The Slog
Pause for a diversion, the point of which will become clear. I was an hour late for a meeting near London today. I was late because the website information I downloaded on how to get here (I don’t like Satnav) was wrong on five separate directions out of the nine it offered. It sent me the wrong way round the M25, the wrong way up the A3, left not right, 4th exit not first, and towards Sutton when it meant Cheam.
No way grumpy old idiot can be blamed for this one: the instructions were what they were – wrong. What’s happened here is one or more of the following: a piece of software has been poorly checked, common sense has not been used along the way, no easy way for the public to report faults has been offered, and the employee doing it was a dork.
Why is a neoconservative outlook to blame for this? Because the accountant-driven bottom line mentality accepts without question the wisdom of lowest employee costs, lowest after-sales service costs, and the shareholders always coming before customers or society.
Bourse quotation for maximum gearing hype, aka company senior officer greed.
Maximisation of share price, dividends and overall shareholder returns in everything you do – using diluted product formulation, overcharging, retail bribery, outlook hype, offshore production, mechanisation, stripping out after sales sanity, and – if all else fails – fraud.
State of the art lobbying advice to ensure all legislative threats are at worst neutralised and at best turned to your advantage.
State of the art cyber-espionage to ensure an unfair advantage over rivals and regulatory agencies at all times.
Large offshore cash bribery fund for use among politicians and tax collection agencies. Even larger tax-deductible budget for hiring accountants to minimise tax contributions and keep every contribution to society to a minimum.
Maximum donation of funds to the Political Part(ies) that support the idea of business & market deregulation, massive cuts in welfare budgets, impossibility of being sued, ease of suing rivals, ease of performing mergers, ease and low cost of firing employees, and 100% privatisation of every utility upon which life and health depend.
Insistence in all media available to you that the only way for society to work is to put human beings last, and concentrate 90% of the wealth into the hands of 3% of the population.
Some of the adverse effects of that ‘model’ are spoken within the construction per se, but far too often the downsides are expressed in left-wing soviet syntax bollocks that wish to explain everything in terms of historic conspiracy and class inequality. In fact the strongest arguments against neocon ideas are legal, socio-economic and fiscal rather than political. From top to bottom – long the same lines as the rickety structure outlined above – they are:
* Sector analysis handed to superficial financial generalists
* Stakeholders whose interests are unlikely to chime with those of the company much of the time
* Reduced customer loyalty, and reduced sector product standards
* Investment banking obsessed with fees based on size and leverage rather than quality and mission
* The growth of a large underclass for whom idleness becomes a way of life
* Complete loss of trust in the purchase process
* Focus on balance sheet numbers rather than workforce and customer fulfilment
* Placing the short-term demands of minority shareholders above the lives of ordinary families and social cohesion
* Giving too low a priority to research and development to create new markets, more jobs, and technical advance
* Putting the instruction not to get caught above the demand to know right from wrong both legally and ethically
* Corruption of legislature members and their social aims in favour of business targets
* Accepting the principle that competitive advantage enjoys a greater moral value than the Rule of Law
* Denying the reality that every business and organisation must contribute to the cost of a well-run society providing the reliable, educated and healthy workforce every economy needs
* Denying the existence of obvious flaws in the model, and actively engaging in media propaganda to suppress evidence to the contrary
* The rise and rise of a speculative banking class unable to grasp that money is a means, not an end
*Business and banking threatening the legislative sovereign body in exactly the way that working-class extremists and bullying union bosses did forty years ago
* Preferring stagnant safety to creative risk
* Losing the ability to tell a cost from an investment
* Gradually, coming round to a world view that sees laws, regulators, geographical boundaries, social priorities, the arts, scientific advance, conservation, genetic dangers and philosophical discovery as “things getting in the way of good business”.
*Eventually, having to face the reality – too late – that impoverished, inebriate, brutish, superficially educated and media-distracted people lack the money or sense to do anything constructive at all, let alone kick-start an economy or demand something better.
The real bottom line – not the fantasy presented to the AGM each year – is that certain things become apparent to the Left. They watch G4S cock up the Olympic Games security, and say “Ah-haa!” They see GM and $30trillion of banking ineptitude being bailed out, and say “Ah-haa!” They wince as French electricity generators take over Britain and go “Ah-haa!”
Trust me, nothing good ever comes from socialist barrack-room lawyers with zero commercial perspective going ah-haa. What you then get is Boris Johnson prepared to drown them out….and defend Beelzebub himself rather than give way to anyone who asks questions like “What about the victims of paedophilia?”, “What about the human casualties that result from laundered drug monies?”, “What about the megadebt and austerity caused by these wonderful bankers?” and “Where is all this trickling down wealth then?”
We humans simply cannot do balance: with us, it’s either central command-economy corruption alongside pc fancy, or robber-baron above the law deregulation alongside droit de seigneur for every privileged pervert.
But the lunatic at the lectern right now is the Emperor Neocon, so he’s the one whose drivel must be deconstructed.
Don’t ask me why – I’ve lost track. I think it’s something to do with hating bullies, but I could be wrong.
NEOCONSERVATISM
There’s nothing especially original in that emphasis: I’m sure it’s been used over and over again. But I’m not sure anyone has yet managed to show – almost in the form of a spreadsheet if you like – the total number of levels and dimensions along which neoconservative economics are very little more than two longer words for “Screw You!”Pause for a diversion, the point of which will become clear. I was an hour late for a meeting near London today. I was late because the website information I downloaded on how to get here (I don’t like Satnav) was wrong on five separate directions out of the nine it offered. It sent me the wrong way round the M25, the wrong way up the A3, left not right, 4th exit not first, and towards Sutton when it meant Cheam.
No way grumpy old idiot can be blamed for this one: the instructions were what they were – wrong. What’s happened here is one or more of the following: a piece of software has been poorly checked, common sense has not been used along the way, no easy way for the public to report faults has been offered, and the employee doing it was a dork.
Why is a neoconservative outlook to blame for this? Because the accountant-driven bottom line mentality accepts without question the wisdom of lowest employee costs, lowest after-sales service costs, and the shareholders always coming before customers or society.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The multivariate levels on which neocon economics are dysfunctional could be expressed as follows…as it were, “from top to bottom”.Bourse quotation for maximum gearing hype, aka company senior officer greed.
Maximisation of share price, dividends and overall shareholder returns in everything you do – using diluted product formulation, overcharging, retail bribery, outlook hype, offshore production, mechanisation, stripping out after sales sanity, and – if all else fails – fraud.
State of the art lobbying advice to ensure all legislative threats are at worst neutralised and at best turned to your advantage.
State of the art cyber-espionage to ensure an unfair advantage over rivals and regulatory agencies at all times.
Large offshore cash bribery fund for use among politicians and tax collection agencies. Even larger tax-deductible budget for hiring accountants to minimise tax contributions and keep every contribution to society to a minimum.
Maximum donation of funds to the Political Part(ies) that support the idea of business & market deregulation, massive cuts in welfare budgets, impossibility of being sued, ease of suing rivals, ease of performing mergers, ease and low cost of firing employees, and 100% privatisation of every utility upon which life and health depend.
Insistence in all media available to you that the only way for society to work is to put human beings last, and concentrate 90% of the wealth into the hands of 3% of the population.
Some of the adverse effects of that ‘model’ are spoken within the construction per se, but far too often the downsides are expressed in left-wing soviet syntax bollocks that wish to explain everything in terms of historic conspiracy and class inequality. In fact the strongest arguments against neocon ideas are legal, socio-economic and fiscal rather than political. From top to bottom – long the same lines as the rickety structure outlined above – they are:
* Sector analysis handed to superficial financial generalists
* Stakeholders whose interests are unlikely to chime with those of the company much of the time
* Reduced customer loyalty, and reduced sector product standards
* Investment banking obsessed with fees based on size and leverage rather than quality and mission
* The growth of a large underclass for whom idleness becomes a way of life
* Complete loss of trust in the purchase process
* Focus on balance sheet numbers rather than workforce and customer fulfilment
* Placing the short-term demands of minority shareholders above the lives of ordinary families and social cohesion
* Giving too low a priority to research and development to create new markets, more jobs, and technical advance
* Putting the instruction not to get caught above the demand to know right from wrong both legally and ethically
* Corruption of legislature members and their social aims in favour of business targets
* Accepting the principle that competitive advantage enjoys a greater moral value than the Rule of Law
* Denying the reality that every business and organisation must contribute to the cost of a well-run society providing the reliable, educated and healthy workforce every economy needs
* Denying the existence of obvious flaws in the model, and actively engaging in media propaganda to suppress evidence to the contrary
* The rise and rise of a speculative banking class unable to grasp that money is a means, not an end
*Business and banking threatening the legislative sovereign body in exactly the way that working-class extremists and bullying union bosses did forty years ago
* Preferring stagnant safety to creative risk
* Losing the ability to tell a cost from an investment
* Gradually, coming round to a world view that sees laws, regulators, geographical boundaries, social priorities, the arts, scientific advance, conservation, genetic dangers and philosophical discovery as “things getting in the way of good business”.
*Eventually, having to face the reality – too late – that impoverished, inebriate, brutish, superficially educated and media-distracted people lack the money or sense to do anything constructive at all, let alone kick-start an economy or demand something better.
The real bottom line – not the fantasy presented to the AGM each year – is that certain things become apparent to the Left. They watch G4S cock up the Olympic Games security, and say “Ah-haa!” They see GM and $30trillion of banking ineptitude being bailed out, and say “Ah-haa!” They wince as French electricity generators take over Britain and go “Ah-haa!”
Trust me, nothing good ever comes from socialist barrack-room lawyers with zero commercial perspective going ah-haa. What you then get is Boris Johnson prepared to drown them out….and defend Beelzebub himself rather than give way to anyone who asks questions like “What about the victims of paedophilia?”, “What about the human casualties that result from laundered drug monies?”, “What about the megadebt and austerity caused by these wonderful bankers?” and “Where is all this trickling down wealth then?”
We humans simply cannot do balance: with us, it’s either central command-economy corruption alongside pc fancy, or robber-baron above the law deregulation alongside droit de seigneur for every privileged pervert.
But the lunatic at the lectern right now is the Emperor Neocon, so he’s the one whose drivel must be deconstructed.
Don’t ask me why – I’ve lost track. I think it’s something to do with hating bullies, but I could be wrong.
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