Every so often, I find a bunch of news headlines on various services to set off a verbal fireworks. I get the idea that I can write the article better, and then you get to suffer through my version...
First, this newsletter lede from a news service I quite enjoy, but - they apparently devoted a whole article to this:
School holidays are here. These are the ways to beat hip-pocket movie pain (TND)
"... many adult prices are now over $25..." ...&c. Save money by taking the bus for the last leg instead of parking, check prices at all the cinemas as they can save you money, use a loyalty program if it makes sense. Bring your own drink, eat before going in.
- I say: Netflix. Netflix and chill: chill, kids, or I'll cancel that too. Money to go to the movies? Chores. Chores for money. Yes I do love you but the first thing to learn is TANSTAAFL, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. (See next item...)
This from an ABC Radio podcast:
Can we beat inflation and keep jobs? (ABC)
Several lines leapt out of this podcast to me. And not direct quotes, but the gist of each line is preserved. This is a longer rant, proceed at own risk.
First, the shownotes of the podcast:
"What does the current state of the economy mean for the unemployment rate and your job?
For decades we’ve turned to well-read textbooks to help us understand how our economy will behave.
But right now something strange is happening and for some economists it’s a bit of a miracle.
They’re calling it ‘immaculate disinflation’, because when interest rates rise dramatically, as they have in Australia, you’d expect lots of people to lose their jobs.
But this time, the inflation rate is coming down and the unemployment rate remains relatively low.
Today, business editor Ian Verrender explains the current economic weirdness. "
- I say: "it's a bit of a miracle" and "economic theory did not predict this, it contradicts every important principle" and I say "??? Really??? I think what you mean is that economics has been a hodgepodge of bullshit "rules" that economists applied to justify their existence - but rules made from the point of view of exploiting the working person for the benefit of the one-percenters.
- Okay - now to the podcast contents.
There's a line where Ian says something like "we're not putting enough people out of jobs." Really???
Or "post-war, the idea of zero unemployment was zero unemployment, i.e. every person had a job.
But then this idea came along that if everyone was employed, inflation would go up. And since then, it's been:
Increase the interest rates, that slows down the economy. Slow the economy, and that puts people out of a job. More unemployed people, more competition for jobs, drives wages down. Businesses "will be less driven to put up the cost of their goods and services.
What? Businesses will always do whatever the hell they want to. S here you also have the wrong end of the stick, economists. If businesses can't put prices up to match their desire for profit they'll just fire people until they reach their desired profit. THAT'S how the two relate to each other.
The way economists put it, is to use NZ economist Bill Philips' "Philips Curve" that he developed - almost a century ago - in1958. Bear in mind how much more direct influence "the gentry" had back then, with many still running on almost a feudal system of governing.
Philips therefore called it a "natural trade-off between unemployment and prices" but in line with the prevalent thinking attributed it to the "bad workers." I think the phrase "people just don't want to work anymore" may have arisen around then, too. That's all a bit telling...
Let me go back even further, to the World Wars. After war, governments wanted zero unemployment - everyone in a job - because the country needed to rebuild, to regain infrastructure.
Bear in mind also that a mere few decades earlier was still the heartless, crushing, and exploitative phase of the Industrial Revolution that saw people worked to death for the price of a few potatoes. Employment in the new "enlightened" conditions was seen as a worthwhile goal. Go us!
The gentry (aka the One-Percenters eventually) however, are always exploitative. If they had to pay a certain minimum wage, then despite the fact that they were making a reasaonable living themselves, it wasn't enough.
First, they needed money "for expansion" on the promise of more jobs being created.
But then they also needed more money themselves for "management duties" that this larger enterprise required from them. So not quite as many jobs as promised were created... And so on.
Nothing - and I will reiterate this loud and clear - NOTHING - can ever be attributed to the "greed" of workers. Fighting for enough wages and conditions to be able to buy the increasingly-more-expensive goods and services and have time to use them, that's not greed, that's asking for the right to become customers of the businesses, and have a reasonably good life.
NAIRoU
Then there was this idea that there's a rate of 5% unemployment would keep this newly-created "inflation" thing in check. The non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment or NAIRoU represented (and I am not making this up, Ian said this) this "elusive level of despair in workers" that would keep prices in check. I'll just say that again:
This "elusive level of despair in workers" that would keep prices in check.
The RBA (and other central banks, that's also made clear in the podcast) are trying to create despair by keeping work out of reach of a certain percentage of their populations.
I can't overstate that. Nor stop myself from actually weeping when I think of how many good people ended up killed by that fucking stupid theory of economics.
We're being shown, in every news article, every story, every movie we watch (thus also neatly tying back to the last headline) that we should admire and emulate greed, hoarding of money, exploiting our fellow humans.
Economists are driving the economy to produce ever-increasing returns, without a thought to where that increase will lead. The bullshit "rules" they pulled out of their arses most of the time, exist only to increase that "elusive level of despair" to the point where there are only two people left in the world, one holding all the wealth of the planet, albeit in a form that they cannot actually make use of, and one starving to death in front of them as a stand-in for a Netflix movie entertainment.
The Reason For The Good Unemployment Figures:
People are more than willing to work. But not to be exploited, and not for work that goes against the common good.
And we're realising that killing our life support system Planet Earth for the sake of someone to be able to sit atop a pile of our bodies and the rotting corpse of what was once a perfectly functioning planet is not the derfinition of "common good..."
And finally some news that *might* end in some good:
Break Up The Firms
Not really coincidentally, I'm going to also mention this TheConversation article. For the natural counterbalance to the "economic theories" mentioned above, this is something that needs to happen. With many of our Ministers accepting donations from many of the firms that adhere to the economic theories I mentioned above, it'll be a bit of a battle to get effective legislations in place, but either we get them, or many good people will die of the "despair" those company oligarchies want to foist on us.
It's a point at which we have to enforce a "stop, examine, and then act accordingly" policy. When two supermarkets can cause "despair" both by underpaying their employees and suppliers while simultaneously also causing "despair" by overcharging their customers through colluding between them to fix prices and wages then it's time for people to take action.
We have the choice of direct action - refusing to purchase at those stores, picketing and protesting - or by influencing our government which has the power to directly legislate. We need to do the latter more than the former, but they are all avenues open to us. I laid some out in a previous article but I really urge much more pressure on the government.
If the personal wealths of the One-Percenters were redistributed and the limits on wealth of firms enforced, the whole planet could live that bit easier. (Seriously - I tried out a few figures, see down the very bottom of the page.)
Thing is - yes, those companies (firms/businesses/corporations/whathaveyou) did accumulate wealth to get bigger and be able to accelerate progress. But far more research was carried out by Universities and research organisations funded privately or by those companies or by governments than purely in the companies. They exploited the discoveries and made them widely available, but always at a price we can't really afford to bear any more.
CTA
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Here's my calcumalations:
Average CEO salaries range from $23bn (Elon Musk's now infamous "realised salary") down to $150,000 for small firms. Discounting the Count of Bullshit and Jeff Bezos, We get Tim Cook of Apple at $770m, down to about $30m, in the top 33 CEOs I was able to get numbers on. They earn an average of $120m each between them. (Estimated average of the following https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-highest-paid-ceos-110400063.html and https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-highest-paid-ceos)
CEOs of less stellar firms seem to average out at about $200,000, i.e. $0.2m, between the thousands of them. So the 33 biggest, averaged with 10,000 of their poorer cousins, means that the world's CEOs average about $590m pa.
We're asked to accept that we should get a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.
I estimate that an average CEO's workdays per year probably never exceed 220. (I'm counting four weeks' leave plus shorter sabbaticals amounting to another four, and ignoring weekends.)
Discounting those like Musk, people like Tim Cooke are earning over $3m per working day. (Don't believe me? At 220 working days and $770m/pa income it's $3.5m, and even if you count every day of the year including weekends he's still earning $2.1m per day.)
Counting the ones at more average companies, whose annual salary is a more realistic $200k pa, they are still earning $900 per working day.
We put those people up on pedestals, how good must they be, ay? And yet the money they've amassed could improve everyone's wages past the point of "despair," and as we've seen, people DO want to work. Not wanting to work is a bit of a hoax, methinks. Sure, there are the inevitable "idle villeins" and Lotus Eaters, but there are also axe murderers and speeding drivers. We have ways to deal with those, we could find ways for the wilful refusers too.
14m people in Australia are in employment. The average wage in Australia is $1,800 per week. That's $93,000 pa pp. The exchange rate is around That means that the CEO of Apple earns almost 12,500 times what an average Aussie earns.
No one is worth $3m ($4.52m in AUD) a day.
And no-one can sensibly spend $3m a day if they're also holding down an (apparently) responsible position in a company like Apple. So personal wealth *must* accumulate at a phenomenal rate. And at the same time, world poverty accumulates too...
