Gordon Gekko: Emblem of Globalised Corporate Greed

"The point is, ladies and gentlemen, greed is good. Greed works, greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

"Greed in all its forms, greed for life, money, love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind - and greed, mark my words - will save not only Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA."

'Gordon Gekko' From the movie "Wall Street"

The Adam Smith Institute: An Emblem of Globalised Corporate Hypocrisy

The market's " ... moral foundation ... " !!!

For today’s critics selfishness has been replaced by reference to greed and if that is not sufficiently colourful - “crass greed”.

“Greed is good” is even said to be the creed of the proponents of free markets and in today’s universal media distribution this has gained widespread currency.

Such negative perceptions of the market economy have the potential to undermine its moral foundation and therefore its general acceptance. ...

Adam Smith Institute

This link is no longer available on the Adam Smith website!

St Paul's showdown: lawyers act to clear Occupy London camp

"Blessed are the peacemakers ... ...

Lawyers will serve notice on activists camped out around St Paul's Cathedral as early as Monday, as police also finalise plans to forcibly remove them if senior officers are convinced they are causing disruption ...

The prime minister said: "I'm all in favour of the freedom to demonstrate, but I don't quite see how the freedom to demonstrate has to include the freedom to pitch a tent almost anywhere you want to in London.

"These tents, whether they are in Parliament Square or St Paul's, I don't think it is the right way forward." ...

Gdn  28 Oct 2011    Bankocracy Log    Corporate State Log    'Divi' Dave Log    Third Meltdown Log

'Inarticulate protests'

St Paul's Cathedral canon resigns

Church 0 - 1 Corporate State

In a statement to the Guardian, Fraser, who was appointed canon in May 2009, confirmed his resignation, saying:

"I resigned because I believe that the chapter has set on a course of action that could mean there will be violence in the name of the church." ...

Gdn  27 Oct 2011    Bankocracy Log    Corporate State Log    Third Meltdown Log

'Inarticulate protests'

Discord at St Paul's over protest camp

The Church of England was facing a grass-roots revolt from within its own ranks last night after a retired reverend used a rearranged Sunday morning service at St Paul's Cathedral to pledge solidarity with the protesters camped outside.

Reverend Dennis Nadin said he would write to the dean of the cathedral demanding an explanation about the exact "health-and-safety reasons" under which it was closed on Friday – the first time such an action has been taken since the Blitz.

He told The Independent that the protesters' message was "absolutely what God would be saying".

"He [God] provided abundant resources for everyone in the world, but they have been unfairly distributed in a way that means people are starving," he said ...

Ind  24 Oct 2011

UK Uncut joins Occupy protest

'The money changers in the temple'

A cathedral spokesman said it was losing between £16,000 and £20,000 a day.

The Reverend Rob Marshall said: "The cathedral needs around £20,000 a day to stay open." ...

BBC NEWS  24 Oct 2011    Bankocracy Log    Third Meltdown Log    

Tony Blair helps Kazakhstan boosts its image in West

Through his firm, Tony Blair Associates, Mr Blair already works for several governments and companies including the rulers of Kuwait; JPMorgan Chase, the bank; and UI Energy Corporation, a South Korean oil company.

Diplomatic cables sent from the Kazakh capital, Astana, and published by WikiLeaks, have stated: "Corruption is endemic among Kazakhstani officialdom."

The US cables also described "severe limits on ability to change their government; detainee and prisoner torture and other abuse; unhealthy prisoner conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; lack of an independent judiciary; restrictions on freedom of speech; pervasive corruption … discrimination and violence against women; trafficking in persons" ...

Tel  22 Oct 2011    Tony Blair    

Dominance Hierarchy

Tony Blair adds Kazakhstan to his growing list of business clients

Search and rescue helicopter bid process is halted

MoD Police are investigating how commercially sensitive information came to be in the possession of the bidder ...

In a statement to Parliament regarding the £6bn procurement programme, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond said:

"In mid December, the Preferred Bidder in the SAR-H competition, Soteria, had come forward to inform the government of irregularities regarding the conduct of their bid team which had only then recently come to light.

"The irregularities included access by one of the consortium members, CHC Helicopter, to commercially sensitive information regarding the joint MOD/DfT project team's evaluations of industry bids and evidence that a former member of that project team had assisted the consortium in its bid preparation, contrary to explicit assurances given to the project team." ...

Analysis

"The focus of the MoD investigation is understood to be Mike Nash. Sqn Ldr Nash was part of the joint MoD/Department for Transport team evaluating the bidding consortium, but left to join CHC helicopters, part of the winning Soteria consortium. He could not be reached for comment ...

"Mr Nash was the second official to join CHC from the government team. In early 2007, Carl Taylor, who worked at the Coastguard Agency, also moved to the Canadian company ..."

Bob Crow, general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, said:

"This whole sordid and botched episode shows that the raw greed of the private sector should never be allowed anywhere near the life-or-death rescue services on the high seas.

"Millions of pounds of taxpayers' money has been wasted and the whole plan should now be scrapped, not shelved."

BBC NEWS  08 Feb 2011

Manchester United reveal record losses of £83.6m

• Deficit is despite club making record turnover of £286.4m ...

Manchester United today posted record losses of £83.6m despite increased turnover, largely due to interest repayments and one-off financial charges relating to the bond issue that was the catalyst for fierce protests against the Glazers.

The bond issue, billed as a way to restructure United's long-term debt but which also made provision for the owners to take out up to £127m in the first year, resulted in a string of one-off costs that pushed the club to record losses ...

... despite ... record turnover – and a £12.7m income from player sales – the club's £40.21m interest bill, a £40.6m charge relating to an interest-rate swap agreement that had to be terminated in order to allow the bond issue to proceed and a £19.2m exchange rate hit all contributed to the £83.6m net loss ...

The bond issue, in January this year, laid bare the Glazers' business plan and made provision for the owners to take dividends and one-off payments calculated at up to £127m from the club in its first year, including a one off dividend of £70m.

Today's results show that – as of 30 June 2010 – none of that money had been drawn down.

But supporters' groups ... expect some of that cash to be drawn down to help repay the PIKs sooner rather than later.

Their only other substantial business apart from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers – their shopping mall empire in the US – has been hit by the recession.

It emerged last month that the Glazers had bought back around a fifth of the PIK debt at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, so reducing their exposure.

But analysts say that does not reduce the impetus to repay them as quickly as possible to prevent the high-interest loans ballooning in value.

Guardian  08 Oct 2010    

Revealed: truth about Glazers business empire beyond Manchester United

The Glazer family

Glazer ownership of Manchester United

Private Equity

Superheroes and supervillains – why the cult of the CEO blinds us to reality

In which blogger needbeer gets to the heart of the matter

Many find it hard to sympathise with Hayward, especially after gaffes such as saying he would like to have his life back. Similarly, few will shed tears over the blame poured on errant bank bosses.

But according to Professor Julie Froud of Manchester Business School, this personal approach blinds us to deeper issues:

"President Obama is coming down very hard on Tony Hayward when he should also be looking at the whole issue of our energy use, which is of course much harder to address," she says.

"It is the same with the Treasury Select Committee hearings with the bankers, or the hearings in the US. It is justified to hold individuals to account, but it doesn't address the deeper problems in banking. The reality is that, in large organisations, success or failure just does not hang on any one individual."

needbeer
13 Jun 2010, 5:48PM

"...businessmen are idolised out of proportion to their real achievements;"

Affirmative. This is self-evident. "on the other, they are disproportionately blamed for the failures of the companies they lead."

Now this requires some examples and there are a few. However the handful of CEOs that have been vilified for the most part have also been handsomely rewarded for their perceived failings, with golden parachutes and such.

The problem as I see lies not in the individuals who lead the corporations for they were merely playing the game, and rather successfully judging from their positions.

No the problem lies in the rules of the game itself, the rules that define what a corporation is, its responsibilities, its liabilities, how it conduct itself, how it may continue to exist, etc.

It is time to re-examine the concept of incorporation and limited liability and decide if this arrangement is in the best interest of society generally.

JH Kunstler recently summed up the nature of the corporation nicely:

"...the fundamental character of corporations is sociopathic, insofar as their only express allegiance is to their shareholders, meaning they are devoid of any sense of the public interest..."

now if one agrees with these thoughts, then one must ask why are we continuing to grant corporations so much power and control over our lives and our governments?

Observer  13 June 2010    Corporate Sociopathy

Judge ... had shares in the oil industry

QinetiQ's plans to slash redundancy payouts 'sour' relations with union

Looking for the difference between New Labour, and Thatcherite Tories? You won't find it here!

Unions are threatening legal action over plans by former government defence research group QinetiQ to slash redundancy payouts to workers.

Workers fear that up to 1,000 of its 6,500 UK-based employees could lose their jobs as part of a restructuring that will be announced next month when the company reports its full-year results.

Staff who joined QinetiQ before 2001 are entitled to a generous settlement if they are made redundant: eight weeks' pay per year of service, capped at 160 weeks' pay.

These public sector-type benefits reflect the fact that the company, which has been hit by the squeeze in military spending in the UK and US, used to be run by the government and that about half of its workers are former civil servants.

The company's new chief executive, Leo Quinn, wants to cut this payout to the statutory minimum – a maximum of 30 weeks' pay for older workers – later this year. He also wants to cut the notice period of six months for compulsory redundancy, along with other staff terms and conditions.

The management consulting firm McKinsey has been carrying out an external review of the business and is expected to report soon ...

MPs slate Qinetiq privatisation

Committee chairman Edward Leigh said ... MoD conducted the 2003 deal "like an innocent at a table of cardsharps, with the taxpayer the fall guy losing out on nearly £100m" ...

BBC NEWS  10 June 2008

Qinetiq deal 'cost UK taxpayers'

Qinetiq's 10 most senior managers gained £107.5m after the move, a return of 19,990% for their total £540,000 investment in shares, a return labelled "excessive" by the NAO.

Qinetiq's two most senior executives, chairman Sir John Chisholm and chief executive Graham Love, made spectacular gains.

Sir John invested £129,000 in the company and now has shares worth £23m. Graham Love turned £106,000 into £20m.

Qinetiq's bosses were allowed to negotiate the terms of the incentive scheme with Carlyle while the private equity firm was bidding for the business, the NAO added.

Conservative MP Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, said the taxpayer had been "short-changed" and that top Qinetiq managers had "won the jackpot" ...

BBC NEWS  23 Nov 2007;

Guardian  06 April 2010    Corporate Sociopathy

NAO report attacks QinetiQ float deals

Greed of the highest order

With yesterday's shareholder meeting in Birmingham, HBOS formally surrendered its independence and tolled the death knell for two once great financial institutions, Halifax Building Society and Bank of Scotland.

It is a sad story of negligence and mismanagement. HBOS abandoned its preference for safe retail funding, piling into the now-paralysed wholesale markets. Like so many others, it plunged into fancy credit instruments backed by US mortgages that it didn't understand and continues to book fresh losses on them. And it turned on the lending tap to entrepreneurs with an enthusiasm bordering on the reckless. It is this third sin which is egregiously revealed in yesterday's dire trading statement.

Loans to companies are souring at the rate of £26 million a day. Holdings in the bank's equity portfolio are depreciating at the rate of £11 million a day. And the losses will go on for years, the bank admits.

Overseeing this department was and is Peter Cummings, a main board director and the highest paid director at HBOS, earning more even than the chief executive. Rival bankers have for years wondered why they could never win business in commercial property-related areas. It is becoming increasingly evident why. Mr Cummings was always there first, offering lashings of cash at cheaper prices ...

Some of the biggest HBOS shareholders are privately saying it is an outrage that he is still in a job and it will be a bigger disgrace if he receives a pay-off when he finally goes. The accusation that senior bankers even now are looking after their own rather than making amends for past failings is hard to refute every day Mr Cummings remains in a job.

He should go at once. It might be just a token gesture. But, as with every day it becomes more apparent that the £50 billion of Government money sunk into banks is not going to be enough, shareholders and taxpayers could do with just such a piece of empty symbolism.

The Times 13 December 2008

... selling out is good: when you’ve build up a business, selling out to a bigger player and taking early retirement is an appealing prospect. And the more general desire of wanting to make lots of money is excellent, too.

That’s both because trying to better yourself and your family is the highest virtue, and also because the pursuit of wealth requires you to produce output that benefits your customers. The t-shirt wearers will denounce this as “greed”. But, as the cult 1980s icon Gordon Gekko put it: “Greed – for lack of a better word – is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind.” The reality is that while the 1960s celebrated the importance of freedom, it was not really until the 1980s that freedom became a coherent position, because the philosophy that marked the decade correctly understood how economics connected with freedom.

It was the Austrian philosopher Friedrich Hayek – a hero to Thatcher – who recognised that: “To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything”. In other words, when the Government takes too much of our income and stealth taxing us at every opportunity, we’re less free. ...

Telegraph 09 October 2008

Life for the super rich in 2006 ‘just gets better and better’ reports the Sunday Times.

The paper’s ‘Rich list’ records ‘a near 20.6% increase on last year and is one of the highest rises in a year we have recorded since our first list in 1989’.

The rich have got much richer under Labour than ever they did in percentage terms under a Tory government’, the Sunday Times records.

According to the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics the wealthiest 1% of the population in 2003 owned 21% of the wealth, while the poorest 50% of the population own just 7%

If you remove property from the equation the figures are even more stark, with the top 25% owning 85% of the wealth and the top 50% on 99%.

Naturally enough the defenders of corporate privilege such as the CBI say such rises are healthy. David Lonsdale, deputy director of the CBI, reportedly said ‘No doubt some will seize on these figures in order to peddle an anti-business message, but executive pay has to be driven by the realities of the market place’.

The realities of the market place are such that we must expect greater and greater inequality and learn to like it.

Since 2003 the inequalities have only increased. According to Income Data Services in November 2006, ‘average remuneration packages for chief executives of the UK's biggest 100 companies rose 43 per cent from just under £2m to £2.8m last year.’

This ‘means that the executives now earn approaching 100 times the pay of their average employees and follows previous inflation-busting pay rises which have doubled the remuneration of the top directors since 2000’.

Scotland is no exception to the boom in fat cat pay awards, Sir Fred Goodwin, at Royal Bank of Scotland, saw a pay rise of some 35 per cent last year, receiving a basic salary of £1.09m, a performance bonus of £1.76m plus a £1.53m increase in the value of his pension fund. ...

What do the rich do with their money?

The 21st century rich are rediscovering the pleasures of times past. In their leisure time they consume conspicuously; in looking after themselves they make sure to buy themselves out of the public sector by availing themselves of private health provision, sending their kids to private schools and generally avoiding their fellow citizens when at all possible. ...

But the new rich-rich divide is as nothing compared to the increasing divide between those at the top of the society whom Reich describes as 'symbolic analysts' and those at the bottom.

Reich notes the accelerating collapse of the middle tier of the work force - those involved in producing goods in factories and offices - and the massive expansion of the bottom tier in the service sector. As he notes, the increasing wealth of the new rich in society - the symbolic analysts (he puts it at about 20% in the US) is 'helping to fuel the growth' of the lowest tier, the personal service workers. ...

spinwatch.org 16 December 2006

Looking for morning news, I click on my computer. My internet service flashes with color, the biggest houses, the biggest jewelry, the most expensive toys.

The internet’s financial press waxes muscular.

Television is the same. The media are a river of adulation for all this glitter and the people who own it.

School textbooks carry a similar message.

Despite setbacks, the economy is ever expanding, its power is unparalleled, we are now spreading free market capitalism around the globe, bringing unimagined wealth and improvement to mud-level nations and countries sucked out by socialism, raising everybody, because that’s what capitalism does.

Has everybody been raised here?

Actually, with talk of equality written into this nation’s founding papers, the scenery never looks right.

The contrast between rich and poor grows, and this year has been no exception.

As an acquaintance on the street puts it: every year there are more homeless people and every year the limousines get longer. ...

Julian Edney

Last week Pfizer CEO Hank McKinnell was the object of a lot of attention. The AFL-CIO rented an airplane to fly a banner saying "Give it back Hank," to protest his pay hike and $83 million pension, despite a 46 percent decline in the Pfizer share price under his leadership. Earlier the New York Times and other publications ran a number of stories explaining how McKinnell has effectively manipulated third parties who should be looking out for shareholders, rather than him.

My colleague Judit Rius began collecting signatures to ask Stanford to consider kicking McKinnell off an advisory board over his bullying of Philippine drug regulators. But my favorite story of the week involves an encounter between Hank McKinnell and Dan Murphy, a medical student at the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine.

Dan Murphy was attending the tapping of the "the End of AIDS: A CNN Global Summit with President Clinton." Hank McKinnell was there to say how much Pfizer is doing to help the poor. But Murphy had been following Pfizer's ligitation in the Philippines -- a case where Pfizer has tried to intimidate government officials by suing them in their personal capacity, so they won't take very modest measures to obtain cheaper sources of Pfizer medicines. ...

Hank McKinnell 29 April 2006

Lord Penrose’s report ... described a management dominated by unaccountable actuaries, a board of non- executives who had no idea what was going on at the company they were charged with overseeing, and a regulator that failed to act as any kind of protector for policyholders.

Equitable was forced to close to new business in 2000, after a decision in the House of Lords forced the insurer to honour pledges made to policyholders with guarantees on their pensions. But Lord Penrose concluded that at the time of the House of Lords decision the 242-year-old society already had a £4.4 billion black hole because it had been paying out more to policyholders than it held in reserves for more than a decade. ...

Lord Penrose lays the blame for this policy of paying out too much cash on Roy Ranson, who was the society’s actuary from 1982 until 1992, and chief executive until 1997. He says that Mr Ranson, whom Lord Penrose describes as a “manipulative” witness to the inquiry, failed to provide sufficient information to the board or to the regulators, effectively running the society as a private fiefdom.

As a result the board was completely clueless about the true state of the society’s position. Lord Penrose said: “The board at no stage got fully to grips with the financial situation faced by the Society: information was too fragmented, their collective skills were inadequate for the task.” ...

Lord Penrose said that Mr Ranson was “frequently aggressive in his dealings with regulators. He was dismissive of regulators’ views and concerns, he was obstructive to scrutiny and often failed to answer questions put to him.”

But the report points out that the regulators should have stood up to bullying by Mr Ranson. Instead, the report concluded that the actuaries did attempt to challenge Mr Ranson, but failed.

“There was challenge, but it was ineffective. Unsatisfactory answers were accepted without follow-up. Lines of inquiry were abandoned or postponed in the face of resistance.” Lord Penrose added damningly: “No problem was considered serious enough that it could not be left until next time.”

The Times 09 March 2004

Equitable Life chief executive Charles Thomson has been reprimanded by the Faculty of Actuaries and found guilty of bringing the industry into disrepute for faking the character reference from his former employer.

The Faculty’s adjudication panel sat on February 22 but has only just published the result this week.

Thomson was summoned to answer the charge after admitting under oath during Equitable’s aborted attempt £3.7bn legal action against Ernst & Young and 15 former directors that he had falsified his character reference when applying for the top job at Equitable.

Under cross-examination in April 2005, he admitted that he himself had written the growing tribute to his personal record at Scottish Widows, where he was deputy chief executive between 1995 and 2000. ...

Money Marketing 09 July 2007

Ivan Frederick Boesky (born March 6, 1937, in Detroit) was notable for his prominent role in a Wall Street insider trading scandal that occurred in the United States in the mid-1980s. ...

By 1986, Ivan Boesky had become an arbitrageur who had amassed a fortune of about US$200 million by betting on corporate takeovers. He was investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for making investments based on tips received from corporate insiders. These stock acquisitions were sometimes brazen, with massive purchases occurring only a few days before a corporation announced a takeover.

Although insider trading of this kind was illegal, laws prohibiting it were rarely enforced until Boesky was prosecuted. ...

Boesky has never recovered his reputation after doing a stint in jail, and paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and compensation for his Guinness share-trading fraud role and a host of separate insider dealing scams.

The character of Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street is based at least in part from Boesky, especially regarding a famous speech he delivered on the positive aspects of greed at the University of California, Berkeley in 1986 (where he said in part "I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself")

Wikipedia

"Greed really has become a part of America’s value system.

"Get as much as you can, while you can, and don’t worry about the other guy.

"Corporate greed often exploits the poor for greater profits.

"Political greed makes promises never meant to be kept in order to achieve position.

"Personal greed sets us free from a sense of responsibility to the community, and establishes love of self as the greatest commandment."

Joe Thorn.net

Search and rescue helicopter bid halted

ManUtd reveal record losses of £83.6m

Superheroes and supervillains

QinetiQ's plans to slash redundancy payouts

Peter Cummings