It’s… an _immensely_ unattractive proposition. But once you stop thinking you can take them down, it seems to be the best option. And I don’t like it at least partly because it makes a huge chunk of Blairism suddenly make sense.

And, you know, just because someone’s rich it doens’t mean they have no conscience. Look at Bill Gates. Or Warren Buffet.

I fear than Jonn may be right, though. The political parties dire financial state makes them very dependent on rich donors – so the fat-cats will continue to get fatter.

An excess of liquidity, and cunning schemes to make it all pay for itself, (rather like some neo-cons believed the Iraq Invasion would be self-financing– excuse bad joke, but TRUE ), have resulted in a frenzy.

The merchant bankers laugh their socks off.

Sorry I have no supporting links, but studies have been done on these Mega-mergers, which showed that very often there was no ‘synergy’, rather the opposite.

Of course the price of the stock rose when they announced 10,000 lay-offs.

That’s REALLY goodnews.

Of course there was immediate added value to the Pension Funds and private stockholders, but a coupla pretty large company towns in the US just died, my friend.

So ‘paper wealth’ as shown in Wallstreet was generated, for a while, but what next ?

When I began as a neophyte money-broker in ’77, my boss gave me a brilliant two-hour lecture on ‘arbitrage’.

The Big Banks got the big Saudi eurodollars . No way were they going to lend to Brazil or Rumanian ForeignTrade bank. So they farmed it out, through us, to smaller banks, who did. And regretted it .

Well, it gave me a comfortable lifestyle, becos in my very small way I was close to the Big Money. It rubbed off on me, so we could have an au pair and a cleaning woman, so there was a little ‘trickle down’. Just luck.

Maybe you, or someone else, will remember the IBM salesman who got the US Army contract ? They were paid by the unit, selling one or two here and there, and this guy got the mega-contract . Like to know what happened to him.

So my nephew’s boss at Goldman got a $52mio Christmas bonus.

What human being has a personal use for that amount ? Hell, it’s almost as much as the US paid for the Orange Revolution. And that did not work exactly as planned ….

Excellent article by Steve.

The Power of Myths, and their endless repetition by the MainStreamMedia , is truly wondrous to behold.

But… they do. And while that’s true I don’t think you’ll get any mainstream party proposing a policy that would really hit their wallets.

And while the public shows no interest in public funding of political parties, that would probably leave the party proposing the idea unable to fund an election campaign.

I take your point though. Some directors do take risks and have great ideas and deserve their rewards but most senior people in the large corporations are bureaucrats like everyone else.

I’m talking from recollection of anecdote more than anything else, but as far as I am aware most shares are not held and controlled by individuals who read the documents and attend the shareholder meetings – they are institutions, pension funds and that sort of thing.

And guess who heads up the institutions and funds? Yes, you guessed it, highly paid executives, who have a vested interest in not seeing the wages of their peers closely examined in case the spotlight falls on themselves also.

Individual shareholder control in large corporations could be compared to representative democracy at best.

A lot of my trepidation with regard to this debate, however, is that the word “company director” gets thrown in with the word “fat cat” as there are loads of risk-taking company directors out there who take home nowhere near that amount of money who are most likely to be targetted with any legislation that comes about. Unlike the “fat cats”, they don’t have legions of lawyers and tax advisers to shield them from the sort of legislation that would come about from this sort of debate.

To tell you the truth, though, if under a particular person’s helm, that person generated wealth for other people, such as the shareholders and the pension funds, and, yes, ensuring employment for the lower echelons, I have no problem with hefty performance-related bonuses.

If, say, an investment banker brokered a 6 billion dollar deal, what is wrong with him taking home a percentage of the profit from the deal? (Leaving aside ethical issues on what the deal is or how it is to be executed).

Also too, as it is the shareholders that own the companies, it is ultimately up to them to ensure that the governance structures are in place to avoid abuse.

As a shareholder, I would rather that money be put back into the company or parceled out as a dividend for me, but any money taken from the top executive’s pay packet is not going to end up in worker’s wages.

a) may just lead to even higher executive pay, as salaries rise to provide the same take home income; and

b) would be political suicide.