Re: Goodbye Michael

[...]

That's right. Public companies should watch out too. We, the
shareholders, have as much right to question the pay of fat-cat
'workers' in public companies as we, the people, have to question the
tax-funded pay of MPs and Jonathan 'Let's Talk About w.nking Again'
Woss and tin-pot town-hall dictators. Indeed shareholders have a duty
to do so, not only because it's prudent to look after your investments
but because the insanely high pay of the fat cats employed to run
large public companies created the sense of entitlement in the public
sector that is (at long last) getting everyone's knickers in a twist.
MPs feel hard-done-by for being paid a mere twelve times the minimum
wage for doing their jobs badly (very little new legislation receives
proper scrutiny) because the likes of Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin and
Dennis 'Schmoozer' Stevenson are paid totally, scrotally grotesque
sums for doing their jobs badly.* Shareholders (particularly
institutional shareholders) are ultimately responsible for the mess
we're in. It's time they (I don't own any shares) went after the fat
cats and reminded them that they are employees, not entrepreneurs, and
paid them an employee's annual salary not an annual entrepreneur's
windfall.  No amount of macho bluster about risk justifying reward and
peanuts attracting monkeys conceals the fact that none of the
corporate chieftains (or the brainiac yobs who gamble with other
people's money in the City) is risking anything of their own. They are
doing a job, that's all, and no job is so difficult that you can
attract suitable candidates only by offering hundreds of times the
minimum wage. It's a cartel and I fart in its general direction.

*In 2007 Lord Stevenson was paid £821k plus bonus and pension
contributions for attending 14 meetings as non-exec chairman of HBOS,
which all but crashed the following year, almost taking Lloyds with
it.** (He also received in excess of half a million that year from his
other sinecures.) Assuming his 14 meetings required 14 weeks' work
(surely generous) and ignoring his pension contribs and bonus, that's
[(£821,000/560)/£5.73] 256 times the minimum wage - for a job for
which he had no formal qualifications and, as things proved, no
natural aptitude. Nice. Where are these jobs advertised? I wouldn't
mind a go myself.

**English usage at last! When questioned in February this year about
the bonus culture and its part in the wrecking of HBOS, Stevenson told
a parliamentary committee: 'I of course receive no bonuses, just to be
quite clear, so in a sense I can speak reasonably objectively.' The
2008 accounts hadn't been released by then and all the previous
accounts showed Stevenson receiving a bonus, so it's odd that the
committee didn't query this statement.

Never mind. That's parliament for you. The real point is whether
Stevenson lied. Let's assume that he had already told the HBOS board
that he was going to waive his right to the delayed bonuses that had
accrued from earlier years and would normally have been paid in 2008,
which is what the accounts eventually said he had done. Are his use of
'receive' in the present tense and 'bonuses' in the plural justified
by the facts and by standard English usage? If for seven of the eight
years of your chairmanship of a company you receive a bonus and only
in the last year do you waive that bonus, is it correct in English
usage to tell an inquiry into what happened during all of those eight
years that you don't receive bonuses? I don't think so. Especially
when in that last year Stevenson received £815k for his seven months
as chairman - a rise in monthly pay so enormous that it surely
constitutes some sort of informal bonus. At the very least, Tony
Blair's old chum was being economical with the actualité. The noble
lord ought to be in jail.

--
VB

Too late, I fear.

I also discern an undercurrent along the lines of "We, the people, pay
for your salaries, Mr BBC Director and Mr MP", as if the salaries of
workers in IBM, BP and M&S are somehow spontaneously born out of the ether.

Or for the costs of him coming back from his holiday early to deal with
a crisis.   If we're going to start to expect everyone to pay their own
expenses, things are going to get very silly very soon.

OTOH, his death has had the distinct benefit of ridding all radio news
of stories about MPs expenses.

And what's this about the DG of the BBC claiming £78,000 in expenses
over five years?  How can that possibly be news?  I wouldn't be
surprised if my expenses came to that much over five years, and I'm not
running a major global business.  And why was he grilled for claiming
the congestion charge he incurred while travelling on business in
central London?

BBC News 24 cancelled Question Time Extra last night so that it could
broadcast an aerial shot of an ambulance parked outside a hospital and
have people say in a dozen different ways that Jackson was probably
dead but nobody yet knew for sure. Rolling news: nothing happening, as
it happens, again and again and again.

Today, the Beeb has decided that Jacko is definitely dead and the new
news is feelings. (Is that pukka English?) What do we feel? What
should we feel? What did we feel twenty years ago? What will we feel
in 2029? This important breaking story is illustrated with
interminable clips of Americans talking about their feelings as only
Americans can.

By contrast, the Iranian English-language satellite news channel Press
TV isn't covering the story at all. Its news stories are all about
what's going on in the world. (Or most of it. The channel is
conspicuously quiet about the Iranian elections.*) It's odd that you
have to watch a channel funded by an illegitimate, anti-Semitic
government to get proper news.**

--
VB

*Jacko v. Ahmadinejad:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvOx4avw8WY>

**You also get Press TV's Shanghai correspondent. Phwoar! She
announced that the Chinese government is to automatically censor
pictures of bare ladies, so if you're in China here's a last chance to
see her nipples:
<http://www.pulseagency.co.uk/female_models/detail.php?
subsection=&page=4&model=8626&photoset=1>

I won't say never, but I haven't so far.  And I'm boggling mildly at
the continuing wall-to-wall coverage of his death.

Quoth "Frank ess" <frank@fshe2fs.com>, and I quote:

Am I alone in the universe in not being able to recognise a
single song by Michael Jackson?

Yes.

He has brought sort of a weird joy to a lot of lives, though. Some of
his pop music is irresistable.

[OT added to subject line for accuracy, not comment]

On 25 Jun 2009, Fred wrote

What a sad life that guy has had.

Weird character, but nevertheless an immense talent.