn signature lines off them, too! After all, some people are just too stupid to know they should hire a lawyer to review a legal document and explain it to them. And we must save them from themselves.
Oh well it was not the clauses. It was the people who didn’t read the clauses that caused the problem.
How dumb is that? It isn’t the fault of the crook. it is the fault of the person who didn’t buy a good enough burglar alarm system. It is not Madoff’s fault. it is the people who trusted him. Don’t blame the thief. It is your fault for trusting a person who is supposed to be an expert.
Some people are too ignorant to understand the damage was caused by bankers who dreamed up CDOs and Swaps. It was not that poor ignorant person who was talked into buying a home they could afford until the bankers crashed the home market. If the bankers kept the mortgages ,they would not have allowed them to go through. Since they were not, they were allowing anything to happen that would close. Then they packaged and sold the risk to other banks and institutions. I wonder if they read the clauses since many Swap agreements were over 400 pages long. The bankers were using deliberate obfuscation. Don’t bitch at a home buyer. Bitch at institutions who were supposed to know better buying them up like candy. Bitch at investment funds full of financial experts who spent millions buying them.
Respond, hell! I attended. Got my faults, its a long damn list, but “stupid” ain’t on it.
Blah, blah, blah. Here’s a tip for you and any nitwit thinking about signing a mortgage document: DON"T SIGN IT WITHOUT HAVING YOUR LAWYER GO OVER IT WITH YOU!
It’s really quite simple.
My lawyer? Mmmmm. About that? Might my footman or valet serve as well?
You are a sensitive soul aren’t you? But the banks created the shitty mortgages on purpose. Do they bear no blame?
Banks profits are at a high level matching the profits before the last crash . Banks make 1/3rd of the total corporate profits in America.
They are preparing to lay off 30,000 workers. Not because they don’t have work, but because they can offshore it and make even more money.
Big banks do not lend to small business very much . Less than 18 percent of their portfolio is small business loans. Small businesses are the engine of employment in America. When the government saved them, there was an understanding that they would loan to small businesses to generate jobs. They did not. There were no laws forcing them to.
You must have missed my earlier point. Another sign of dumbfuckness is not budgeting for a lawyer.
If they did somehting illegal, lock the fuckers up. But are you really going to argue that everyone who now finds himself in a bad situation with a mortgage was a victim of shennanigans? Please. Even so, simply refer to my previous piece of advice:
DON"T SIGN A MORTGAGE DOCUMENT WITHOUT HAVING A LAWYER GO OVER IT WITH YOU!
Why is that so difficult?
And? Given their number and what they do, is that low? High? Reasonable. Oh wait, am I supposed to go into a tizzy because a third might seem like a large number? Tell me, what do you think to be an appropriate number, and why.
Although I think it is more of an issue of people who lack education and job skills who used to make a decent living in blue collar factory jobs not being able to find meaningful productive work. A typical mid-level employee at any of the companies I mentioned probably does pretty well. But not everyone can work at Microsoft or Berkshire Hathaway.
What other “treating a corporation as a person” are you talking about besides “limited liability”?
No, because that is a meaningless catchphrase you just threw out there.
Don’t get mad at him because you are too dumb to understand economics.
It’s funny, but no one seems to complain about the fact that Derek Jeter made $20 million or Johnny Depp made like $75 million for all those Pirates movies. That’s the real argument for taxing the super-wealthy. Every rich person isn’t Steve Jobs creating Apple in his garage.
Don’t argue with yourself. I made no such claim. i said the availability of the poisonous mortgages was a wet dream of the bankers. Could one person have saved themselves from a bad mortgage with a lawyer? Sure but do you inhabit a world in which every person does the wise thing? The bankers don’t. They knew selling toxic mortgages was a money making proposition. They were smart enough to recognize the dangers to home owners , the country and the world economy. They did not care. They took down millions of people, companies ,organizations and families. They crippled the world economy and are doing it again.
But if that person just would have gotten a lawyer, all would be well, I guess.