Opinions
commented that while bankers had "the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore". Lloyd Blankfein, current CEO of Goldman Sachs, egregiously defended this as normal market practice. (Blankfein had received a $67.9 million bonus in his first year as CEO in 2006!) Why is America so lenient with its most crooked?
The US Supreme Court grants Corporations the same rights as individuals; shouldn't they therefore be treated like individuals and be tried and jailed, like Madof, for 150 years, instead of getting megamillion bonuses?
Government agencies, corporations and large private businesses dismiss the public in a cavalier way, depriving it of assets and livelihood, yet are never brought to book. Just as we have begun to prosecute warriors for crimes against humanity, we should deem large-scale public swindling such as we have seen in the last decades as major crimes against humanity. Why should the petty thief, burglar or traffic violator be incarcerated when we leave corporate giants free to gouge their fellows in the most oppressive and remorseless way?
The despotic attitude of CEOs has spread widely across Canada and, as recent reports have shown, has spread to Crown corporations, who often pay CEOs up to 100 times more than the lowest paid workers, besides additional fat bonuses based on "productivity". This is not easily measured in non-profit organisations, like hospitals, where bonuses tend to be a percentage of the total budget or of the amount "saved" in a year.
A differential of 10 times between highest and lowest paid was considered undesirable. That is where the Prime Minister of a province probably is today. Yet he bears a thousand times the responsibility of the average public CEO, such as Canada Post, Hospital Corporations, Ontario Hydro and others. These consistently reward their top executives just for meeting budgetary targets. It is devilishly easy for chiefs to inflate their budgets and then show what wise stewards they are by cutting them back. Even in instances where a genuine budget is presented and a cut needed the current trend is to thin staff, replacing full-time and seasoned staff by novices, contract or part-time workers, and cut services, reducing quality, increasing unemployment, but happy with the resulting bonuses!
Why should they get bonuses for doing their job?
It appears that this is common practice. Surely it should stop and the strictest ethical standards imposed on all who hold public office. None should be allowed a final contract that is not approved at the strictest levels of public oversight. Those executives who threaten to leave for the private sector should be encouraged to do so and spare the public their excesses. Few, if any, are indispensable.
The argument for equality of executive compensation between public corporations and for-profit businesses is spurious and is a product of the chutzpah of Crown corporatists and cabals, generally in cahoots with political cronies. The practice should stop whereby CEOs appoint the directors of their corporations who then set their remuneration and perquisites; there is no more revolting example of backscratching, amounting to criminal conspiracy to extort public funds.
If we want equity, fairness and peaceful coexistence among citizens – allowing premiums to those who genuinely innovate and improve our lot – we must reduce the expanding gap between rich and poor. Those who use most of the nation's resources should pay the highest taxes, including clawbacks.
I wonder whether people are fully aware of the finite limits to what the world can provide safely and humanely as they continue to expect increasing growth and extreme personal enrichment in much the same way as city developers expand peripherally consuming arable land and increasing environmental damage while neglecting city centres. We don't know enough to assemble all the needed information to act smartly and cohesively; this is partly why Crown executives continue their chicanery, trading on general ignorance, disunity and fear.
We as voters must become educated on the critical issues, before our world is stolen from us by the very people we employ.
Folks must realise that when the crunch comes the poor are always the first to go.
Sleeping better with a smoky
mosquito coil
The joy of watching the shades of the tropical sunset change from red to orange during my boyhood days with the family would be interrupted by an explosive slap on a leg, or an arm, or another exposed body part, and an exclamation of annoyance.
"A nasty mosquito gone and bite mih!" a family member would say while ferociously scratching the offended area.
The response from a silhouette in the growing darkness would be the same each time: "Go and light a cockset, nah!"
For those of us who recall those moments back home, lighting a "cockset", which was the mosquito coil, was as ritualistic as the evening bath standing on the sun-hot bathing stone in the backyard behind the water barrel.
I remember those days "making market" with my mother – she would write up a grocery list before we left the house to take a private hire car down by the junction for the open-air market in the next town. Among the essentials on this list was a prominent item: it read, "2 box of cockset". This item ranked up there with dhal, rice, flour, cooking oil, Turban or Madras curry powder, and three packages of anchar massala.
"Cockset" was the mosquito repellant. It was the brand name of the product that was made in Trinidad in those days when I was growing up back home. Like Kleenex and Coke, the name Cockset became a synonym for the product itself. I do not know if it is still around today since I have not been back to visit in over a decade. I hope it is, and dialogue still goes like the following on evenings with the sun sinking into an orange-skinned ocean just beyond the tall chimney stacks of the industry that now dominates the skyline where I grew up.
"Boy, go and bring a kleenex for me to blow my nose, and I over thirsty, so bring a coke for me to drink. And since you passing in the kitchen, bring the Three Plumes box of match to light the cockset. A mosquito just now bite mih big toe."
From what I recall, then Cockset came in a box of ten coils, with the picture of rooster, inexplicably, on the box cover. There were five sets with two coils wound around each other like a pair of mating snakes. In fact, the coils looked like green garden snakes, with tails sharp at the tip and winding inwards together, the heads interlocked like yin and yang. Slits for eyes were at the centre of the heads.
To go "light the cockset" put an evening ceremony into action. It took a pair of hands as steady as a brain surgeon's to take apart the coils without any breakage. A broken coil obviously shortened the burn time so it was important to take them apart as separate units. A tin stand came in the box. The centre of the stand was punched out to make the equivalent of a foot, and this terminated with a thin tip like a pointed toe. This "foot" was lifted up and out of the tin base and its tip inserted into the eye of the snake on the head of the coil. It balanced perfectly on its centre, the coil drooping slightly, but all the same solidly supported by the base of stand. The foot part of the stand that folded up to balance the coil also had its centre punched out to make a slot. This was used to hold the pieces of the coil that sometimes broke out from the main body. Obviously, not everyone had the steady, sober hands of brain surgeons. The mosquito coil and its silver stand sat in a saucer or in a chipped enamel plate.
The coil was lit with a sulfurous yellow-flamed match that flared noisily as a warning to all lurking mosquitoes. The flame was held to the tip of the coil until it caught fire. It would then begin a slow, smoky burn with the red tip glowing like a cigarette in the dark. It burned throughout the night like a stick of incense, the white ash keeping the shape of the coil and breaking off with the pull of gravity to fall in a circular pattern onto the plate below.
From what I recall, the ingredient Pyrethrum was used in these coils. I understand from various sources that this has been used as an insecticide for centuries and is quite effective and deadly in repelling mosquitoes. There were other additives to the coil that contributed to making it burn slowly through the night, which I now hear could have deleterious health effects. All the same, it certainly worked, because the mosquitoes would complain shrilly before leaving the room.
However, I figure that a few mosquitoes learned to hold their breaths, or at least control their breathing, in a room filled with the Pyrethrum smoke. If a few mosquitoes got through, the added protection offered by the mosquito net ensured they did not make it to that vulnerable, exposed big toe.