Archive for the ‘economy’ Category
How profitable is overworking and underpaying workers?
July 19, 2009I was just thinking about why there’s such a constant process of employees being overworked and underpaid.. and so I thought I should run a what-if scenario with numbers – see just HOW profitable being cruel to your workers is and how you can pull it off without being lynched. Here’s the results of that:
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Say you have a job that should require 10 people at $40,000 per year costing a total of $400,000 per year to do correctly with happy workers. You want to reduce that cost and not have to deal with so many employees. You could plan for each person to do two people’s jobs, employing only 5 people – and you can pay them less, say $30,000 per year. Doing that could result in mutiny though and what’s more, you don’t want to interact with their newfound animosity.
So to solve both problems you insert a middle manager at twice the reduced workers’ pay ($60,000). This overpaid manager is there to obscure you and ride your 5 overworked & underpaid workers so they don’t mutiny. This person will be willing to do that because you’re paying him or her bank and they have this false sense of authority. Your cost equaling what would be 7 employees, is a new total of $210,000 per year, nearly half of your original operating budget.
If you had 7 underpaid workers with no manager (same operating cost), you still might have a mutiny and you still have to interact with all of them. If you cut 5 jobs but kept their salaries the same (within $10,000 of the same operating cost) then there’s still a risk of mutiny and you have to deal with their woes of being overworked.
But with the original cuts and manager method you get your $190,000 (almost $200k) in savings without serious risk of mutiny or needing to interact with anyone besides your toady manager.
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That’s why it’s so profitable for CEOs to make your life hell, even in this one scenario they can nearly double their profits if they ride the fine line between mutiny and obedience.
Letter to USA Today – Healthcare Reform
June 17, 2009The healthcare industry has no use for the greed and heartlessness of the for-profit insurance companies. Since the Nixon administration put these HMOs in place in 1973, they’ve been working hard to deny care and drive America into bankruptcy. While it took them a few years to get a stranglehold on our hospitals and private practices, their influence has most certainly hit the fan these days… and they still don’t care. What are they doing with all of our money? Pampering and promising the world to our Congress and our President – spending billions of dollars to keep laws favoring their needless and inhumane role in our great nation’s medical field.
Aetna, Cigna, Anthem.. patients despise them and doctors abhor them. Our politicians need to cut their financial ties with these corporations and do what is right for the American people – declare for-profit health insurance illegal, liquidate their assets, and put these billions (trillions?) of dollars into a for-care healthcare system that works for patients and doctors.
Medicare is such a system here in the US, use that model to extend cost coverage to the rest of us. The answer is staring us right in the face – as long as our elected officials are willing to look past the dollar bills being fanned in their faces by insurance corporation lobbyists. Most people call it single-payer, because as with Medicare, the government is the only entity that pays doctors on our behalf.
These health insurance scoundrels have had their run and it has turned out very badly. They were created by law and they should be removed by law, now.
Congress.org on Banker Bailouts
June 15, 2009The bankers have proven themselves to be.. not just uncaring but entirely incompetent to manage commercial investment. The “system” does not work – it is intrinsically flawed by its current design and needs to be replaced with more granular and socially just structures. It can be done with some careful planning and a few strokes of the pen. Our current failure of economics came into being with the same actions – the difference being what the policy changes do: either make gains in the short term or long term, either benefit the few or the many.
We’re long overdue for our financial policies to make long term gains for many. That can only happen if we replaced these failed, wrong-headed guidelines with better ones – look past the dollars that contribute to the next election, that money is dirty and its source should not be perpetuated.
Congress.org Support allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce mortgage
March 13, 2009I support allowing bankruptcy judges to change the principal owed on mortgages because the banks have not geared loans to facilitate greater home ownership, they’ve geared them to maximize profit. Since regulation has not kept banks in check, the situations are hitting the fan within the courts.. so judges are now on the front line of keeping people in their homes. Allowing judges to make loan payments affordable will keep A LOT of families in the homes they’ve purchased – and it will have that effect immediately.
Congress.org Deficit Survey
February 24, 20091. Which actions do you support for reducing the budget? Why?
Phasing out the war in Iraq
Ending tax cuts for the wealthy
Because the Iraq War is the biggest money pit in the U.S. budget and tax breaks for the rich are our biggest loss of revenue. Turning around our policy on these two situations could flip the deficit into a surplus as quickly as the changes can be implemented.
2. Should Social Security and Medicare, which comprise as much 33% of the federal budget, be reduced to lower the deficit and the pressure to raise taxes? Why?
No
Because these programs serve positive functions for our society. They are what government is for in the first place. As even more of our population become seniors, these programs will only gain importance.
3. What do you think needs done to reduce the deficit?
Outlaw off-shore tax shelters for the wealthy, re-regulate foundations to mandate they spend a higher percentage of their holdings on charity, end all our wars, shut down most of our foreign military bases, end all war profiteering contracts, cancel most “defense” contracts, investigate and demand re-payment for breaches of government contract, cut pork earmarks, shut down the health insurance industry, build solar and wind farms to replace coal, imported oil, and nuclear energy sources, end subsidies for crops that we don’t need, return money printing authority to the Congress and liquidate the Federal Reserve.
4. What do you consider your political philosophy to be?
Government should provide basic assistive services for its citizens and regulate “sandboxes” for competitive commerce. It should be as rations are to the military and the NFL is to football. Little more and no less.
Congress.org – 2009 Priorities
November 24, 2008– Green Jobs
Congress.org – Oppose $25 Billion Auto Industry Emergency Loans
November 18, 2008
If they’d spent their money making cars made to last, cars that used less and alternative fuels, cars that were still made in America – they wouldn’t be in this mess. If they hadn’t spent billions of dollars lobbying to fight regulation for greater fuel efficiency, paying their executives 400 times more than their employees, and gambling profits they would never earn on the stock market – they wouldn’t be in this mess.
If they’d still been making fewer, quality cars and earning steady, modest profits held responsibly, then they’d instead be weathering through this downturn in purchases without suffering any “crisis”.
So they want billions of our hard-earned tax dollars? How about they stop making cars we don’t need and start making wind, solar, and thermal generators that we DO need?
to Obama – Chief Technology Officer
November 11, 2008The internet has the potential to be an amazing means to right the wrongs of the past and remain an agile society faced with resource depletion.
Network transmission must be kept free, open, and unbiased – that makes the rest possible. National effort must be put into solving some of the employment crisis by hiring people to build free access hardware, educational materials, independent media, governmental transparency, and bring it all back together with Democracy 2.0 online.
Power that with electricity from “green economy” energy infrastructure and you’ve got a bright future for this country.
For various reasons, these would be my picks for CTO in order of priority:
Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia
Lawrence Lessig of the Creative Commons
Brewster of Internet Archive
Craig Newmark of Craigslist
Rob Malda of Slashdot.org
to Obama – my vision of the future
November 9, 2008
As for actions, they can be prioritized into the following categories:
1. Diverting funding from the absurdly rich to the working class.
2. Turning our foreign actions from aggression to healing.
3. Holding the crimes of the Bush administration to account.
4. Healing our population and planet.
5. Reforming our government to fully represent us.
My expanded action list can be found at ihoby.com/plan but I can also summarize further in future posts.
1. Diverting Funds – Bankers and Billionaire Corporations have been receiving free handouts in the form of subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks funded by the hard work and tax dollars taken from the majority of Americans. This has gone too far for too long. While Americans are increasingly prudent and in need, they are being neglected by the collusion of business and government setting disaster capitalism to run amok. Business is treating government and government is rewarding business.. this exclusive relationship is poison for this nation’s people, land, sea, and air. It’s a poison that has built slow but it’s effects are unmistakable in causing this financial crisis and climate change. Trickle-down economics has been proven time and time again to never work. Trickle-up however, obviously works very well.
The rich have this power because we are allowing them to keep it – either from kindness, obedience, or ignorance. The time has long since past when we need to claim our eminent domain on the hoardings of the rich, to cut off their supply of corporate entitlement programs, corporate welfare, corporate socialism. They have enough money to be just fine while we route our federal spending back into America’s communities:
– bail out the families facing foreclosure, make their mortgages be affordable
– start the Green Economy with jobs building wind and solar generators
– supplement medical costs to make health care affordable
– increase the minimum wage and lower taxes for smaller businesses
All this and more can be funded by cutting off the corporate free lunch and requiring the richest CEOs and bankers to pay their fair share.
2. Foreign Actions – Our wars of aggression into Afghanistan and Iraq (among other places) are clearly both internationally illegal and extremely immoral. They were started out of a series of dysfunctional world views and need to be ended immediately so that pacification, reconciliation, and healing can bring about the changes and improvements that war can never, ever accomplish.
– remove combat from countries we’ve invaded, replace with infrastructure services
– cut aid to countries who are committing atrocities
– halt all contracts to mercenary, service, and construction profiteers
– cut spending on military procurement programs
3. Holding Accountable – Many many people in and well outside of the Bush administration are clearly guilty of some involvement in War Crimes, Treason, Crimes Against Humanity, and other more minor but serious breaches of law and moral turpitude. Since these crimes were not thwarted at the time or dealt with swiftly after through impeachment – they’ll have to be treated to justice slowly and carefully over the next few years. The perpetrators of these modern atrocities have done these deeds in our name, with our flag, and they must not be allowed to continue their evil deeds under new titles.
– set Congress to investigate War Crimes, Invasion Pretext, War Contractors and Mercenaries, Election Crimes, 9/11 “false flag” evidence, Domestic Spying, etc.
– prosecute perpetrators of crimes being investigated in federal and international courts
– draft regulation to help keep these tragic atrocities from happening again
4. Healing – The endeavor of medicine should simply not be run by organizations who’s primary goal is to maximize profit. That is unfortunately what we have and that is why our medical system is failing to meet the needs of Americans. We also have industries trampling across our fragile earth in a reckless surge of exploitation and pollution. Our natural systems, our global ecosystems cannot handle this level of abuse. We must enact ambitious programs to provide free healthcare for all citizens, affordable healthcare for all people, and a livable planet for ourselves and our successors.
– build a free, universal healthcare system
– dismantle the insurance companies and replace them with assistance programs
– ban the building of any new “dig and burn” plants
– build “green” sources of energy
– shut down the existing “dig and burn” plants
5. Progressive Reform – The Bush administration has been the most secretive, corrupt, criminal, deadly, and unrepresentative office ever. They have privatized, militarized, and marginalized more aspects of our country than ever should have been. All of this has to stop, all of it must be reversed. We want a government who is accountable, transparent, just, peaceful, respectful, and receptive.. a government who spends our money wisely and truthfully.
– do all of the previously stated action items
– expand citizen access to continually participate through democracy
– regulate yourselves
– solve problems instead of creating or exacerbating them
– declassify, declassify, declassify
Congress.org – How could you vote for the bailout?
October 7, 2008
To every senator who failed to stop the war(s), impeach the Bush administration, this and all the other failures of congress, don’t expect to get re-elected.