The out-of-date nation-state (II) (some further reading)

 corporations, nation states, on a high, revolution, Rob Marchant  No Responses »
May 072013
 

Yesterday, I suggested that if only corporations were moral, their way of shaping how state-sized entities might be was far more appropriate for a physically globalised and 21st century world than the legacy of nation-states we’re suffering from more and more.  As I observed in the post in question (the bold is mine today):

So if anything is now stopping us, if anything can explain our hatred for these behemoths, it must surely not be the things themselves but, rather, the way they’ve been hijacked for other purposes.  We shouldn’t be railing against the idea and structure of corporate bodies themselves but, instead, be identifying the miscreants who’ve subjected their missions to such stupid jackass strategies.

Much as political leaders have lately driven us to UKIP, so business leaders have driven us to moral despair.  We are clearly confused.  We are clearly bemused.  We are clearly unable to properly understand the shape of things.  But looking at these things with a cold and beady eye, three-dimensional, morally-respectable and transnational states of the kind corporations could potentially become make far more sense in a truly 21st-century world than the two-dimensional, mutually-excluding, geographically-restricted and xenophobia-leaning nation-states of the type we are clearly headed for.

Further thoughts and reading has occurred to since I wrote that post.  Firstly, I realised that perhaps what’s missing isn’t corporations which act more like the better nation-states but, rather, nation-states which incorporate the better aspects of the better corporations.

For there are, of course, many people who wildly fling about statistics – which may be made up or not – that argue bitterly against the alleged fact that around half of the biggest “economic entities” in the world are corporate.  As if all the nation-states that populate the globe are covering themselves in glory.  We only have to revisit the number of wars since World War II to realise that – even where possibly in cahoots with the private sector – many nation-states aren’t averse to using violence and death to achieve their external and internal policy objectives.

Some of them being these democratic nation-states we so love to look up to.

So just because half the world is corporate doesn’t mean that the non-corporate bit of it is doing us any particular favours.

The other interesting aspect of this whole argument is that it does appear the proportion of big corporate hitters in the top 100 is falling over time.  Or at least in the decades leading up to 2009.  The argument being that new corporate players have been recently emerging from Asia and other rapidly developing areas of the world, so taking some of the purchasing power and influence from the traditional corporate behemoths.  If we accept, or assume, that these new and emerging players operate in non-Western cultures and choose to play by some of their own rules, the chances that Western corporations can influence and manage the growth of such companies for their own benefit is going to be rather more reduced than if we were talking about start-ups in our homegrown economies.

What’s more, if the tendency I mention above is as described, it would appear that – over the recent past – political and nation-state unions may have been heading in the opposite direction: with the moves to cement Germany safely at the centre of the European Union, the historical impetus to protect Europe from war has led to a concentration of powers rather than a spreading out.  That this should take place within a supposedly democratic framework such as the EU, whilst corporate-capitalist organisations fight it out in what is, even so, hardly a free market, does lead us to some rather puzzling places.

Three pieces of further reading, then, to inform some of the ideas I’ve had in these past two posts:

  1. From Rob Marchant, with a piece from March this year on Labour’s internationalism and how it is at odds with standard business practice.
  2. From revolutionise.it, this pamphlet on reaching cross-party consensus by being forward-thinking.
  3. From an American PBS-linked organisation, sponsored it is true by corporate agents, we get this project on re-engineering corporate values and practices.

I think there is plenty to be getting on with here – and, we might even argue, to be considering seriously already.

Happy reading.

Hope it’s useful.

The out-of-date nation-state

 corporations, in a hole, nation states  1 Response »
May 062013
 

Here’s an interesting slideshow with data from 2009 on the subject of the top 100 “economies” in the world.  Worth your time, I think.  I found it fascinating, myself.

 

More on the subject, I think with respect to a similar dataset, can be found from a 2011 blogpost from Oxfam here.  There’s an interesting discussion in the comments thread as to how useful it is to compare what the original poster refers to in his response to a critical comment as “apples and pears”.  But at the margin of such discussions, which I am not qualified to judge, I do think both the slideshow and the Oxfam post provide instructive food for thought.

When I finally left my parental home in search of a new life, it took me twenty-four hours by coach to get from London Victoria Coach Station to Burgos in northern Spain.  My eldest son, meanwhile, living and studying in China, is about fifteen hours away by plane.  Making his life across the other side of the world, he is nearer today to me than I at the time, in Europe, was to my parents.

I once read an article which suggested that most sustainable nation-states had acquired their sizes around the distance of three days’ travel on horseback.  I don’t know if, in the event, this was actually true or not for such structures, but it almost certainly does now apply to corporate transnationals.  Being able, effectively, to be physically anywhere you have your installations, within that forty-eight to seventy-two hours of leaving HQ, is surely a psychological need all CEOs and executives must have fulfilled.

In this sense, then, corporations of the sort we regularly lambast are simply very three-dimensional equivalents of the traditional dividers of national space.  And also in this sense, we could argue that, if properly applied, their procedures – ranging from people selection to health and safety to cultural openness to creativity to technological diversity – could make for far better nation-state alternatives than those our political buddies are currently fashioning.

That’s the catch though, isn’t it?  That big “if”.  Because if it weren’t for the “if”, for the inconsistent and inconstant implementation of all those theoretically excellent values, processes, and procedures, we might want to argue that nation-states were out-of-date.  In a world where barriers really need not exist as they used to, we could do away with customs, different ways of doing things, the money-changers’ paradises, the red tape which allows public bureaucracies to earn their pound of flesh for just crossing their artificial frontiers … for a whole host of superfluousnesses and confusing uncertainties which slow down the abilities of us all to get things done.

In this sense too, we could argue that if corporations could be trusted, then in their massively planned economies, in their ingenuity and focus when implementing new ideas, in their ability to deliver hugely-multiplied services to many people simultaneously, in their (at the very least supposed) capacity to serve the vast majority of a market’s needs, the corporation way could quite easily be the way we should want to pursue.

The way, in fact, of choice.

So if anything is now stopping us, if anything can explain our hatred for these behemoths, it must surely not be the things themselves but, rather, the way they’ve been hijacked for other purposes.  We shouldn’t be railing against the idea and structure of corporate bodies themselves but, instead, be identifying the miscreants who’ve subjected their missions to such stupid jackass strategies.

Much as political leaders have lately driven us to UKIP, so business leaders have driven us to moral despair.  We are clearly confused.  We are clearly bemused.  We are clearly unable to properly understand the shape of things.  But looking at these things with a cold and beady eye, three-dimensional, morally-respectable and transnational states of the kind corporations could potentially become make far more sense in a truly 21st-century world than the two-dimensional, mutually-excluding, geographically-restricted and xenophobia-leaning nation-states of the type we are clearly headed for.

The out-of-date nation-state, do we say then?

Unfortunately for us and our world, the pretender to the throne is simply too rash, cruel and unwilling to recognise where its virtue might correctly lie.

A real pity.

It could be so completely different.  For everyone too.

Essentially, what’s happening: a sorry state of constitutional hijack

 a con, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition economics, corporations, education, free schools, Legal Aid, NHS, police  No Responses »
Apr 282013
 

This is what’s happening to Legal Aid.  Essentially, citizen access to due legal process is being dramatically reduced and gamed in favour of people and organisations with loads of dosh.

This is what’s happening to the NHS.  Essentially, patient access to due medical process and the right to doctor-patient privacy is being dramatically controlled and gamed in favour of people and organisations with lots of power.

This is what’s happening to our police.  Essentially, the subjects of this green and pleasant land are becoming just another monetised calculation in the deep pockets of transnational law-and-disorder.

This is what’s happening to our education system.  Essentially, the students and teachers of England are, both, becoming part of a secretive and overbearing experiment to change the ideological bent of society in the future.

And this is what’s happening to our social cohesion.  Essentially, the government – having failed in its attempt to impose a full quiver of mean-tested benefits through its attacks on the disadvantaged – now aims to shame the elderly well-off into giving up their rights. Attempting once again, this time at the other end of the spectrum, to achieve the aforementioned objective.

Essentially, old against young; rich against poor; sick against healthy … people like Iain Duncan Smith playing their favourite game of bloody divide and rule.

Essentially, what’s happening is that legal rights, health, policing, education and the ability of our society to band together are all being pulverised by the monetising ideology of those who run the world: those who have the time, energy, knowledge and resources to fill in forms, understand documents and read executive summaries.

Which ain’t going to be you or me.  Which ain’t going to be any of those who struggle in evermore precarious lifestyles to get to the end of the month.

Essentially, what’s happening is that our blessed unwritten constitution is being radically rewritten in the most underhand of ways.  No consultation.  No public recognition of their aims.  No voter awareness that the law, patient care, justice, learning and the socialising nature of humanity are being progressively re-engineered to fit “one best way” only.

To fit just one way.

Quite covertly, these people have analysed every significant centre of human liberation, of equal opportunity and of citizen empowerment which we’ve managed to fashion in the last sixty years.

And having done so, they’ve worked out how to dismantle each and every brick which made up those walls that served to protect us so – that served to protect us from the wolves.

The wolves that have never left the doors of poverty.

The wolves that now await each and every one of us.

This is a revolution conducted by a group of people who have burrowed into the very innards of the establishment.  They have turned it inside out as a hedonist may pick away at the meat of a lobster.  Rather pink and expensively pursued by the money-mad, this is the call to independence of the corporates.

Independence of ordinary people; independence of ordinary lawyers; independence of ordinary police officers; independence of ordinary health workers; independence of ordinary educationalists … independence, that is to say, of the general desire that societies have to work together.

Sounds a bit mad of me to suggest that this might be the case?  In truth, how else can we describe it?  If someone takes over your legal, health, police and education systems – as well as attempting to detonate the ability of a people to defend themselves judiciously as one – what could we call it if not a call for someone’s savage breaking away?

A breaking away, if you like, from all that England and the United Kingdom used to mean.

No wonder some Scots are burning to escape.

Who wouldn’t want to leave such a sorry state of constitutional hijack?

The real 21st century fix: how banksters even corrupted our instinct for collaboration – and what next

 21st Century Fix, a con, bankers, banking, banks, collaboration, conspiracy, corporations  1 Response »
Apr 252013
 

Rolling Stone, in its latest edition, has this story to regale you with:

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

I suggest you all read it all before we continue.  So see you in a few minutes, OK?

*

Fixing the prices of, well, just about everything, eh?  That would, I suppose, include not only sovereign debt, community loans and the cost of things that make the world of manufacturing go round but also, indubitably, the price of foodstuffs too.

Can it get any clearer than this?

Time, perhaps, we resurrected my recent idea to “arrest without bail” and “imprison” banks?  This is why we need these two figures – and how they would work:

[...] At the moment, corporations are legal figures with many of the rights and obligations of ordinary people.  This is well known and well documented and I shan’t repeat myself here.  However, what I would like to suggest is that a serious imbalance does exist as far as depriving the liberty of such corporations to act when under investigation – or, indeed, after being found guilty of certain acts.

Ordinary people, for example, quite often when arrested find themselves summarily deprived of their liberty – and no one questions the process.  Apart from the odd legal phonecall or interview or occasional family visit, their radius of action and ability to influence the result is radically reduced.  This allows for the police to carry out necessary investigations, untrammelled by the interference of too many interested – and perhaps self-promoting – parties.

This does not happen in the case of corporate entities: mostly, in cases of even quite severe misdemeanour (witness recent high-profile banking scandals around the long-term money-laundering of drug revenues by banks you’d hardly expect to exhibit such behaviours), we generally find such corporate figures – flesh-and-blood people in everything but flesh-and-blood – do not get arrested; do not need to request bail; and never get imprisoned.  Their liberty is never deprived; they continue to operate in the meantime; they proceed to make their money as before.

Sadly, of course, we often discover after the event that the potential for being fined for some act or another will have been factored into an annual budget before the crimes in question were committed.  A fine, even a large fine, even just the threat of a fine, becomes simply one more operating cost to be contemplated as the logistics of the year are calculated.

And although, on occasions, executives do find themselves accused of specific acts, the processes are so drawn out as to make any sensible adjustment to the direction of our socioeconomic fabrics impossible to engineer.  They frequently manage to stay at the top of their hierarchical games, despite the complaints of shareholders; despite the unhappiness of a wider consuming public; and despite the reputational damage this leads to.  With their battalions of legal support, these alpha men and women feel secure in their protective silos and bunkers of belief.  No wonder they behave as imperiously as they do.

In such cases, not only are the operations of the companies in question left untouched, the ability of their apparently criminal leaders to continue leading remains intact.

My suggestion, then, which came to me as I journeyed – quite appropriately – to the TUC’s founding place, is to engineer two new figures in company law:

  1. the figure of arrest without bail
  2. the figure of imprisonment

How would these work?  Well, in the case of the former, arrest without bail would mean the corporation would have to shut down all its operations immediately.  Just as a person who finds themselves under the same deprivation of liberty, whilst investigations into probable misconduct take place, so we should be able to do the same to a company.  And the mere threat of being able to do this would surely lead to a radical change in how fines and punishments for corporate maleficence were treated and assessed in the future by those who currently quite happily contemplate them.

In the case of the latter figure, the figure of imprisonment, we could suggest that a company might totally cease operations in a similar way once sentence had been passed a posteriori.  Under such circumstances, and for a certain period of time only, the company in question could not continue to occupy the marketplace, in much the same way as a person in prison must effectively cut off all connections to the outside world.

The result would be two powerful instruments to make the corporate figure far more like the human equivalent which – in so many cases – it loves to emulate.

Applied in particular to the banking corporations, it would send a hugely important message around the significance of competence, honesty and openness for our shared societies.

As well as, surely, end the terrible cycle of reward for utter failure – a cycle which appears to be the current tonic and reality of latterday capitalism.

I think the evidence of a seriously consistent, deliberate and intentioned sequence of misdemeanours is piling up enough for a real and concerted series of contrary actions to be designed, shaped and implemented.

Don’t you?

A 21st century banking fix in search of a 21st century legal fix.  A way of changing radically how banking corporations behave.  A way of recovering these astonishing tools to organise the masses, in order that – in potential harmony – different ways of seeing and doing might serve to re-establish some sense of overall sensibility.

If you like – and finally get – my drift, that is.

If you appreciate the measure of what apparently needs to be done.

How about we started arresting the banks?

 corporations, latterday capitalism, laws, on a high, sorted  No Responses »
Apr 212013
 

This story was brought to my attention by Paul Bernal on Twitter this morning.  It involves what he described as a Labour-funded think tank, IPPR, coming up with the brilliant (#irony) idea to turn unemployment benefit into a loan which would be repayable on returning to work.  You can find the story on the Observer at the moment here.

IPPR, meanwhile, is fairly transparent as think tanks go.  As per the Who Funds You? website, it gets an “A” rating – and on its own website lists current funders thus.  Quite a mixed bag, in fact: from charities and David Miliband himself to the European Commission, Serco (#hmm), Aviva, the consumer magazine Which?, a brace of Joseph Rowntree organisations and the City of London Corporation.  Hardly straightforwardly Labour-funded, then.

The news did, however, cause me to tweet in the following way:

Taxpayer bailouts; student loans; now the poor in their grasp. The real something-for-nothing scroungers are the bloody banks themselves!

And it’s true.  It seems to me that in a crisis entirely due to mismanagement in and around the financial sector – both technical and technocratic it has to be said – those who continue to pay the price for such disintegration are those hardest hit by its consequences.  So it is we reward instead of punish the banking corporations for having got it so wrong.  As money gets tighter for the poor, opportunities for the banks to make easy cash off our backs are expanded not only by the Wonga-style market forces of the desultory high street but also by the bright and bushy-tailed think-tank boffins themselves.  I can’t think of another sector in the world – or, indeed, in history – where failure was such a profitable act.

Nor, in fact, where it continues to get even more profitable.

But, on the train yesterday on the way to a Manchester policy forum, I stumbled across a solution to all our ills.  At the moment, corporations are legal figures with many of the rights and obligations of ordinary people.  This is well known and well documented and I shan’t repeat myself here.  However, what I would like to suggest is that a serious imbalance does exist as far as depriving the liberty of such corporations to act when under investigation – or, indeed, after being found guilty of certain acts.

Ordinary people, for example, quite often when arrested find themselves summarily deprived of their liberty – and no one questions the process.  Apart from the odd legal phonecall or interview or occasional family visit, their radius of action and ability to influence the result is radically reduced.  This allows for the police to carry out necessary investigations, untrammelled by the interference of too many interested – and perhaps self-promoting – parties.

This does not happen in the case of corporate entities: mostly, in cases of even quite severe misdemeanour (witness recent high-profile banking scandals around the long-term money-laundering of drug revenues by banks you’d hardly expect to exhibit such behaviours), we generally find such corporate figures – flesh-and-blood people in everything but flesh-and-blood – do not get arrested; do not need to request bail; and never get imprisoned.  Their liberty is never deprived; they continue to operate in the meantime; they proceed to make their money as before.

Sadly, of course, we often discover after the event that the potential for being fined for some act or another will have been factored into an annual budget before the crimes in question were committed.  A fine, even a large fine, even just the threat of a fine, becomes simply one more operating cost to be contemplated as the logistics of the year are calculated.

And although, on occasions, executives do find themselves accused of specific acts, the processes are so drawn out as to make any sensible adjustment to the direction of our socioeconomic fabrics impossible to engineer.  They frequently manage to stay at the top of their hierarchical games, despite the complaints of shareholders; despite the unhappiness of a wider consuming public; and despite the reputational damage this leads to.  With their battalions of legal support, these alpha men and women feel secure in their protective silos and bunkers of belief.  No wonder they behave as imperiously as they do.

In such cases, not only are the operations of the companies in question left untouched, the ability of their apparently criminal leaders to continue leading remains intact.

My suggestion, then, which came to me as I journeyed – quite appropriately – to the TUC’s founding place, is to engineer two new figures in company law:

  1. the figure of arrest without bail
  2. the figure of imprisonment

How would these work?  Well, in the case of the former, arrest without bail would mean the corporation would have to shut down all its operations immediately.  Just as a person who finds themselves under the same deprivation of liberty, whilst investigations into probable misconduct take place, so we should be able to do the same to a company.  And the mere threat of being able to do this would surely lead to a radical change in how fines and punishments for corporate maleficence were treated and assessed in the future by those who currently quite happily contemplate them.

In the case of the latter figure, the figure of imprisonment, we could suggest that a company might totally cease operations in a similar way once sentence had been passed a posteriori.  Under such circumstances, and for a certain period of time only, the company in question could not continue to occupy the marketplace, in much the same way as a person in prison must effectively cut off all connections to the outside world.

The result would be two powerful instruments to make the corporate figure far more like the human equivalent which – in so many cases – it loves to emulate.

Applied in particular to the banking corporations, it would send a hugely important message around the significance of competence, honesty and openness for our shared societies.

As well as, surely, end the terrible cycle of reward for utter failure – a cycle which appears to be the current tonic and reality of latterday capitalism.

Is it ever OK to be a racist? Perhaps so

 corporations, globalisation, immigration, in a hole, racism  No Responses »
Apr 022013
 

Definitions first.  This, on the corporation:

An corporation is a separate legal entity that has been incorporated through a legislative or registration process established through legislation. Incorporated entities have legal rights and liabilities that are distinct from their employees and shareholders,[1] and may conduct business as either a profit-seeking business or not for profit business.

And this, even more pertinently:

Despite not being actual human beings (‘Natural People’), corporations, as far as the law is concerned, as legal people have many of the same rights and responsibilities as natural people do. Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state,[5][6] and they can themselves be responsible for human rights violations.[7] Corporations can be “dissolved” either by statutory operation, order of court, or voluntary action on the part of shareholders. Insolvency may result in a form of corporate failure, when creditors force the liquidation and dissolution of the corporation under court order,[8] but it most often results in a restructuring of corporate holdings. Corporations can even be convicted of criminal offenses, such as fraud and manslaughter. However corporations are not considered living entities in the way that humans are.[9]

Now this, on how we might define racism:

Racism is usually defined as views, practices and actions reflecting the belief that humanity is divided into distinct biological groups called races and that members of a certain race share certain attributes which make that group as a whole less desirable, more desirable, inferior or superior.[1][2][3]

And this, again even more pertinently:

Racism and racial discrimination are often used to describe discrimination on an ethnic or cultural basis, independent of whether these differences are described as racial. According to the United Nationsconvention, there is no distinction between the terms racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination, and superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous, and that there is no justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in practice, anywhere.[7]

Now to my most recent post (though I’m pretty sure, in my case, the tendency has been exhibiting itself for a while) on the subject of Tory failure (the bold is mine for the purposes of the post you are now reading):

In terms of their own economic markers in the sand; of their inability to lead a country – not through medieval fear but a real and tangible hope – out of the quagmire most of the less well-off will now find ourselves in; of their absent understanding of where a natural justice must lie; and of their abdication and giving-up of a sovereign England to transnational corporations with very foreign ways of seeing and doing.

I imagine, of course, I’m not the only English subject to fear the influences of foreign parts – but I do try to resist what might fairly be considered the expression of racist tendencies.  So why am I happily letting slip phrases such as a “sovereign England” being given up to “transnational corporations with very foreign ways of seeing and doing”?  Given that – as the above definitions have shown us – corporations have many of the attributes of people, am I not committing the cardinal sin of racists everywhere?

Am I not, in fact, demonstrating a profoundly unpleasant side to my character – a side I only reveal when dealing with the branded anonymity of my fast-food provider?

Then I think even deeper on the matter.  Perhaps there is in motion a deliberated sequence of events (not exactly a conspiracy – more a flocking of interested parties) aimed at directing our immigration-riven fears at the foreign people who visibly come over.  That these fears might originally be sourced in the corporations we work for, with their “foreign” values and missions and their effervescent induction processes, seemingly unstoppable, unavoidable and inevitable as they are, is neither here nor there: in essence what is happening, as we find ourselves unable to fight the “real” enemy, is that we transfer our fears onto the entirely blameless young Polish couple living two doors down from where we do.

Seen in such a light, we must conclude the following: of course it’s not right to be racist about anything.  And yet … and yet … in the light of these thoughts, I better understand the “real” racists out there.  These corporations, with their foreign ways, are coming to change my education system, my NHS, my police, fire, search and rescue services, my Legal Aid, my road and rail infrastructures – even, it would seem, my very English love of a cricketing fair play.

So what gives them the right to storm the barricades of Englishness?

Their logo-dressed fineries?  Their invisibility cloaks of globalisation?  Their automatic right to move their electronic wealth from country to country?  And why, please tell me, do they really manage to become so like us – especially when the ordinary foreign-landed flesh-and-blood folk allegedly find it so difficult to integrate with our traditional ways and wherefores?

Are the corporations more gracious with our customs?  Are they more respectful with our habits?  Are they more adept at understanding our ways?

Or is it something else – something really rather unhappier?

Is it really that they manage to remake themselves in our image – or is it more that they have the means and methods to remake us in theirs?

Maybe it is OK to be racist to a corporation after all.  They, in many senses, would appear to be swallowing us whole.  Swallowing us whole – before (once sufficiently masticated, our function fulfilled) they proceed to discard and spit us out.

Thus I come to my final question: in such circumstances as these, wouldn’t your racist tendencies begin to flower too?

Bureaucracies – our saviours or our assassins?

 bureaucracy, business, business leaders, corporations, in a hole, NHS, politicians, pork-barrel politics, private bureaucracy, private sector, privatisation, public sector, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations  4 Responses »
Mar 072013
 

Rick has a lovely piece on defending bureaucracy as a Good Thing.  It starts off like this:

Gus O’Donnell presented a thought-provoking programme on Radio 4 this morning, In Defence of Bureaucracy. He presented two arguments. Firstly, you can’t get much done without basic organisation. Secondly, bureaucracy, with its formal rules, offers protection from the arbitrary whims and prejudices of those in power.

I suggest you read it in its entirety.  It’s not just a piece about bureaucracy in government.  It’s also a piece about bureaucracy in the private sector.  This paragraph, for example:

Bureaucracy is the corporate equivalent of the rule of law. It protects people from arbitrary decisions inside the organisation. Rules and procedures give people clarity about their roles, their scope for decision making and their boundaries. Like the rule of law, they protect employees from random and vindictive treatment by their bosses. It has become very fashionable to deride bureaucracy but working in organisations with fewer rules and procedures can be just as unpleasant. Trying to second guess the whims of a maverick autocratic boss can be every bit as energy draining and innovation stifling as working in a bureaucracy.

In essence, as a set of democratic societies, we could not have arrived at where we are if it hadn’t been for the law-engendering instincts of overarching rules, processes and procedures.

It’s clear, therefore, that our impulsive perceptions of bureaucracy need a makeover.  We need to perceive it with a greater sense of its complex contribution to latterday civilisation.  Therein the rub, of course.  There’s plenty of evidence that bureaucracy – and its fairly widely independent relationship to political masters – makes it a perfect vehicle for doing ill too.  Just because a bureaucracy religiously ensures that rules, processes and procedures are followed to the letter doesn’t mean that only good may necessarily spring forth: if the rules, processes and procedures in question are malignant in nature, the result will be unkind.  What’s more, pretty consistently – even remorselessly – unkind.

The most obvious example is how the Nazis appropriated the Weimar Republic’s institutions.  But we also have an example much closer to home:

Patient interests were neglected for years by NHS mangers as hospitals concentrated on cutting waiting times at the expense of good care, the head of the service admitted today.

Sir David Nicholson accepted that he was “part” of an environment where the leadership of the NHS “lost its focus” and which indirectly led to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of patients at Stafford Hospital.

Now it still seems the latter case is being the subject of much political football – the Tories have recently blamed the previous Labour government for, I assume, its attachment to targets (perhaps, in this case, the wrong ones – that is to say, the easiest ones to measure); meanwhile, the Labour opposition is calling for Nicholson to resign his current responsibility as driver of highly unpopular government-organised change at the NHS.

As I’ve said on a previous occasion:

If you think about it, the pyramid which reaches pointy-headed to the sky is actually totally absurd.  As the work gets more complex and challenging, we use fewer heads to decide what needs to be done.  The chances of committing errors, of stressing oneself into illness, of failing to achieve one’s targets … these are all bound to increase with the traditional pyramid we are all used to.

Surely this is madness.

Surely we need if not a cylinder, at the very least a pyramid without a considerable part of its upper superstructure.

And as Shuggy concisely points out:

From the Hootsmon:

“Excessive hierarchy must become a thing of the past. Upward communication must be encouraged and constructive criticism should be positively received.”

The remedy for this is, apparently, to give those at the top of the hierarchy more power:

“Headteachers should be seen as the chief executives of largely autonomous organisations…”

Kier Bloomer being desperately stupid in a way that only intelligent people can be. I’ll make this my last post on education for some time because this stuff makes me so depressed I can’t stand it.

Again as I’ve said on other occasions, where we currently find ourselves is here:

Where managerialism takes over, and where hierarchies reduce the number of people involved as the tasks get more complex, we get the big-hitter striker syndrome: a man or woman at the top on whom everyone is focussed. A man or woman on whom everything depends. A man or woman who will one day fail; or perhaps, over time, frequently fails – but has the physical presence to convince us they are, even so, actually succeeding; and so deserve the massive salaries they command. [...]

Bureaucracies and top executives – or corporate law and CEOs, if you wish – are complicated relationships, after all.  It’s true, of course, that bureaucracies can act as a dead hand on individually dangerous and maverick leaders.  But as the Nazis showed us, and as the concept of charismatic leadership more widely demonstrates, a stratospheric leadership structure can just as easily use a bureaucracy to escape conviction and control as that very same bureaucracy can serve to ameliorate the former’s wilder instincts.

If we want to continue to believe we can use bureaucracy as a force for good, we need – first and foremost – to sort out the ever-growing dysfunctionality of pyramidal structures, as well as the inefficient concentrations of wealth that accompany it.

Brute corporate force, exerted brutally – is this really what we deserve?

 corporate hooligans, corporations, corruption, coup d'etat, in a hole, PIGS  1 Response »
Feb 272013
 

Time to be totally honest about this.  I’m officially diagnosed – have been for most of my life – both epileptic and paranoid schizophrenic.  I’m not quite sure about the second diagnosis – my doctor refuses politely to revisit it any more.  But I have been – and still am – dependent on expensive medication in order that I might function.

Without it, I would at the very least be having multiple fits every day of my life.

This, therefore, has profoundly shocked me – not only shocked me but revolted and disgusted me:

[In Greece, hundreds] of drugs are in short supply and the situation is getting worse, according to the Greek drug regulator. The government has drawn up a list of more than 50 pharmaceutical companies it accuses of halting or planning to halt supplies because of low prices in the country.

More than 200 medicinal products are affected, including treatments for arthritis, hepatitis C and hypertension, cholesterol-lowering agents, antipsychotics, antibiotics, anaesthetics and immunomodulators used to treat bowel disease.

The Guardian goes on to report that:

Chemists in Athens describe chaotic scenes with desperate customers going from pharmacy to pharmacy to look for prescription drugs that hospitals could no longer dispense.

The government list includes some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca. Pfizer, Roche and Sanofi all said a few products had been withheld. GSK and AstraZeneca denied the claims.

So why are the drugs being withheld?  It would appear that traders as well as wider corporate greed are both, once more, at the heart of our problems:

“Companies are ceasing these supplies because Greece is not profitable for them and they are worried that their products will be exported by traders to other richer countries through parallel trade as Greece has the lowest medicine prices in Europe,” said Professor Yannis Tountas, the president of the Greek drug regulator, the National Organisation for Medicines.

I’m truly sorry for the language I’m about to use here but I see no other way of expressing my rage.

On second thoughts, nothing in the English language fully expresses the way I feel right now.

*

Of course, you’ll be thinking, and I bet you are, Greece is one of those reasonably faraway countries we like to nastily describe as PIGS.  Which, in truth, says far more about ourselves than any unfortunate object of our prejudices.

Only, quite interestingly, this acronym has been expanded on two occasions – and can occasionally be now seen even as PIIGGS.  Yes.  Great Britain is joining the band of merry men and women whose sociopolitical and economic environments do unpleasant things to their peoples in the name of financial probity.  Looking for examples?  Try this one, again from the Guardian tonight:

The acrimonious debate over soaring energy bills and mounting fuel poverty reignited when British Gas – the biggest energy supplier in the UK – unveiled an 11% increase in profits and its parent group, Centrica, promised a £1.3bn handout to its shareholders just months after pushing through an increase in household bills.

Campaign groups warned that 160,000 children had been dragged into fuel poverty by the actions of the big six energy suppliers since 2010, while trade union bosses accused energy chiefs of “creaming off” profits. Dividends of more than £3.5bn have now been paid out by Centrica over the last five years. Anger was exacerbated by confirmation that Phil Bentley, British Gas’s managing director, will stand down with a combined pay and pension package worth more than £10m.

Curious, isn’t it?  After the credit-crunch years, and as all those little shareholders of people’s-capitalism fame found their investments slipping like sand through their once expectant and optimistic fingers, so the big corporate blue chip companies – riding out the storm – have begun to handsomely reward not only their managerialist executives but also their cleverly deep-pocketed gargantuan corporate investors.

As people’s capitalism went into reverse gear, so the corporates learnt to bide their time.

As people’s capitalism lost the support of the people, so the brutal corporations remembered how to keep their resources ever closer to their (war) chests.

And all of the above on the backs of 160,000 children.

All of the above on the backs of the most poverty-stricken.

Brute corporate force, exerted brutally – is this really what we deserve?

Transnational pharmaceutical companies which hold cancer patients, schizophrenics, heart-condition sufferers and people with depression to the kind of ransoms only bastard kings would ever consider.

Energy conglomerates which pile the pain on every winter as they force the poor and elderly to choose between food and fuel.

Where the HELL is your HUMANITY, for Christ’s sake?  Where the HELL is your SHAME?  Where the HELL did you leave your CHARITY?

Where the HELL do you THINK this will LEAD you in the end?

Or IS this HELL we already inhabit?

Criminals – or just businesspeople?

 a con, content, copyright, corporations, criminals, customers, donkeys, horses, privacy  No Responses »
Feb 112013
 

Our blessed government seems to still be selling us the donkey (many apologies to any donkey-lovers – and, indeed, donkeys – reading this post) that those ladies and gentleman responsible for the horsemeat scandal are a group of murky underworld elements quite different from anyone in respectable public or private office.

Of interest, then, to my naturally suspicious self is the following quote from the Telegraph article in question:

Mr Paterson [the British Environment Secretary] yesterday said: “As we speak this morning this is an issue of fraud and a conspiracy against the public I think probably by criminal elements to substitute a cheap material for that which was marked on the label.

As he goes on to point out, in language all politicians are prone to understand (the bold is mine):

“It is a labelling issue. Now we may find out as the week progresses and the tests begin to come in, we may find out there is a substance which is injurious to human health. We have no evidence of that at all at the moment.”

Once again, we see that branding (probably literally in this case) raises its ugly and foolish head.  For politicians do love to define every problem in terms of how it’s being communicated – and never in terms of how objectively grave it might be.  To say that the issue is simply one of labels is – really – to argue the empty-headed toss about one of the most significant concepts in 21st century business: just think of all the money and effort massive corporates, privacy groups and other interested observers are expending in justifying their different approaches to issues such as the integrity of intellectual property, its differentiation and its intrinsic right to earn an exclusive income from its authenticity.

So it is utter bollocks for anyone these days to argue that anything is ever just a matter of labels.  If it were absolutely nothing else, it would be more than massively a matter of great preoccupation.  If such arguments are good enough to justify oppressive Internet intrusion in order to protect film content and DVD sales, surely a little more hands-on attachment to the integrity of our food chain is also fairly going to be warranted.

But back to my first quote tonight, and this phrase in particular (again, the bold is mine):

“As we speak this morning this is an issue of fraud and a conspiracy against the public I think probably by criminal elements to substitute a cheap material for that which was marked on the label.

Criminal elements – or standard business practice?  Isn’t the drive that is continuous improvement – which perpetually looks for ways to substitute a more expensive “material” with a functionally similar but far cheaper equivalent in every single process, procedure, product and service – exactly what 21st century business is exactly about?

In reality, these “criminal elements” are only doing what every good businessperson, CEO and team leader does every single day of their working week.  The objective of their respective marketing actions is to match perceived customer needs to such processes, procedures, products and services – and deliver the outcomes in question at both the lowest possible cost and highest possible price.  So perhaps, as the Telegraph does indeed suggest today, the behaviours which are coming to light at the moment are rather more distributed, widespread and “endemic” than the furious distancing techniques of recent government statements would tend to give lie to.

As I have already noted on these pages, both the banking and food sectors’ regulatory bodies share the same abbreviation: the FSA in each case.  This is, of course, a total coincidence – but not an irrelevant or specious one.  That such crises of propriety, probity, confidence and honour should assail banking in recent times has led many of us to assume the problem is sectoral.  But that similar patterns should now repeat themselves in our food chains should, surely, make us begin to think more than twice.

In each case, we have perhaps necessarily top-down institutions with about as heavy a governance as one could expect, failing lumberingly to inspire the sort of trust one would hope for in their respective consumers and users.  In each case, it would also seem that through the habit corporate organisations always exhibit of building, little by little, every element of their precious practice on the assumption that preceding and successive practice is coherent, correct and contained, the tenuous connections thus finally constructed lead them almost inevitably to criminal downfall.  Part of the problem, of course, is that companies are made up of people, and people cement their understanding of whether other people are behaving themselves on the basis of what these other people manage to do to appear trustworthy.

You can never entirely remove from any process or procedure the need to trust that another is doing what they are supposed to do.  And when you add to the mix the Chinese walls that are designed to ensure we all behave ourselves – but which, in the event, seem to be leading more and more of us to misunderstand the acts of other specialisations to the terrible detriment not only of the companies we work for but also of the societies we operate within – it would seem the mix is becoming dangerously explosive.

Don’t get me wrong.  Corporate organisations are potentially magnificent tools to organise a globalising century of many billions of human beings.  But when they become as fragile as they have of late, we might rue the day we decided to construct our societies around them.

They have, I fear, become corrupting in what many of us saw as precisely their greatest virtues: those very paused and structured mannerisms we assumed would guarantee – at the very least – some kind of enduring sense and sensibility.

*

When businesspeople and criminals both use the same structures to such an extent that it becomes practically impossible – from the outside looking in at least – to tell clearly enough who is who, maybe it’s time we decided on a different set of approaches.

For maybe the day business and criminal practices first began to use the same tools is the day we should have decided – in some way – to shut up this stable for good.

Before all these bloody horses had their chance to bolt our systems and – in that process – perhaps ended up criminalising us all.

The Tomb of an Unknown Donkey

 a con, corporate frankfurter meat, corporations, customers, Europe, European Union, eurozone, food speculation, Mafia, Tories, www.ciwf.org.uk  No Responses »
Feb 102013
 

And so it has come to pass.  The beef that was not beef but was actually, to a very great degree, horsemeat may not – in the event – be horsemeat either.  Whilst lurid tales have been recently spread by government ministers – alluding to Eastern European mafias shifting equine loot – the Independent reports tonight that we could be facing a culinary invasion of donkeys.  In its astonishing report – verging on the most English of parodies in tone – the paper also reminds us (the bold is mine):

The French consumer minister, Benoît Hamon, said today that he would not hesitate to take legal action if evidence emerged that the two French companies which handled the meat had been aware of the fraud.

In passing, Mr Hamon also took a swipe at the British Government. He said that London was complaining about weak European food inspection while cutting the budget for EU food-safety checks in Brussels.

This is a revelatory sentence and explains with great clarity the behaviour of the Tories.  “How perfect!” their strategists must have proclaimed on discovering that good old British beef had been contaminated by pesky European horse.  No matter that in reality we could argue these things happen because hands-off neoliberal thinkers a) like to believe the market will attend in an absolutely perfect and efficient way to both its own and our needs and b) love to suggest the complex B2B transactions that now populate our globalised world are always going to be entirely beneficial.

In truth, the B2B transactions I mention don’t really have to be as complex as they are.  It’s only so huge transnationals can easily reach – with their tenuous distribution channels – each and every corner and supermarket shelf of the nations that make up the developed world that we tolerate these complicated and interdependent ways of delivering food to our tables.

And so now that it turns out our meat has been properly tested for hygiene but not – it would seem – for species, what other lurid thoughts can flood our minds?

Horses?

Donkeys?

Mafias?

Concrete boots?

Various and varied ways of disposing of that which one would prefer to make disappear forthwith?

The FSA, light-touch regulation – and banking on sub-prime horsemeat

 bankers, banking, banks, business, business leaders, business opportunity, corporate frankfurter meat, corporate hooligans, corporate lobbies, corporate speak, corporations, corruption, credit crunch, financial crisis, food speculation, horses, Mafia, unclassifiable, www.ciwf.org.uk  2 Responses »
Feb 092013
 

The Observer reports tonight on a story which will no doubt run and run (in an equine sense if no other):

Sources close to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Food Standards Agency said it appeared that the contamination of beefurgers, lasagne and other products [with horsemeat] was the result of fraud that had an “international dimension”.

Substitute some of the actors with our friends in the financial services community – even the Financial Services Authority shares the same TLA with the Food Standards Agency – and you’ll see why I’m beginning to get the feeling that horsemeat DNA on a criminal scale bears an uncanny resemblance to Libor fixing on a criminal scale.  In both cases, it would seem that insiders have been stuffing outsiders – and the outsiders have been suffering the consequences, generally unknowingly.  A mafia is a mafia, however genteel or besuited it may show itself to be.  We are, it would appear, in the grip of such mafias.

In fact, to state – as the Observer does in its headline – that the “Horsemeat scandal [is] blamed on international fraud by mafia gangs” is just a tad disingenuous: it may be true, of course, but a) it doesn’t half let the government and the regulatory authorities off the hook of ultimate responsibility and b) it doesn’t half beg the question why whoever’s doing the blaming didn’t realise this any earlier.

The process and sequence of events is exactly the same as that which assailed us during the 2008 credit crunch.  All of it essentially down to light-touch regulatory mindsets which believe stupidly in the magical powers of utterly unleashed corporate environments: environments which start out – in our hopeful and ever-optimistic politico-economic models – as virtuous circles of efficient business, only to end up being populated with dysfunctionally greedy individuals, systemic failures no one could have predicted or even – as in this case – Eastern European mafias.

The all-too-predictable result of a hands-off and responsibility-abdicating approach to the business of government and governance.

By trusting the market to run itself, by not inspecting the opportunities for greed and irresponsible behaviours, by believing that organised crime won’t care to get involved in the daily operation of customer choice, these latterday governments of ours are destroying the very integrity of our economic checks and balances.

And that their mentality should argue that customers vote freely with their purchases every day of the blessed week is appalling in the extreme: whilst we cannot take our own personal DNA testers to every prepared meal, and prick them and poke them before every purchase, we are at the mercy of those processes we should surely have every right to trust.

The Independent concludes in the following way its report on the obfuscation currently at play:

‘Bute’ aside, the unlabelled horse may indeed be safe to eat. But that’s not to say that people wanted to eat it, nor, more importantly, that anyone in the food supply system was aware of the existence of what seems to have been a massive undetected fraud.

It was just the presence of an unknown substance –  prions that caused BSE (and the ensuing complacency and cover-up) – that led to a collapse in confidence in British farming.

Judging by the events and attitudes of the last few weeks, the lessons have not been learnt.

Not learnt indeed.  That is all too clear.

But what’s even more clear to me tonight is that business today, whether white collar or abattoir, needs a massive kick up the backside from about as fearsome and heavy-touch legislative and inspection regimes as we can possibly manage to invent and devise.

If for no other reason than to guarantee the safety of hapless human beings in a complex and interdependent century – human beings who still don’t come complete or supplied with their own portable laboratories.

A market for cheap and easy-to-use DNA testers then?

Perhaps the need is wider than that.  Maybe the market that’s really waiting to be exploited is for an algorithmic comparer of prices and products, which automatically suggests the potential presence of fraudulent behaviours in any supply chain.

For until we as consumers get far more access to information about what goes on behind the scenes in such B2B transactions, there is little we can do but to resign ourselves to further and ever-increasing fraud in banking, technology and food products various.

Sir and Lady Worker: how the real problem ain’t facelessness but faceFULness

 corporations, Internet, publishing, thought, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Jan 262013
 

I haven’t done much in the blogging or social media world this week.  At last, after a couple of quiet years since I was made redundant from my totally inappropriate – and, I might hurriedly say, humble – banking job, it would seem that money for the work I’ve been carrying out is beginning to slowly flow in.

I’ve invested probably a few thousand of my own – and my family’s – resources on continuing to post to this blog.  I’m now looking to capitalise on this – ethical advertising may be one way, but there are others out there I am investigating.

The content I’ve produced may be to your liking or not – but in the diameter of likes and dislikes which is the worldwide web, there must surely be some people interested in reading and rereading the thoughts I have posted over the past six years or so.  And possibly even paying for the honour.

Well.  It’s a thought anyhow.

Meanwhile, after a few fits and starts (mainly BT Openreach and TalkTalk’s inability to lay fibre as quickly as promised) my English language-learning online service is now very much under way.  I still have to consult on subjects such as Terms & Conditions, Privacy and other policies – as well as the thorny subject of whether tax is applicable to online language-learning delivered from the UK at my level of turnover (very one-man business – and looking to stay that way …).  So if you know a friendly Internet tax and legal adviser, do point him or her in my direction.

My publishing ventures have hit rather more of a brick wall.  I had two lovely texts which I was looking to distribute in Spain last year.  With one of the texts, I came up against strong anti-independence sentiments amongst the intelligentsia of that country which seemed to be responsible for putting a spanner in the works of the initial progress I made.  Meanwhile, the second text was taking time to settle down as the author was still tweaking its approach.  As all good publishing should do, I sat back and waited for it to settle.

So lots of things started; a long haul and much waiting; a lot of investment in time, energy and financial resource; and quite a bit of working as house husband in the meantime.  My children are much better for the latter.  The twelve months prior to my being made redundant had them slightly abandoned as latchkey kids.  Now they have someone to tell their tales to – their school day and thoughts and frustrations – when and as soon as they come through that front door.

They are much better for it.

Much happier and settled in themselves.

*

Opportunities which need to be taken advantage of, then.  Little by little.

And whilst all the above has been happening, our Coalition government, our business infrastructures, our managerialist ideologies, have all been losing the plot.

Though I haven’t posted or tweeted very much at all this week, what little has been able to seep through to me is disastrous lying and half-truths on monumental proportions.

You know how they say the problem with modern life is faceless corporate bodies?  (And in this terminology we can include governments and other institutions just as easily as we might accuse the corporations themselves.)  Well, I think the real problem is not facelessness but faceFULness.  Every time you try and deal with an issue that needs resolving – whether this be after-sales service for a product you’ve bought or simply trying to make an income-tax declarati0n – you are faced not with the faceless but, rather, what we might call the terribly faceful.

And every time you phone up or try and contact someone, it’s always someone else.  They all have first names, of course (only first names as a general rule) – and if you are redirected to a call centre in some faraway country, they have curiously resplendent first names which clearly look to mimic those of the country you are contacting them from.  Names like Cuthbert, Oswald and Geraldine.  Almost there, then, but really not quite.  I wonder out of which hat such names are pulled.

But this facefulness I talk about isn’t the root of the problem so much as an awful symptom.  Whilst the CEOs at the top of the pyramids become publicly renowned and able to wield tremendously irrational power, the poor worker bees at the bottom – who deal with the real customers in this allegedly faceless and yet, even so, face-to-face manner I am describing at the moment – have all the responsibility for everything they cannot do well and none of the rights to decide how they might do it more effectively.

The facefulness I describe, then, is defined and limited thus: plenty of exposure to the consequences of inadequate process and little power to affect how things might be done in the future.

So are our political and business leaders really as stupid as they seem or are they simply entangled in a web of inadequate and counter-productive hierarchy?

And what would the world of business and politics be like if Sir and Lady Worker – the men and women at the coalface of work these days – got to decide themselves how things were properly done?

How things were done – and undone too – for the wider benefit and efficacy of us all?

It’s a thought, you know.

A thought I think we really should pursue.

In a thinking society, why do they dumb down all the processes?

 corporations, people, politicians, problem-solvers, process, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations, unclassifiable, work, Work A, Work B, work-life balance, work/life balance, workers, workfare, workforces, working people, working to live, working-class, workshy  1 Response »
Jan 112013
 

Yesterday, on the back of an excellent post published by James Firth describing the upsides of shirking and laziness, I in turn said this:

And thinking on this fearful government campaign against the concept of shirking as James would prefer to understand it – a concept we could just as easily describe as idle thoughts, imagination and deliberately unfocussed creative and lateral thinking in general – makes me wonder if our government doesn’t have a couple of prejudices driving it:

  1. Thinking idly must be the preserve of the idle rich – because it’s one of the most sure-fire ways of getting richer.
  2. Thinking idly must be the preserve of the already powerful – because, as one sure-fire way of understanding how the world really works, it’s bound to lead the plebs to reconsider their assigned positions in society.

What I didn’t realise was that there is science behind what is happening.  Watch this video, first – it’s only ten minutes long and will change your life for sure.


http://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc

As you will see if you follow my instructions to the letter, unthinking work responds positively to the attractions of monetary payments.  They dangle a larger carrot in front of you – or threaten you with a larger stick for not working harder – and, verily, you end up working harder.  But when it comes to using your brain to think, more money actually makes you perform worse!  Time and time again, the data proves the latter.  An astonishing – and apparently counter-intuitive – conclusion.

Are human beings, in reality then, hard-wired socialists by nature?

It’s certainly a thought, anyhow.

*

Naturally enough, this got me thinking.  I worked for about seven years in a large banking corporation.  My experience in one department there led me from relatively thinking tasks at the beginning to evermore desultory and meaningless data entry six years on.  The trends were absolutely clear: the dumbing down of processes and their corresponding procedures was an instinct which was manifestly part and parcel of corporate life.  The question was: why?

I always assumed it was an urge to reduce training costs, limit the impact of staff turnover and make it impossible for any one worker to be in control of sufficient intellectual property which a move into another company might prejudice.

The dumber the processes the workforces have to carry out, the fewer of those processes – and their value-adding implications – they can take away with them out of malice or pique, for example.

But in the light of what we’ve just seen in the RSA video above, it would seem that there is an intuitive (maybe even conscious) conspiracy sustaining itself to take out of a thinking society such as ours – trained for decades, as it has been, in the constructive cocoon of compulsory education to cogitate better and more profoundly than ever before – all the relevant and value-adding opportunities to use our cognitive and self-motivating side to be precisely that.

So instead of substituting a stick-and-carrot system designed to make simple and repetitive tasks function at least minimally well with an alternative system which would fit exactly with our thoughtful and educated latterday brains, large and small companies everywhere have decided – whether deliberately or instinctively – to jettison all attempts to take advantage of our minds and, instead, return us to the drudge of manager-driven wage slavery.

In a thinking society, where almost everyone has been taught how to imagine, create and laterally devise, this is why they’re dumbing down all the processes: it’s a power thing, after all.  A desire to keep a hold of those old hierarchies.  A need they have to maintain the control that externally motivated work has over the worker bees it commands.

And what’s even more curious is that as we continue to find ourselves carrying out more and more meaningless tasks in our work time, in our leisure time we’re blogging and videoing and writing to our heart’s content.  What’s more, with mostly very little monetary reward.

Whilst we’re pushed towards evermore robotic work experiences, our need to think and cogitate cannot be suppressed.  Just as, in fact, our democracy is removed from our politicking, so our desire to search out and practise democratic process moves into online and other virtual manifestations.

However hard you try to remove freedom of thought and cognitive opportunities from human beings and their daily experiences, you are bound, I think we can all agree, to ultimately fail.

And whilst we humans are pushed towards – and back into – meaningless work, and whilst our robots become cleverer and more ingenious, no wonder our politicians feel the need to criticise the thinkers: to criticise them roundly, describe thinking as shirking – and let it be understood that those who wonder are wasting their time.

After all, imagine how difficult it might be to rule over a nation of people far cleverer than you.

A nation of people who thought stuff without the petty reward of the only thing that separated you – with your concentrated wealth – from them.

A nation of people who didn’t believe stuff in accordance with what you gave them or withheld.

A nation of people who did what was right because doing what is right is what keeps them alive.

That, in conclusion, is what we now have in the United Kingdom.

Too many clever voters who think better in their spare time than their leaders are now managing in their paid time.

Curious, isn’t it?  Curious how historical hierarchies always seem to fight to reassert themselves.

A Lesson in Neo-Prehistory: “Why McDonald’s Brings Us Closer to the Cave”

 Camerong, conditionality, corporations, David Cameron, McDonald's, McMenu, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Dec 292012
 

My middle son doesn’t share breakfast with us during the week.  He gets up at six and feeds himself.  He has, however, agreed that at weekends we are to be regaled with a little of his time.  Today, being Saturday, was one such occasion.  It was a nice family moment which the older your children, the less frequently you enjoy.

At one point in the meal, carefully laid by myself and my wife with appropriately Christmassy-themed plates, cutlery and assorted items, he brought a 4-pint plastic bottle of milk to the table.  We raised our hands in horror.  He couldn’t see what he was doing wrong.  As he wants to be a film director later in life, I asked him whether in the making of a film how he presented the content wouldn’t matter and be important.  He said of course – but that would be a job with the reward of money behind it.  There would therefore be a reason to take care of the hows and wherefores.  Here, meanwhile, there was none of the above: what did it matter whether a plastic bottle or a beautiful jug was brought to the table or not?

I wonder if such attitudes don’t have an explanation.  This, after all, is the generation of McDonald’s: a place where you are taught (if teaching were necessary) to eat with your fingers and without knives, forks or plates – and yet, simultaneously, clear up after yourself!  What a contradictory set of lessons and messages our powerful corporates are able to transmit.

No wonder my son is confused about etiquette.

In a sense, so much of modern corporate education – for that is how I would describe what they spend so much time, money and effort on communicating – is designed to bring us closer to our forebears: from eating with our hands, on the hoof and as quickly as possible to only doing stuff for ourselves and others because there exists a reward of some kind behind the acts in question … well, it’s clear that something retrograde is happening here.

If anything defines what’s happening to the nations that currently compose the United Kingdom, it’s this generational conflict – this misunderstanding even – between these “before” and “after” moments: on the one hand, sensible British socialists as manifested by the NHS, Legal Aid, free education and the rule of an egalitarian law; on the other, unconscious children of the corporates.

The latter savvy, it is true, in their ability to read and absorb the meaning of the content faster than any of the rest of us – but perhaps without enough distance from the ideologies that underpin its transmission.

We feel we see it all clearly – and so we find it difficult to enjoy; meanwhile, they simply do and act – and so find it so difficult to question.  Their futures are so very bound up in the structures we as failing adults criticise.  In a sense, therefore, it’s understandable that they should wish to participate in what’s on offer.  Our working lives are coming to an end whilst theirs are only just starting.  If we cannot deliver the Jerusalem of educated altruism that we so fiercely attempted to build our postwar society on, how can they possibly continue to believe in anything but a return to the caves of yore?

Cameron is not a bad man, in himself.  He is simply an enabler of a change of generations.  He is continuing the work that Blair did before him.  And whoever comes afterwards will not be able to stem the tide of conditional behaviours that dominate our societies.

We came from the caves, we created a society which strove to retreat from them – and now, in a matter of fifty years, it would seem that our children will return.

And what shall we call it – when the dust has gone and settled?

Neo-liberalism?

Neo-conservativism?

Neo-prehistory perhaps?

Whatever the label, we will shortly be in a position to understand exactly why McDonald’s – and those who like to follow their star – are bringing us all much closer to the caves we once escaped from.

Even when we’re shareholders, we’re never only shareholders

 a con, Apple, corporation tax, corporations, Facebook, fallacy, Google, privacy, share prices, shareholders, tax dodgers  No Responses »
Dec 272012
 

Paul has a nice piece today on why the New Year should bring about a massive disconnection from Facebook and all its works.  Conclusion and the how-to as follows:

Here is a link to instructions as to how to delete your Facebook account. If you have the strength, go for the real ‘deletion’ rather than the ‘deactivation’ method. If you just deactivate, you’re leaving your data there for Facebook and their partners to exploit…..

Meanwhile, from the Telegraph and also this morning, how Facebook’s own family sometimes gets the privacy settings wrong:

Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook chief executive Mark, has complained after a “private” photo she posted on the social network was spread on Twitter by someone she had not intended to see it.

No connection between one and t’other, of course.

*

What really caught my bleary eye though – being just after breakfast whilst I supped the last of my torrefacto coffee – was this report from the always ahead-of-the-pack Reuters: this time, on the subject of how rising profits by transnational corporations in the UK equal falling tax revenues for the state:

Big companies in Britain now pay less tax than they did 12 years ago despite a big jump in profitability, a Reuters analysis of official data shows. Tax campaigners say the trend is the clearest signal yet that tax avoidance has blossomed under a more business-friendly strategy at the UK tax authority Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

The article, at least for me, makes sickening reading – especially when companies like Google find themselves in the following position:

Google, for example, channels $4 billion of UK sales through Ireland each year, most of which ends up in Bermuda. Google said it complies with tax law in every country in which it operates but that it also has an obligation to its shareholders “to run our business efficiently”.

The problem is that even when we are shareholders, and even when companies have a responsibility to us as such, we are never only shareholders.  We are also frail human beings who will one day fall desperately ill and will be in need of the support of our fellow men and women; we are also parents, sons and daughters with responsibilities to children and progenitors; we are also democratic citizens with an obligation to participate in democratic discourse.

All of the above-mentioned does, therefore, have a cost – and a price.  A cost – and price – the powerful prefer to ignore.

The limited focus that corporate executives choose to bring to their responsibilities is easy – and simultaneously facile.  Facebook decides that advertisers’ wants must operate above and beyond even its owner’s family privacy; Google decides that its shareholders’ finances (even where these shareholders are also parents, pensioners or the disabled) must weigh more heavily than the schoolchildren, patients and infirm of the communities they make their humongous profits from; and, in the meantime, our very own governments – both Labour and Tory it would seem – decide that they must court corporate investors more carefully than the people who made the mistake of voting those selfsame governments into power in the first place.

It’s a fallacy, I’m afraid.  Even those people who are made of money – and who make it their business to make more of  it – aren’t ever only moneymakers.

One day they will also be helpless citizens – just like the rest of us.  No amount of money can ever change that.

No amount of money can ever do more than postpone that event.

No.  It’s not enough to say that we have a responsibility to shareholders.  When we say that, we mean we only care to see one facet of terribly complex beings.  It’s a lie to argue that we must make more money regardless of the hows – simply because these shareholders allegedly have their foot on the accelerator pedal of a massive multiplication of amoral income at the expense of other more thoughtful behaviours.

Please think again, those of you who can.

Please thing again, before this all blows up in our faces.

*

I was kind of involved, a couple of days ago, in a Twitter exchange between two diametrically opposed positions.  One person argued fiercely in favour of an intervening state; the other argued, just as strongly, against the inefficiencies – and even the corrupting influences – of such structures.  I bowed out of the debate, and let it rest there and then.  But I didn’t forget the points made.  And I was reminded of them today with the absolute absence of moral judgement which the Reuters’ investigation so sadly threw up.  The behaviours thus described were the choice of men and women working in large institutions as big as many nation-states.  Yet they were all, without exception, working in the very private sector.  So when we talk about inefficiency and corruption in such nation-states, we tend to forget that private industry can be as inefficient and corrupt as any poorly-run state.

The only difference being, perhaps, that the public sector is eventually that: public.

Whilst the private sector prefers to remain generally t’other: private.

*

A final story tonight, again from Reuters, on that icon of 21st century corporate amorality which, in a very biblical sense, finds itself quite appropriately named Apple.  In this case, we discover the obscenity that involves an annual salary of $4 million equalling a 99 percent cut – in relation, I do admit, to temporarily inaccessible paper values – on the previous year’s earnings.

It’s really too difficult for me to fully comprehend how casually upside-down our world has become.

Do you understand what’s happening?

For I certainly don’t.

Any explanation you can think of which doesn’t involve  further biblical references?

Worker-owned capitalism – a collaborative alternative we should nurture?

 capitalism, cooperatives, corporations, on a high, workers  2 Responses »
Dec 062012
 

The Guardian published an interesting report a couple of days ago which contained the following statistic:

Little-known fact: about one in ten US workers has ownership in the company they work for. [...]

Worker-owned capitalism to such an extent in one of the most corporate countries in the world?  Well, yes – and as it should be.  We are, after all, talking here about recovering for our own purposes the idea of corporations and their ability to organise the masses.  As Rick and Chris have both pointed out on more than one occasion, high levels of self-employment are no necessary sign of healthy and mature economies.  The latter summarises the issue thus:

[...] Four things make me side with Rick:

- Entrepreneurs are often jacks-of-all-trades. An entrepreneurial society thus doesn’t make best use of the division of labour.

- Self-employment, especially now, is a form of under-employment; people sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.

- Micro-businesses suffer from financing constraints to a greater extent than large firms do. This can prevent them reaching optimal size.

- Many of the self-employed actually want to be relatively unproductive. They see self-employment as a better way of combining work with their commitments to children or the golf course.

There are good reasons, then, why economies of entrepreneurs are often low-productivity ones. Small businesses are very often not tomorrow’s giants or job creators, but rather just mediocre plodders – if they survive at all.

But I think this probably results more from the fact that the next step after individual self-employment – which is to say, the corporatisation of self-employment as per that ten percent of US workers the Guardian mentions – is quite difficult here in the UK to get government, financial and cultural support for; quite difficult to get even a glancing acknowledgement of.

If America can do this – use the corporate structures, tools, processes and procedures to organise self-motivating worker-owned capitalism – then why can’t we?  If America can make self-employment massively efficient and creative, what’s to stop us from doing the same?

It can’t be that the existing vested interests in Britain are fiercer – after all, the US corporate behemoths of a traditional flavour often stride the world in their ability to beautifully create product and unjustly destroy competitors.  Is it – could it – actually be that in the land of entrepreneurship we are discovering that a kind of cooperative capitalism is finding a more fertile ecosystem than here in Europe?  Is it – could it – actually be that our own business infrastructures and people, from the smallest sole trader right through to the grandest blue chip, are simply not up to the challenges a properly-competitive business landscape should present for collaborative capitalism?

Is it – could it – actually be the case that who’s really got used to benefits and feathered nests is not the struggling worker on the poverty line but the reasonably well-protected managers and executives who – whilst being so distant from the production lines, processes and procedures – still take it upon themselves to take the decisions about how companies should operate?

Worker-owned corporates, then? An alternative to nurture?  I think so.  I really do.  The best of both of our worlds.

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