The folly of executive pay caps

posted by jack at 08:54 CET in / politics

Obama's new proposal of imposing executive pay caps on firms that receive government bailout money has a problem as seen in USA Today and other places: Since firms that are doing well don't have the pay caps, there may be a "brain drain" wherein the "best people" won't want to work for the companies where the limits are in place. According to a "compensation consultant" named Alan Johnson, "[...] you end up killing the institution you tried to save [...] You drive away the good people."

Hard to deny that. You want to "save" a company via cash injection, but at the same time you put a limit in place that will tend, over time, to lead the best people away from the company. The implied upshot of this is that we shouldn't be imposing a salary cap. I'd like to take this a step farther, and suggest that we shoudn't be trying to "save" them with cash in the first place! Clearly, there is a range of results in the financial industry, where lots of companies feel like they need a handout to keep going, whereas some are apparently doing OK (e.g. the ones who would theoretically pull talent from the ones where the caps would be applied). It seems to me that we should let the market take care of this. Those companies that are doing the worst should risk going under, just like any other industry. If they do, their competitors can buy up their assets, including their previous customers, etc.

The fact that we even consider bailouts for behemoths like the automobile industry and the financial services industry seems to prove that the US "market economy" is anything but. Like Newton's laws of physics which break down in conditions with extreme velocities or extreme scales, our concept of the free market seems to break down when actors in the marketplace are extremely large.

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wake up, patriots

posted by jack at 10:42 CET in / politics

I've been so busy (and having so much fun with) work lately, that I've been neglecting politics to some extent, especially here. In fact, I now see that my latest entry filed under politics was 19 months ago!

Well, time to catch up. Here's an interview with Naomi Wolf, discussing topics from her latest book, The End of America. In this interview, she describes having discerned 10 steps that tyrants of the 20th century used to subvert democratic systems in their own countries, converting them to dictatorships. It shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that the piratical crew at the helm of the U.S. government have already implemented a number of these items, with more on the way.

Near the end she mentions the American Freedom Campaign, a bi-partisan movement determined to take away the powers that Bush has grabbed for himself, and restore the checks and balances described by the constitution. This seems like a good thing to me.

Really, it's hard for me to understand head-in-the-sand republicans who willfully ignore the power imbalance that the current administration has created, giving so much power to the executive branch. It works out well for republicans as long as there's a republican president, but what if (gasp) a democrat actually wins the presidency the next time? Do they want a democratic president having the same kinds of powers that Bush now has, but applying them towards the progressive goals they so despise? Or is there a unspoken understanding amongst this crowd that things have been sufficiently "fixed" that there simply cannot be anything but republicans in the presidency, come hell or high water?

(via Giles)

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Steven Colbert goes to Washington - and kills it

posted by jack at 11:01 CET in / politics

This has already been linked-to all over the place, but anyone who already hasn't should go check out Steven Colbert's speech (especially parts one and two; I thought part three kind of fell flat) from the White House Corresponts' Dinner held last weekend. It takes some serious balls to stand there, just a few feet away from ol' monkey-boy, and lower him a notch or ten like that.

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Chomsky on the lack of a war on terror

posted by jack at 14:47 CET in / politics

Just read a mercifully short interview with Noam Chomsky. I say "mercifully short" because, as much as I admire the old guy, lots of his writings tend to be long and dense. Good to see a bite-sized piece for a change.

Some salient bits:

A large majority of the population is in favor of a national health care system of some kind. [...] But whenever that comes up [...] it's called politically impossible, or "lacking political support," which is a way of saying that the insurance industry doesn't want it, the pharmaceutical corporations don't want it, and so on.

[...] we are under a rigid doctrine in the West, a religious fanaticism, that says we must believe that the United States would have invaded Iraq even if its main product was lettuce and pickles, and the oil resources of the world were in Central Africa. Anyone who doesn't believe that is condemned as a conspiracy theorist, a Marxist, a madman, or something.

What gives me hope actually is public opinion. Public opinion in the United States is very well studied, we know a lot about it. It's rarely reported, but we know about it. And it turns out that, you know, I'm pretty much in the mainstream of public opinion on most issues.

Pass it along to your conservative friends!

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election theft

posted by jack at 12:14 CET in / politics

The notion that electronic voting machines without paper trails are dangerous to democracy is something that's been talked about before. Now, a General Accountability Office report shows pretty clearly that there were lots of irregularities in the 2004 U.S. elections, connected to the use of electronic voting machines.

Regardless of your political affiliations, regardless of whether you believe that Bush & co stole the elections, it's important to understand that electronic voting machines without paper trails produce unverifiable results. The simple fact is the actual results of last year's elections are, inherently, UNKNOWABLE. There is simply no way to know how many people voted, or for which candidates they voted.

This goes beyond the issues of "hanging chads" that vexed us after the 2000 elections; Then, you could at least theorize the existence of a person or device that could divine the intent of the voter with a high degree of precision. With unverifiable electronic voting machines, it's just a total crapshoot. The GAO report cites several known cases where large numbers of votes went to the wrong candidates, which were supposedly "fixed" afterwards. The problem is, how many unknown, similar cases are there? We'll just never know.

Again, this is an issue for EVERYONE concerned with the preservation of American democracy, regardless of party ties. This time it may have been criminal, unethical Republican asshats who used some wide-open holes the security of these machines to secure elections for their candidates; Next time it could be criminal, unethical Democratic asshats doing the same! For that matter, it may be that BOTH parties had people trying to fake out the voting machines in 2004, and that the Republicans just did a better job at it. Who knows?