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Saturday, October 01, 2005

greed

there are some stories that leave you with a bit of a funny taste in the mouth. not because they are truly horrific, not because they show the evils that lurk within the hearts of men, but because they demonstrate the ambivalent emotions you can have over the same story.
now i admit to being an armchair socialist.
i can get into a rant about a lot of things and some of them have appeared on here. but to my shame i rarely get off my large arse to do much about them.

i flick over to the the independent online to have a look and see if there is anything interesting and one of the stories is about a bloke on a spending spree to celebrate his bonus.
bloke in question is a financier (and frankly i have never understood what they do - other than operate a three card shuffle type con - the only difference is they get shed loads of money and are told that they are captains of industry)so he has his bonus and he goes out and celebrates.
nothing wrong with that.
except his bar tab was £36,000 for the night. it's more than i earn in a year. what on earth was his bonus. (was also stunned that there was a service charge!)
now what annoys me is that he is probably among the people who complain about workers having a minimum wage, he is probably someone who doesn't want to see any protection accorded to employees, is no doubt very keen on the a flat tax or a serious tax cut.
that sort of wage disparity is one of the things that is wrong with the modern world. for all his talk about globalisation being here and we have to learn to live with it and learn to deal with it blair seems to miss one of the key problems with it is that if we want to buy the things that globalisation creates we have to have money. if all the jobs go to the low paid developing world then what are the people in the west going to do in order to buy these items. we are bombarded by images of the lifestyles of the rich and famous - all of which encourages us to live in debt, to aspire to a style we can't afford and really we don't want but we are told we should. financiers (who do very little - fuck they gamble with our money not theirs) can think themselves save in the global economy but frankly i am sure there are indian and chinese financiers who will be able to the job better and cheaper - so lets outsource them.
and while we are at it lets outsource that fat twat dibgy...

3 comments:

ems said...

i was about to say you can't tar all financiers and city whizz kids with the same brush. but you're probably right if a straw poll of my friends is anything to go by

pat said...

to be honest i am sure i overgeneralised there. but i suspect that because it is a young man's game that they come into it young, their heads get turned and they think life is like that and it is fine.

and then the digby's of the world say it is ok for them to be that way.

and of course not helped by new labours love of the consultant community, who are even worse scourge on society. i have now worked with two and from what i can make out all they do is make sure they line their pockets and do very little.

ems said...

ooohh. put those nails back in