In this month I will turn 62 and will start getting Social Security in Februrary. That is a vote of no confidence in the job-market, the economy, and especially in investors and business-people whom I am sure are a bunch of idiots who conned us into believing, with the help of the Reublican Party, that they really had expertise into how to manage things. Now, with the unfolding collapse of the economy, prehaps another Depression, they have revealed that they don't really have a clue. The whole thing is predicateded on imagery and people who wanted us to believe that they were prudant with other people's money turned out to be taking far greater risks than they should have.
For the past few years I have been living my life according to the belief that there was far greater risk out there for ordinary people that the Government and business people wanted us to believe. It amazed me how people where assuming risky loans and getting over extended by credit. I reduced my debt to almost nothing. I also realized that in my job hunt of the past four years that most business people had no concept of value, they wanted people they could manipulate or who were yes-men, but they do not recognize real expertise. Also, my profession had turned preditory as people competed for fewer jobs that expected much more than I wanted to give. I decided that I rather live poor than die young and rich having been consumed by a hyper-competative and exploitative market that was really not producing value or opportunity and making the fruits of technology available to more. This buyer's market was driven by investors who had pulled out of tech leaving only a few who could ask for much more than they should. It is sad how people who lose their job or are forced out of their career spend too much time blaming themselves when quite often change is caused by investors leaving that industry for whatever wise or unwise decision and that it has almost nothing to do with merit.
The credit collapse shows that investors are really a stupid lot, really unable to see value, and that the Republican idea of so-called Free Markets setting the priorities in society works about as poorly as a centralized Socilized state setting economic priorities. Leadership in public companies has suffered at the hands of fickle investors who ruin the chance of management to mature and develop vision. The lesson of Sun Microsystems, where I worked for seven years, is that when management listerns too much to the market and do not mind what the plan is for their business they lose their way and focus. A tech company run by fiancial, marketing, and investment oriented management is doomed. Contrast that with what happened at Apple since 1999 when John Scully, a marketer for Coke, almost drive the company into the ground before Steve Jobs resuced the company with a sound vision of what Apple's intellectural capital really means. If Scott McNealy was reaklly a leader, and he is not, he would have taken Sun private in 2005 as he threatened in order to get the analysts in Wall Street out of his face. More corporate leaders ought to tell Wall Street to get lost. The fact is that most of them do not have the nerve or courage to really take full responsiblity for their business, a result no doubt of bad training in the nation's Business Schools, which should all get shut down.
It is interesting as CEO's from companies they mismanaged, like the US Automakers, go running to Congress for a bailout, that if the President lost $ 6 Trillion in equity he would be executed as a traitor, the current President and many in his Administration should be tried for crimes on other basis, anyway. Add to crimes surrounding the War on Terror, crininal conspiracy to allow for private business to rob the American People, and George W. Bush is eligable for the gallows, just like Saddan Hussain. If corporate CEOs were required to cut their fat bellies open in the lobby of corporate headquarters for mismanagement, the nonsense we are facing would end very quickly.I like the result of loss of face in China and Japan, the suicide of arrogant men when they fail. We should have some of that here.
America needs leadership that has been sorely lacking in both business and government. Whether the president-elect is that leader, only time will tell. There are good signs, but he is a product of that system of checks and balances which has failed us in the past. Americans rightly fear the abuse that strong leaders often bring. What they are less aware of if how people who are called leaders failed them when they do not lead, when their decision-making is not guided by a vision of how the entity they run contributes to the betterment of all. Too often we have had people in powerful positions who do not have a vision of public service. They all claim to be aware of the greater good, but then fail to execute deeds that promote it.
The Myth of Markets is that an unled-consensus driven by the lowest common denomenator, some democratic ideal, arrives at the best solution to problems. It is true that individuals know their self-interest, but that any large-scale system needs leadership having a vision of the collective good as well as a toleration of individual choices. No one should be fooled that most markets are really free or that most individual choices are really made from a prudant consideration of self-interest. More often there is a big player who constrains the choices most of the other individuals have and they are left to choose from choices that only more or less meet their needs. This situation worsens as markets scale-up and mature due to integration and reduction of competition. The broadcast-media market is a good example of this, and it has been through several cycles of this. If it wern't for technology upsetting the market's evolution, all markets would evolve into cartels and monopolies. The freedom in Capitalism is not due to the market-system but due to the way technology upsets market evolution.
So, business and politics needs guidence, leadership. They need a vision of what is good for the nation and the world, and people need to become aware of the idea that economics and finance are political decisions hidden behind of vail of obscure self-serving rhetoric. Every decision to use money entails a political decision because politics is defined as the choice to favor one group's interest against those of another group, and especially as the more large scale the economic decision gets the more it is tainted with idealogical distinctions that are no different than political decisions. That is why the meetings of world wide economic leaders such as the G8 or the WTO are now always attended by demonstrations and riots. People know that their economic interests are political and they do not have the same influience over economic decision makers that they do over Governments,
Anathama to business people is greater and greater accountability and disclosure. They are now having to spend money as line items on disclosing to regulators, things that they would have kept secret claiming that these facts put them at a competative disadvantage. Their problems are going to get worse; they are now going to have to reveal more and more, because their own actions have called for the demand for more scrutany. This is their own fault. Business people are going to have to be more accountable like their counterparts in Government and for the same reason, their conduct entails many of the same kinds of abuse of power.
The problem facing the economy at the moment is one of trust, and the cause of this breakdown of trust is the lack of accountability and leadership in both the economic and government. The system breaks down and wealth decays away because the people we have trusted to lead these systems have failed. The have lost our trust and they have failed to lead.