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Politics : Middle East Politics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (4251)	9/6/2003 9:20:58 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 6945

Related to this guy? -> Screwing the public Andrew Phillips Sunday September 7, 2003 The Observer The idea of Hollywood caricaturing Wall Street by exposing someone with the Bunyanesque name of Grasso grabbing $140 million a year would be reckoned over the top. Yet it would be true. To add to the symbolism, the gentleman concerned heads the New York Stock Exchange. Although we have largely become anaesthetised to the shameless rewards fat cat corporate honchos and City big hitters award themselves, Richard Grasso's package carries grotesquery to obscenity. Some think that, unconstrained by anything but increasing, and increasingly ineffectual, regulation Anglo-American market capitalism carries the seeds of its own self-destruction. Shame is not much in evidence on the pay front these days. It is almost as quaint as the notion of greed, which has been legitimised as the indispensable motive force of modern capitalism. Contrastingly, in the domestic lives of these high riders their children will be firmly finger-wagged for taking more than their fair share of the strawberries. The long process of separation of work values from family values, never a workable dichotomy, has led on to invasion of the latter by the former. The demoralising effects have seeped into the very lifeblood of society at large and the world beyond. The anti-globalisation movement is partly fuelled by it. So, too, an element of the noxious brew out of which has come the deathly antipathy between 'the West' and the world of Islam derives from the insatiable, aggressive, amoral materialism into which we are seen to have declined. Though of course markets need competition, where that lapses into crude acquisitiveness which chokes other essential virtues, community life and society itself are put at risk. For example, we now experience widespread work obsessiveness which prevents a sensible work/life balance, affects our physical and psychic health and inadvertently squeezes out our relationships. Ironically, it also often saps the very capacity to enjoy the material fruits of such (often self-imposed) sacrifices. The unsustainability for those in this bind is predictable and already revealing itself. As to the impact on the public realm, the huge benefits from the City of employment, tax contribution and service exports also have to be set against intangible yet highly pernicious consequences. For example, an all-encompassing work regime has caused a substantial disengagement of many if not most of our business and professional leaders in civic and public life, locally and internationally. But a far greater evil is the example which elevated greed sets and the emulation it begets. In a society in thrall to money, sex and celebrity, the distinction and justification proferred as telephone-number earnings 'lawfully made' and theft is not at all clear to those at the bottom of the pile. The pathetic failure, among a myriad examples, of the remuneration committee of New York Stock Exchange to stop Grasso's piracy will confirm to the cynics (ie most people now) what snouts-in-the-trough, you-scratch-my-back affairs high finance has become. The substantial minority of disaffected young adults looking at all this from below will also note that, not content with their massive salaries and bonuses, many of the self-same grandees have been caught screwing the public by systematically the markets. Forget Enron et al. That was the work of a few bad apples but the spectacular frauds perpetrated on Wall Street was by more than 50 of New York's biggest investment banks during the collapse of the hi-tech boom, culminating last autumn in SEC fines on 10 of them of $1.35 billion, with many more billions worth of civil claims now flooding in. The fact that among the malefactors were many of the US banks which now dominate the City of London confirms the extent and depth of the crisis. Chaucer put it neatly 600 years ago. 'If gold rust, what will iron do?' The question is whether implosion is preventable. Until some very bold and wise spirits in London and New York really confront these complicated and deep-seated problems with the same rigour, skill and commitment which they devote to enriching themselves, plus some simple morality, the answer must be 'no'. Pray God they do. Too much hangs on it. politics.guardian.co.uk