Tag Archives: Business

Wall Street and cancer have a lot in common.

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(I’ve updated this slightly for 2020 but not much.  What has changed most is the vaster pile of company corpses, mangled and murdered by stock-price-driven company management.)

Actually, Wall Street is a cancer.

Some part of the body that once had a function but has grown, mutated, and acts to kill the host.

The key to understanding Wall Street is to come to grips with the fact that what goes on there is not, for the vast majority of activities, investment.

How can that be with thousands of screen and print ads screaming their desire to help you with investment?

Understanding starts by looking at actual investment.

Consider, there’s a car wash down the street, or an apartment building, or whatever.  You want to buy it or maybe lend some money to it.  In all cases, you are providing capital or gaining ownership in order to produce something that can be exchanged.  Maybe you want to produce more of that something.  Maybe you just want to continue the production–usually buying a row of apartment buildings comes with the intent to continue to see renters.  Or maybe it’s to tear the apartments down and put in a mall or a restaurant or a factory?  In any case, you are intimately involved with the fate of your investment.  You want it to become something greater, to produce more of something, maybe not even the same something, or at least continue to produce.

On Wall Street what matters is if the stock price rises or falls.  That is not the same thing as increased or better production.  In fact, it rarely is.

Most Wall Street “investors” don’t have a clue what it is they are “investing” in.  Certainly, pure investment does contain a gamble.  But that does not also mean that pure gambling is investing.

From a certain viewpoint, everything is a gamble.  But when the only concern is the show of the dice–or the show of the stock price–then it’s not investing.  It’s speculation.  It’s playing the ponies.  It’s rolling the roulette wheel.  It’s gambling.  And gamblers and speculators will do anything they can get away with to get the dice to show what they need for their return.  That anything doesn’t have to be good for the company.  It doesn’t have to be good for the rest of the gamblers.  It just has to make someone a winner.

That something could be stripping employees of the retirement they’ve earned.  It could be running the company into bankruptcy with whatever damage that causes to people and other companies.  It could be giving the technology to a foreign company.  It could be anything.  So long as it makes for a more predictable bet, some speculator is planning it and trying for their own killing.

When you set up casinos to get a cut from this sort of gambling, then you have Wall Street.  The brokers and “investment” firms are the “house.”  They own the games.  For each play, they get a cut.  It doesn’t matter how much–or more often, how little–you or I walk away with.  What matters is that there are enough plays that the house percentage makes them rich.

This frantic monument of speculation does virtually nothing beneficial for investment, but it does turn investment from its necessary function and makes it cancerous.  The cancer metastasizes to distant parts of the economy.   It is the correct term for what Wall Street has done to our industries–especially those who lead those industries.

Chairmen and CEO’s are today much more concerned with what Wall Street thinks–that is, where the stock price is going–than they are with the welfare of the company they are to manage.  Most bonuses for upper executives are made in terms of stock options.  Regardless of how the bonus terms are couched in the individual executive contracts, the key driver in executive decision making is the stock price.

And Wall Street is only concerned with what they think will make the stock price change for better or worse.

But, say the objectors, that is exactly what we want:  Companies should respond to Wall Street.

Perhaps.  If Wall Street was concerned with increased or better production–and was intimate with the companies enough to have sensible things to add–then maybe.  But that is not the case.

What Wall Street knows is what every gambler and speculator knows:  They make money if the price changes.  The price changes when other speculators are convinced the price should change.  What convinces other speculators is rumor, popularity, conjecture, fear or elation.  What convinces other gamblers is a perceived chance to scratch the itch of their greed.

That it is good to be tied to Wall Street is common knowledge–but it’s not real knowledge.

It is just what we’ve been taught.

Just list the major accomplishments of Wall Street in the last 100 years:  The Great Depression–and immediately following this triumph of investment:  World War II.  (You don’t think so?  Take just a few minutes to look up the causes of the fall of the Weimar Republic, the German government that Hitler was able to corrupt into Nazi Germany.)  Just between those two, the Great Depression and World War II, measure if you can the depth and breadth of horror spread across this planet by the insatiable greed the speculators on Wall Street.  And this is just the beginning.

After WWII, we see the metastasizing of Wall Street’s cancer into our government and our foreign policy.  From Guatemala to Iran, our government has been on a spree of “protecting American interests,” which translates directly into doing what Wall Street wants.  The Cold War was a marvelous excuse to subvert, malign, overthrow, and murder in the name of profit.  If you have not read “Inside the Company” by Philip Agee or “Legacy of Ashes” by Tim Weiner, then you don’t know enough about U.S. foreign policy to have an opinion–and you should have an opinion.  Not that every effort in the Cold War was a waste or criminal, but consider this:  Would there have been a Cold War if there had not been a World War?  And consider this–while remembering the Cold War’s supposed foreign policy success–which four communist countries saw the most violent opposition from the United States?  The answer is easy.  Just look for the four, existing, wholly communist countries.  Still drawing a blank?  Try these:  China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.

If the punitive violence that was so much a part of our country’s policy was successful, then why are those countries still standing?  Even the countries where we did succeed very often hate our guts.  Drawing a blank?  Think of Iran.  What?  You didn’t know it was one of our successes?

Oh, the list goes on.  Wall Street has given us recessions in virtually every decade since WWII, sometimes more than one, all of them brought on by panic of one sort or another on Wall Street.  You might ask this very good question:  What does Wall Street’s panic have to do with production?  With the creation or growing and sale goods?  The answer should be:  absolutely nothing.  Why should our economy fall because some gambler thinks he’s not going to make the killing he’d hoped for?  The speculator’s effect on the economy is wholly that of a parasite that has grown so invasive that the parasite is determining the health of the host.

There is no need for us to allow Wall Street’s machinations to determine our economic health.  That is the greatest and most damaging lie from which our economy suffers.  If Wall Street served its real purpose of providing one of the places for companies to find extra funding–and did that function without the gambling and speculation–which means without the panics–then the economy would not rise and fall with the fear level in the stock market.  It is possible that there would be no measurable fear level when investing.

There’s more.  Business decisions are driven by what will make the speculators pant.  Insane decisions are made in the board room and the legislature driven by the need for speculators to have a reason to speculate.  For instance, where was information systems industry developed, including the computer chip, the LCD and the software?  Which country was the industrial powerhouse of the world?  Where are those devices made today?  What industry is left in this country?  It might have been before you were born, but it was the U.S.  Where are these industries now?  Mostly not here.  Who drove the decisions that sent all of that overseas?  The answer is, by and large, Wall Street–and congressman in Wall Street’s pocket.

The greatest economic advantages a country and a people could hope for were squandered, given away, sent off to our competition, because some gamblers in the stock market thought they saw a way to make a stock price rise or fall.

And today, after Wall Street and their bankers figured out how to gamble on the value of our homes, our home prices first inflated and then crashed.  So now, if you don’t want to risk your capital speculating with stocks, you do not even have the safe haven of real estate.

But there’s more.  The crash in our economy brought on by the Wall Street investment fiascos echo around the world.  In 2008, Governments teetered on the edge from Europe to Asia.  Many of them still suffer.  We already know what follows economic chaos.  If somehow you don’t, then you needed to open your ears to the saber rattling in the press, echoing that from Washington.

These things are not accidents.  That is the one thing that history teaches.  The fools who start the chaos may not understand or care about the results, but they pull their triggers deliberately.  Those who claim otherwise depend upon your ignorance.

Is it possible I’ve missed something here?  Sure.  But something important?  I think not.  The complexity that is modern economics is artificial.  Real economics is as simple as “I have something you want” and “What do you have that I want?”  The complexity we have in investment exists largely because it affords opportunities to siphon from the flow of exchange and much less so because it facilitates exchange.

To anyone who thinks Wall Street is a friend of this country, I say, think again.

Destroying our economy is not a crime

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(Written in 2010, two years after that recession.  Nonetheless, as I review, still true today.)

So, the latest word is that, after two years, only two people are being prosecuted for destroying our economy.  It seems the loss of trillions of dollars and millions of jobs isn’t actually a crime.

Of course, this is not surprising.  Too many in Congress and too many in business are dirty.  Too many would go down if any real investigations took place.

Case in point: Barney Frank.  You may have seen him on TV, chairing a committee in Congress, boiling with outrage at Wall Street and financial big shots.  The real story is that he had as much to do with the sub-prime fiasco as anyone.  He even got paid for it.  Many tens of thousands of dollars.  Moreover, his boyfriend at the time worked at Fannie Mae. (Do your own google on Frank and Fannie Mae.)  Regardless of the consequences for the rest of us, these criminals were only interested in their immediate profit and pleasure.  This is typical of criminal society–massive irresponsibility for the results of their actions.  Which leads to an interesting question:  What is homosexuality but irresponsibility toward the fate of the race?  I spent some time on the streets when I was young, and avoiding the homosexual traps was just part of the life.  Not everyone made it, but those are stories for another time.

The worse truth is that this behavior is typical of all criminal groups, including Congress.  Each criminal offers the deal of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”  Frank is hardly alone.  Millions of dollars from banking and insurance firms, who were selling thin air, went to politicians still in office, including now President Obama.  Democrats and Republicans alike are neck deep in the mire.

Sadly, being criminals, these individuals and groups support other criminals.  This is a fact often missed.  The idea that a person or company can be a criminal in one area and a responsible citizen in another is a fantasy.  The heart of criminality is irresponsibility.  Any criminal will tell you, in whatever creative words they can find, that their crimes were forced on them, didn’t hurt anyone, were caused by the victim, and so on.

This sort of thing does not have a boundary in a person’s life.  It spills over and spreads.  There is no choice.  If it’s okay to beat the wife, it must be okay for someone else to beat the wife–or the kids.  It must be okay to drink the grocery money up since that is the way to stay away from the wife.  Therefore it must be okay to be drunk on the job or lose the job.  Just extend this in any way you like.  Crime bosses are not great fathers except in the movies.

Companies are the same.  Just look at the groups that Fannie Mae supported–and perhaps still does.  Once the corruption reaches the top, companies will find a way to support other crimes and criminals.  On the flip side, very often the companies that preach the most about responsibility are doing the most irresponsible things.  Irresponsibility is something they know well, and the only way they can avoid the pain of self-inspection is to point the finger elsewhere.

Of course, this also applies to politicians.  If you think about it, for what other reason has our system of legalized bribery, otherwise known as campaign contributions, continued to exist in our so-called free elections?  Companies with criminal activities, by which I definitely include areas of irresponsibility, support politicians who will look the other way.

Almost any politician, to be elected, is under terrific pressure to take part in this crime.  The cost is self-respect.  The result is irresponsibility.  The need for the money does not go away.  There is always that next election.  Some company or person with filth to hide or legalize will have a “contribution” to make.  All that’s required is that the politician be just a bit more irresponsible.

Thus crime spreads through all of society.

There is a great deal to be said on how loss of self-respect leads to irresponsibility and crime.  Many areas of our society are bubbling pools of irresponsibility–and the irresponsible encourage more of it.  They preach behaviors that lead to loss of self-respect, knowing full well this leads to criminality.  It is, after all, the path they have walked.

Most of these areas don’t get labeled as criminal.

But they should.

Ways to steal from the kids

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There are lots of ways to steal from the children.

Speaking with a friend of mine, we got on the subject of social security, welfare, unbridled handouts and so on.

He was angry.

I didn’t disagree with him.  I still don’t.  People want and politicians want–they make deals to satisfy each other by taking a loan out in their children’s name.

Sleazy, dirty, dishonest, corrupt, foul–all are good adjectives.  And accurate.

But then he went on to say that we ought to be drilling oil wherever we can find it.  The North Slope.  Wilderness areas.  The Gulf.  Wherever.

“Do you think,” I asked him, “that maybe our children, our grandchildren and their children might want to have some oil?  Do you think they might find that handy?  Do you think they might possibly need a few gallons to ensure their own survival?’

He blinked, blinked just as if I’d tapped him between the eyes with a hammer.

And he didn’t answer.  For good reason.

He had no answer.  So far as I know, he still doesn’t.

Everyone likes to think that their variety of handout is the good kind.

It isn’t just the socialists who are stealing from the kids.

It is the handiest way for a politician to win some votes–and it doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum that the politician is on.  The average politician reaches out into the future and takes a finger or a lung–or a job, or the oil, or the air to breathe–or their educations and the right to their own minds, from the children.

Next time you shake hands with a politician, remember to wash.

And if he gives you something, at least say a prayer for those who will pay.

Socialism and capitalism-the two philosophies compared

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Socialism and capitalism–the two philosophies couldn’t be more apart. At least, that’s the common refrain.

But it isn’t so. Not really.

Truth is, as they are practiced, at their core, they are nearly identical.

Each promises that someone else will do the work.

They both have immense bodies of propaganda designed to convince those who produce that the greater part of the wealth created by the producer’s production actually belongs to someone else.

Both deny that they are bound by the laws of exchange. Those same principles that say when I go to the grocery store, I leave behind something of value equal to what I receive. Yet both capitalists and communists espouse systems whereby someone gets but is no longer required to give.

The biggest difference is not philosophy, but numbers. How many not working will be supported by those who bust their butts?

There’s the difference.

The modern capitalist does a better job of hiding the lack of exchange than does the socialist, but that is necessary. The socialist, when successful, has enlisted large portions of the population–and there is a great power in those numbers.

The capitalist–not such big numbers. To compensate, the capitalist starts out by entering into exchange, giving an investment for a share. But as quickly as possible, that share becomes complete control and lasts forever.

I’ve written before about the reality of a company–it consists primarily of the knowledge and production of those doing the work. Though it’s not an even division, some know more and produce more, some know and do less, there is still a proportionate share of ownership created each and every day, created and maintained by that good, knowledgeable production.

Nothing folds up a company faster than having all those involved with production, along with all the knowledge of production, walk away.

What is the value of a share of nothing?

What is the value of a share of a company that consists of hardware, buildings and such, but has no one left who knows what goes on in those buildings? Well, what will the buildings and stuff bring at auction? It’s not even a company. Just some stuff that might be valuable to those with the knowledge to use it to make another company.

Yet the modern capitalist will claim that because of money lent years ago, or centuries ago, that the “company” belongs to the capitalist. If great-great grandpa put a hundred bucks into ATT, great-great grandson doesn’t need to produce anything. He gets to siphon the profit and wealth from those doing the work.

Siphon the profit and wealth. Does that remind you of something?

It ought to. That is the driver behind socialism, communism, feudalism and monarchies, and is also key to such simpleminded political structures as dictatorships and totalitarian states.  Somebody wants a free ride and those of us creating products get to do the heavy lifting.

Socialism, having numbers on its side, doesn’t bother with any initial investment. You work, we take. Thank you very much. We’ll be back tomorrow for your next “contribution.”

Capitalism says, you work, we take–because there was at one point a contribution made to help enable the production. Where this morph’s over into a “you give, we take” scheme, is when time is entered into the equation.

If I give you a hundred bucks so that you can buy tools to make doodads, then I should get something in return. Absolutely–that is simple and fair exchange.

But do I own the company years later when you’re producing millions of doodads and selling them for a bundle? Is all that profit mine for my hundred buck investment? Your years of work, your reinvestment into goods and equipment, your accumulation of knowledge, your daily creation–but my hundred bucks?

At some point, the exchange created by the initial investment has been made trivial by the investments of time, effort, knowledge and production of those doing the work. How does one know that such a condition exists? Just have the knowledge and production fail to show up on Monday.

It’s like Vito saying, “Keep the money. But you owe me ‘favors’ for the rest of your life. And then your kids owe me favors. And their kids owe me too. And the kids after that right on out to the end of time.”

An investment should be paid back, and an obligation exists until it is. But dollars of investment can’t create eternal obligation. Eternal obligation–that’s slavery.

That’s something for nothing.

So you see, at their hearts, as they are practiced, socialism and capitalism are blood brothers.

The real difference is:  How many we have to carry on our backs.

The real question is:  How does your back feel?

Speaking of capitalism–what is a founder’s share?

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Speaking of capitalism, what about the situation where someone founds a company? Doesn’t just make an investment, but rolls up his sleeves and dives in?

Who owns that company?

Is the founder by rights an absolute dictator, sole heir to all profit and benefit?

No, not quite.

Ownership is still measured by contribution.

Let’s say that after years of work, hard work by everyone including the founder, that everyone but the founder walks away. It’s a mess, but the founder can create another company, right? If he’s been in there swinging, he’s got the knowledge–most of it, anyway. He can hire new people, train them, get things rolling again–but at how much effort, at how much lost profit, production, and customers?

That extra, the part that disappears with the people, is the least of what the former “employees” owned. The “owner” only owns what is left. That may be more. It may be less. It depends on the real contribution, on the amount of creation. But ownership of this thing called a company is shared.

How do we know that?

Because it went away when those creating it left.

So, even a sole founder is not so sole.

Very quickly ownership spreads out.

And it’s easy to understand.

After all, the creation of a company is the sum of many, many individual acts of creation. Most, nearly all, of those acts must be replayed every day to keep the company created. When a company is rebuilt, it’s a new company, created newly by new actions and new efforts.

What a founder does is enlist the creation of others–but he can never own their ability to create. That is unless one subscribes to slavery. That’s what slaveholders try to do–own someone’s ability to create, own all that someone does create.

Even then, it doesn’t last. Eventually the system collapses–slaves have very little stake in success.

Neither do employees who are denied their rights to ownership, denied the recognition and exchange demanded by their individual acts of creation.

Such companies eventually die.

That’s because the life leaves them.

It simply walks out the door.

Jobs overseas and parasites at home

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IBM was in the news recently for laying off more Americans and hiring more electronic migrants. Some writer pontificated that the workers had no right to complain.

They were just employees.

Such drivel, this idea that IBM owes the workers nothing. What IBM executives think they own, what the shareholders think they own, and what they actually own are two very different things.

It is very easy to calculate. Consider, tomorrow morning, no one employed by IBM, no one more than a few levels below vice-presidents, shows up for work? What happens the next day? Or the days after that?

What’s left? Aside from computer rooms, network cables, empty factories and panicked clients? Whatever it is, it’s worth only a small fraction of the current share price.

That’s not what Wall Street wants to hear. It’s not what the IBM board wants to hear. And it’s not what the executives at IBM want to hear.

But there it is. Take away the “employees” and the company ceases to exist.

A company is not a thing like a kitchen chair or a lawn ornament. The greatest part of most enterprises is intangible. It is the skills, the knowledge, the drive, the production, the creation, and the work. That intangible wholly owned by those disdainfully known as employees.

That label hides a truth, for they are not employees nor even workers, but producers. Even better, creators. They create the company and do it each day by walking in the door and bringing the company to life.

So I ask again: What is left if the producers leave IBM? If the producers don’t producer? If the creators don’t create? If they walk away?

A corpse. That’s what you call a body when the life is gone. And then you bury the thing.

A century ago, Carnegie and his ilk fought a war to deprive those who create from the rewards of their creation. Unfortunately, Carnegie won. Modern capitalism was born. Carnegie’s minions wrote the history books. His cultural descendants keep the lie alive.

Perhaps it was inevitable. The monarchies had fallen. Slavery was out of fashion. And the world had room for only so many warlords. The inveterate parasites had to find another way to feed. The key for all of them is, and always has been, to find a way to take from those who create and give to those who, well, don’t create.

Does that seem harsh? Perhaps. But there remain these questions:

What is a company?

And if it disappears when the producers stop and the creators cease, then how can someone else possibly own it?

Outsourcing insanity

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When it comes to this outsourcing insanity, it doesn’t just stop with computer professionals. Any job using computers is at risk: Accounting. Order taking. Computerized factory floor. Even debt collection.

How appropriate–after a corporation electronically brings in a migrant to do your job, they’ll electronically bring in another to harass you as you go broke.

It is such a drain on our economy that any sane person has to ask: Why do we have to let those jobs go?

Of course, we don’t. But large corporations want it. It gives them an advantage over small companies. They can sell to Americans but not hire Americans. These corporations pay enough in campaign bribes to get their way–and the correct term is bribes. The campaign money comes with strings even if the Supreme Court can’t see it, yet any fool outside the Court’s ivory tower knows that what looks, works and stinks like a bribe, is a bribe. Those bribes grease the way for multinational conglomerates that prefer to ignore national boundaries.

Yet the jobs exist. The jobs are here. Americans could be doing them.

So there’s no law.

It’s our border. These are our jobs.

We can make a law.

Our politicians may think that they work for the multinationals ninety-nine percent of the time, but they still need our votes, even if it’s only once every few years. As a matter of fact, they need our votes this year.

Maybe our politicians have forgotten that?

Maybe we should remind them?

A footnote for 2020:  One might get the impression that I don’t like immigrants or foreigners. I hope not. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are people, just like you and me. I’ve trained and work with any number of people working in India, as well as worked and work with lots of immigrants.  Though I resented the company firing Americans to hire in a foreign country, I still found and do find I like my Indian compatriots. Today, of course, after driving so many Americans out of Information Systems, the mostly likely candidate for a job in America is an immigrant.  I have some Indian friends who have become citizens and now live with the threat of their job going overseas.  So at least the corporate hate for jobs in America applies to everyone in America.

It’s not the people in the jobs.  It’s the destruction of the American economy as a substitute for knowing how to run a business that gripes me.

This, I think, is the major reason for President Trump’s unpopularity with Big Tech. They are the worst offenders at building companies with Americans and our tech and then firing the Americans to make themselves even richer.