Society is suffering from the greed of the few

Contents Changing attitude to income Who are the worst thieves? Climate change deniers Acknowledgement Index   Every Australia Day we hear a lot about the importance to Australia of volunteers – those who work with no expectation of payment and the aim of making their society just that little bit better. They look after the elderly, the sick and injured, the disadvantaged; they fight our fires, get trapped people out of car wrecks, help to bring storm damage under control, and improve our environment.   Value for money? We are told that huge salaries must be paid to attract the very highly talented people we need. As I write this section in October 2008 the world's economic systems are in chaos because many banks and other financial institutions have collapsed following irresponsible and stupid lending of billions of dollars to people quite incapable of repaying their debts. The worst excesses were in the USA, but institutions in other countries around the world are in deep trouble because they invested their money (or their investor's money) in the businesses that went down. The executives who were, we were told, so very highly talented – and certainly were very highly paid – have made a dog's breakfast of running the big institutions. It seems at present that the average self-funded retiree would have looked after his investments with more care, foresight and intelligence than shown by the corporate bosses. We are all fallible. No-one is worth even ten times as much as anyone else. Gulf of Mexico oil spil The record-breaking oil leak from the deep-ocean oil well of 2010 and BP's incompetent response to it shows again that the top corporate bosses are just as fallible as the rest of us. Changing attitude to income According to an annual UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] survey of college freshmen [first year students], "being very well off financially" was "very important or essential" to 44 percent of students in 1965, but that number has steadily increased, reaching 75 percent of students in 2000. It's curious to note that while prosperity has significantly increased during the past fifty years, self-reported levels of happiness have stayed the same. The data are dramatic. For example, while inflation-adjusted personal income has almost tripled since 1956, the percentage of Americans reporting that they are "very happy" has remained steady at 30 percent during the past 45 years. Extract from 'Do The Right Thing', by Thomas G. Plante Exactly opposite the spirit of the volunteer is that of the bosses of our big companies. They demand obscene amounts of money for their time; they divert money into their own pockets from people who are less well off than themselves; in place of the volunteer's altruism, the corporate bosses have selfishness. They use their positions of power to amass levels of wealth that are far beyond what they will ever need. Where the volunteers give, the corporate bosses take; where the former are admirable, the latter are contemptible. Who pays the multi-million dollar salaries of the CEOs? Many of the volunteers would be small investors, many would be employees of the big companies, many would be self-funded retirees, many others would be putting a portion of their hard-earned income into superannuation funds. The CEOs are taking a cut from all these groups; effectively robbing the poor to help themselves. Some volunteers would fall into several of the above categories and would be loosing in more ways than one. Many volunteers, small investors, employees of the big corporations, and those who pay into superannuation schemes are far from wealthy; they can ill-afford being 'milked' by the bosses. The CEOs take a significant skim off the top of the profits of the big corporations. If they took less there would be more for the employees and the investors. The superannuation funds invest a large part of the money that they have the responsibility to look after in the big companies. All those who place money in a superannuation fund, or who have retired and are living from their superannuation, are paying a portion of the bloated incomes of the big bosses. In effect, the battlers are paying the wealthy. The average package for the 100 highest paid CEOs in Australia in the 2001-2002 financial year was $2.6 million a year. Consider this: if a particular CEO was to decide that he (there are very few shes) could get by on $600 000 a year and put the rest back into the company funds, that $2 million a year would be enough for a thousand investors to each get a thousand dollars more each year and a thousand employees to get a pay rise of a thousand dollars per year. Enough to make quite a difference to many volunteers, I imagine. And that's only one company. In late 2010 the price of gold is at an all-time record. People have been taking money out of shares and putting it into gold because they have become disenchanted with investing in companies. How much of this disenchantment is due to a perception that those who are running the companies are not doing so for the benefit of the shareholders, but for their own short-term selfish aims? It is more than a perception, the total value of the companies on the share markets has stagnated or declined at the same time as the corporate bosses take out larger and larger cuts.   Luxury houses in 'Mandurah Canals', Western Australia. I looked for solar panels (PV and water heating) on the roofs of many of these houses, didn't see any. Solar is fairly common on more ordinary houses; why not on the houses of the wealthy? Does it indicate a systematic lack of concern for environment? There is ample research indicating that beyond sufficient income to provide a comfortable living, more money does not lead to more happiness. The same research confirms that, on the other hand, too little money certainly causes misery. The gross incomes of the corporate bosses and board members don't come out of the blue; we pay them! Most ordinary Australians are paying toward the maintenance of their life-styles and the size of their bank accounts. Ethically the grasping CEOs are no better than embezzlers or bank robbers. While they may obey the laws, they take away from many who have much less than themselves, and they do not need what they take. They take it because they can! The share of the nation's wealth in the hands of the richest 10% increased greatly during the Howard years, just as the share of the nation's wealth in the hands of the poorest 10% decreased. The incomes of the wealthy increased steeply, those at the bottom of the heap were lucky if they kept their heads above water. The gap between rich and poor in Australia must be wider now than for a very long time. Will the Rudd government turn this around? I'd say that the early signs are not promising. We should be more vocal in our condemnation of greed – for the good of our society.

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