There is an old joke. How do you know the British Airways flight has landed? They turned off the engines, but you can still hear the whining.
Sorry – wrong nationality. Must be American Airways.
Every time I turn on a television, there is a photograph of some fat bastard who is supposed to have stolen my gas money to make excess profits, or there is some debate about whether Congress should give me $100 to make me feel better about it.
Economics 101: From 1990 to 2004, the CEOs of the top 365 companies in the USA increased their pay 319% while the average worker’s pay increased 4.5%. More than 10% of many companies’ profits go towards paying their top 5 executives…
For this cash (plus stock options, special pensions, severance pensions, and the company jet) the fat bastards must make profits. Now. Not next quarter. His (not her – don’t be a moron) job is to maximize growth and profits this quarter come hell, high waters, hurricanes, or Hu.
If CEOs don’t maximize profits, they get shown the door, with their personal goodies in the nearest empty copier-paper box.
This is the system honored as the American Dream, so don’t whine when they do their jobs. Do you actually expect him to give you his profits, and get a bullet from the Board, out of some non-existent goodness, which you hypothesize might exist in his evil, black, fat bastard heart?
No one asks Microsoft to give profits back to the consumer, and there is plenty goodness in some of those guys, even if Windows annoys the hell out of you.
And stop whining about health insurance companies. They are for- profit, public, listed companies. They are managed by CEOs, who get enormous remuneration to screw the customers as much as possible, to maximize profits for the quarter, and to get the best growth and the best profits.
They don’t care about you and your doctors’ bills and your medical debt. You’re grist to the mill of the balance sheet. That is your place in the system.
And the pols are in on the action, because their job is to collect money from the fat cats, and spend it on getting you to vote for them to keep the fat cats rolling in catnip (while getting a big- penis power trip for themselves).
House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) went to a news conference on gas prices on the 27th of April in a Hydrogen Alternative Fueled automobile, left in it, and drove a few blocks to his SUV. Other members of Congress did the same.
It must be fun to treat the people who put you in power like morons.
Which suggests that real fiduciary responsibility might begin with some thought about directing your own pennies (saved in a not- for-profit credit union) away from the pols who mock you, and the fat weasels who see you as fodder to their private jet fuel account.
