Wall street drame
Aug 27, 2011
- This is just another case of the “new American way” – where leaders who make mistakes and damage businesses decide who gets fired from the top down (and get large bonuses for “restoring profitability” if they throw enough innocent workers under the bus), while people who worked hard to implement the ideas of these geniuses in boom times are cut loose or forced to work double duty, and loyal customers who got bad advice (or were victims of outright double dealing) are forced to pick up the slack.
I’m waiting for a Board with more stones than comp consultants in their pockets to start a layoff from the bottom up, by asking workers to weed out the useless jerks in the ranks of their supervisors, the remaining supervisors to weed out middle managers, remaining middle managers to weed out executives, and remaining executives to decide on whether to retain the CEO. This strategy should result in savings that are a multiple of those from a top down headcount reduction, due to the leverage provided by identifying the greatest amount of dead wood at the highest salary levels. - As a kind gesture, I would also offer people at each succeeding rung up the corporate ladder the option to waive their bonuses and take a proportionate cut in compensation to save their fellow employees’ jobs – not because any of them would ever take it, but because it would be fun to see them experience the acrimony, fear, bitterness and survivor guilt which so far seem to have been reserved for working people who are given that “generous” offer when their bosses need cost reductions to hit their bonus targets and option strike prices.
At least the executives, traders and deal makers would understand the importance of keeping their compensation packages strong in the face of layoffs so that the ones left behind would not all jump ship, unlike lower level workers who somehow think that it’s fair for everyone to make less money when the firm makes less. And with the leverage of weeding the numbers of these people out from below, the firm would still save more money than by keeping them ALL on at comp levels disconnected from performance. - Bankers firing bankers, and probably foreclosing on them too! So, it’s true what they say about Wall Street’s greedy monsters eating their own young! We, the taxpayers, bailed out this immoral, voracious, greedy scum – for a while at least. After all, they do have friends in high government places – just like Mexican drug gangs – with whom they share a common set of “ethics”. Republicans and the Supreme Court want to give these ruthless entities called corporations all of the “rights” of citizens! It won’t long before Goldman Sachs’ Board of Directors can outvote an entire large city in a Presidential Election. America is no longer about “representative government” of the people. Per Republicans, it is about CAPITALISM.