Related: Danny Glover speaks at Occupy Oakland yt (really really great).What does it say that I read that as "Donald Glover" and was confused for a second, thinking "Who's that old guy?" before I caught up.
But I'm unclear on the issue with CEO remuneration. Yes, CEOs in big companies get paid an obscene amount. But they (the companies) are private entities.It's complicated. But the CEO of Toyota makes $900k a year. The wages for CEOs in other countries is a lot less, yet, those companies have no trouble competing with U.S. companies. In fact, they may compete better due to less money getting sucked away by CEOs.
The shareholders get a sayHahaha, not really. The board gets a say. But who's on the board? CEOs of other companies. So it becomes, essentially, a bunch of people giving each-other raises. The actual shareholders in these huge companies are often state pension funds and lots of people with 401(k)s. They don't pay attention to what's going on and the people managing their money often belong to the same super-elite class.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the main problem with Wall Street is that they led us into a financial slump because they bet against the American economy?—PostIronyIsNotaMythThat's wrong. Short answer: we're in a slump because a finance bubble burst.
I suppose the question is, why has worker pay stopped increasing in line with productivity? And how can it go back to the way it was in the 50s to the 80s? How do you make employers pass on the gains?—His thoughts were red thoughtsPeople come up with complicated theories about this, trying to think of reasons why these productivity gains are qualitatively different than the past. That's not necessary.
But I'm unclear on the issue with CEO remuneration. Yes, CEOs in big companies get paid an obscene amount. But they (the companies) are private entities. What they pay is between the company and the employee (in this case, the CEO). The shareholders get a say, but it is frankly nobody else's business. Does anyone actually believe protesting about that will change anything?—His thoughts were red thoughtsI don't know and it's a serious problem. It's difficult or impossible for those with the responsibility, the shareholders, to do anything about this because of how the system works. The shareholders are represented by the board of directors. The individuals on the boards of directors are almost exclusively chosen from the executive class. A director on a compensation committee decided the salary of a CEO today may had his CEO salary decided by that CEO sitting on a different compensation committee tomorrow. As individuals of the executive class, the people sitting on boards of directors have an incentive to set the salaries of the executive class high, not low. And it's usually sold to the shareholders as "being competitive" with other corporations.
So if corporate profitability is high and labor is cheap what is stopping new company start-ups or existing company expansion using some of this cheap labor to take a slice of these profits? What are these profits, and why are they apparently immune to competition? Or what have I misunderstood?Nothing. But how many startup founders were middle class when they started? Startups cost money. A lot of money. And venture capitalists invest in companies started by people they know. Typically the people you know are in the same social class as you. So, the result is rich people helping other rich people get rich. Meanwhile labor costs stay low and "productivity" (i.e. the amount of profit the corporations can squeeze out of the average worker) go up.
Or what have I misunderstood?The fact that the "free market" isn't magical and people pretending to quote Adam Smith have never even read his books (in which he talks about the problems caused by monopoly and the need for the government to break them up, stop collusion, etc for the market to work). Or maybe they're quoting Ayn Rand. The point is, the free market isn't magical, it doesn't solve all problems and fixed costs are a real issue in starting a bussiness.
Danny Glover speaks at Occupy Oakland
That's nearly entirely wrong, and a constant Republican talking point.—newdaddyNo. This is the one thing the Republicans aren't saying. That you would assert that completely destroys your credibility.
I would assume that more business leaders have MBAs and other business school training now than they did during the Depression. So now, during crisis, they revert back to the models they learned in Econ 101: "There's no demand, so we must cut supply!" Nevermind that this leads into a deflationary spiral since cutting supply means laying off redundant workers, who in turn cease to be active consumers and thereby cut demand further.—jefficatorOne of the most important things to understand about deflationary pressures in a liquidity trap is that under these conditions individually rational, self-interested decisions are collectively unhelpful and deflationary. That's part of why that's such a very bad place to be in—the other part is that once you're there, it becomes more and more entrenched because future expectations based upon current conditions just make those individually rational but collectively destructive decisions even more urgent and necessary.
On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe — between free markets and controlled economies — but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no “realistic alternative,” nor any “utopian project” that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy — and that’s the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws — in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.Libertarians have, so far, failed to provide a compelling narrative of how a society controlled by markets and without governments could function without becoming an oppressive regime similar in effect to the USSR or Mao's China because Communism (the philosophy and ideology) was all about human freedom without government interference.
Markets, Capitalism, etc, has been an amazing engine of growth and prosperity, the advances of the 20th century has alleviated an unprecedented amount of human poverty and suffering.The innate propensity for individual human greed has presumably remained much a constant (evolution being a slow thing (or static, if you're a tory)).
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posted by delmoi at 10:33 PM on October 17, 2011 [12 favorites]