‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter’ – Martin Luther King Jnr
In his book Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, John Lanchester seemingly explained how modern language of government, (delivering of services, providers etc) came into being. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this produced a climate of unchallenged victory for the capitalist system, a clear ideological hegemony of a type that had never existed before.
At the same time, the free market became an item of faith, of near-mystical belief. In that belief system, the finance industry made up the class of priests and magicians. In the UK that meant ideological hegemony for the City of London. The government adopted City models for behaviours and the vocabulary to go with it - the language of targets and goals being a sign of uncritical governmental Cityphilia.
Credit makes the economy work - is it too important to be privately controlled?
John Lanchester in his book mentioned above, and extracted by the London Sunday Times [31-1-10] said:
Banks create credit, and credit makes the economy work. In a sense, credit isn't just an aspect of the economy, it is the economy- the seamless, ceaseless, frictionless ebb and flow and circulation of credit. When it works, this process is a wonder of the world. When the banks go wrong, everything goes wrong: it's a bank crisis that gives you that slamming-the-car-into-reverse-feeling.
Banks are central to the operation of a developed economy; in particular, they are central to the creation of credit, which is as important to the modern economy as oxygen is to us.
High Pay and the myth of talent
In his book, Pay Check: Are Top Earners Really Worth It David Bolchover says a whole army of vested interests has combined to exaggerate the value of an individual's performance to a company. They include chief executives, senior executives, management consultants who sell their services to senior executives, and institutional shareholders whose own executives are usually highly paid.
These vested interests have constructed and jealously guarded an entire ideology of "talent" a self-serving distortion of the real meaning of the word. The ideology holds, without anywhere near sufficient evidence, that the individual value of senior executives is extremely precious.
The originators and the upholders of the talent ideology .........hoped that the rest of us would be intimidated.....into staying silent. They assumed, correctly, that we would simply defer to our betters even if we sensed that there was something rotten going on.
As Sir Stuart Rose (how do these people get their knighthoods?) of Marks and Spenser recently said on commenting on the $34 million pay package of the incoming boss of the company If you pay peanuts you get a monkey. This hoary defence of an outrageous remuneration is one trotted out by all those trying to defend the indefensible. As Dominic O'Connell, Business Editor of the London Sunday Times [7-2-10] observed Just as bankers don't seem to "get" public anger about their bonuses, nor do chief executives. In the rarefied air they breathe, all the talk is of legitimate rewards for performance and globally competitive packages. In the real world, people don't understand why a small group of top managers should get paid tens or hundreds of times more than, say, a brain surgeon.
New Zealand entered the realm of this self serving remuneration ideology in the change from public to semi public services in New Zealand and the introduction of managers who knew little or even nothing about what they were supposed to manage. That it had no need to do so, apart from apeing the private sector, is evident as nothing over the last ten to fifteen years has improved in the New Zealand Public Service of which the public is aware. And when perfectly well managed public utilities joined the corporation regime, the justification for the obscene financial rewards for the few in the higher echelons was the old if you pay peanuts you get a monkey.
- submitted by Colin J. Whitmill, UK correspondent