WHY CAN’T WE GET ANY HELP ANYMORE?

I recently switched my DSL service and ran into something that’s become maddeningly common these days. At every step of the way they got it wrong. When I told them I wanted a standard modem, not a wireless, they sent me a wireless.

On the date my service was to begin, I received an automated phone call telling me the service would start on that day no later than 6 P.M. When I tried to set it up at 7, nothing worked. Thinking I had made a mistake, an hour-and-a-half was lost while I redid everything about three times to make sure it was right.

Then I called their tech support and spoke with a fellow who—judging from his accent—was from some exotic land far away. Now, normally I would enjoy the opportunity to chat with a person from a distant culture, but in this case I would have preferred to talk with someone who actually understood what I was saying and who had the power to correct my problem.

After going on and off hold several times while he checked various things, the best he could tell me was that my service hadn’t been activated yet. When I told him of the automated call that said otherwise, he again put me on hold while he talked with his supervisor. After about ten minutes, he came back on the line and said that the date and times given were estimates, not actual commitments.

There was nothing in the message about estimates. They said it would be activated on that date.

I tried again the next day and it still didn’t work. Another call to Bangalore (or wherever) yielded nothing except that they now thought my service had indeed been activated and that the problem must be on my end. They said they would set me up for an appointment with a technician, who could probably get here within a couple days. Problem was, I had to go out of town for a few nights, so they told me I’d have to wait until I got back to make the appointment and then wait one or two days after that.

I returned home four days later but had to leave town again after a couple hours. Imagine my delight upon discovering that my internet service was finally working! I completed the online setup and everything was running smoothly. I left on my trip satisfied that I was good to go.

When I returned two days later, it was off again! Another call to Bangalore (and the obligatory journey through an endless maze of recordings and responses before one can speak with an actual human), and they tell me that I’ll have to have a technician come out to my apartment. I told him that it had worked fine a couple days before, and that nothing had been changed on my end, but he was adamant: A technician visit was the required next step.

“He’ll be there between 8 A.M. and 7 P.M. tomorrow” he told me.

(sigh)

Luckily, the tech arrived at 9 A.M. (Good fortune at last!!!) When I told him that it had worked fine a few days ago, he said that the problem was likely in my neighborhood phone company office.

“We always have problems with that station,” he told me. “Usually we can get a problem fixed while we’re talking with them on the phone. But in the area covered by that office, it can take the better part of a week. It’s a real mess down there. Half the time when they connect somebody new, they accidentally disconnect someone else. They can’t help it, though. They’re terribly understaffed and overworked these days.”

Just to be sure, he checked every part of my connection, starting from the back of the computer, testing the wiring running through my apartment and out to the box where the main line comes in. He even climbed the pole in my neighbor’s back yard. Everything checked out fine. The problem was definitely at the local office.

To make matters worse, it was now Friday—and they don’t work weekends—so if it wasn’t fixed that day, I’d have to wait until at least Monday before I could again be connected to the internet.

Well, it is now Tuesday and I’ve been disconnected for twelve days. And there’s no one I can talk with who has the authority to get it straightened out. All I get, after about an hour of answering recorded questions and waiting on hold, are heartfelt apologies from my Old Buddies in Bangalore.

(I imagine that, after all of my calls there, mine is now a household name throughout the Venerable Old City of Bangalore. Because of all the business I’ve generated for them, and the many genial hours we’ve spent conversing, I hear they’re planning to name a bridge after me…and that my name is to be misspelled.)

Now, I’m sure that everyone reading this has similar tales of horror to relate about their dealings with vast, faceless corporations. It seems to happen to us at the rate of about once a week in some form or other. And it always seems that, the bigger the company, the harder it is to get a problem resolved.

The point of this isn’t to rant about the frustrations of modern life (such a tirade would be truly endless), but to try to understand why—as the title asks—can’t we get any help anymore?

A large part of the reason for all this can be found in the way in which the heads of major corporations get their money. We’ve all heard the reports of outrageous levels of executive compensation, running into the tens—and sometimes hundreds—of millions of dollars. What most people don’t know is the mechanism by which the cash is funneled to them.

Their most extravagant windfalls don’t come from salaries or bonuses, but from stock options. Without going into the particulars of how they work, the key is that the options given to these Big Shots are worthless unless the price of the corporation’s stock rises. They are awarded the options when they assume their positions on the Board of Directors, and the more they can make the value of their stock go up, the more money they’ll make when they cash in their options later.

If the stock price stays the same or goes down during their time on the Board, the options are worthless and the poor, hapless boobs must somehow squeak by on their salaries and bonuses (in other words, mere millions instead of tens of millions).

Now, on the surface, this seems like a good idea. Stock options offer a strong incentive for executives to make their corporations as profitable as possible, because when profits go up (relative to their competitors) the stock price tends to rise and their options become worth a bundle.

Along with that, the theory goes, stockholders will prosper and, because of enhanced buying power and economies of scale, service to customers will improve and prices will be kept as low as possible. Everybody’s happy.

But the devil, as they say, is in the details. In order for the options to fetch the many millions of dollars necessary for our poor, benighted executives to avoid having to give up one of their Lear Jets, stock prices have to rise as high as possible, but only until the executive cashes in the options. Once that happens, there is no incentive, none, to ensure the corporation’s prosperity after that time.

If an executive has a choice between prudent policies which would generate stable, long-term profit growth, and reckless policies (like, ahem, a flagrant disregard for customer satisfaction) which might cause faster growth, the incentive—in the form of tens of millions of dollars—is too strong for him to resist the second option, even if it jeopardizes the corporation’s long-term prosperity. It doesn’t really matter to them once they’ve cashed in their stock options.

Also, key to a rise in stock prices is how quickly profits grow from year to year. Problem is, corporations do most of their fastest growth in the years when they are small- to middle-sized enterprises. By the time they reach the size of the giants of the telecommunications industry, for example, their rate of growth has slowed considerably. Most people have telephones and cell phones already, so there aren’t too many new customers out there.

So how do you maximize profit growth when you’ve long ago done the lion’s share of your growing? By cutting costs. That means cutting (or limiting the growth of) workers’ pay and benefits. It means reducing staff so that three people have to do the work formerly done by five. It means replacing all of your telephone operators with cheap, automated systems. It means outsourcing all the service and contact personnel to far-flung regions ‘round the world where wages are low.

As I said, they don’t give a damn if their actions annoy the hell out of their customers and hurt the corporation in the long run, so long as they can rig things to generate a bundle (an obscene bundle) in the short run.

(And they can rest easy in the knowledge that, given their enormous size and resources, they can use their political clout to thwart any meaningful regulatory control.)

And anyway, who else ya gonna deal with? They’ve long ago driven out all the responsible (and irresponsible) small businesses, so they can pretty damned well do what they please and we have to put up with it. They know we have no choice but to accept their arrogance and negligence.

True, we could switch to one of their competitors—although their numbers are few and rapidly dwindling. But since they are all equally vast, arrogant and impenetrable, that ain’t no choice at all.

So the next time you’re frustrated with some incompetent bureaucracy like I was, don’t take it out on the poor chaps in Bangalore. They’re just regular folks like us, struggling valiantly to stay afloat in a world economy whose floodwaters are threatening to drown us all.

Instead, let’s raise a little hell where it belongs: with the Big Shots who are living high on the hog by causing it.

If you’re one of their servants, drivers, a waiter at one of their favorite restaurants, or anyone who works in the industries providing luxury and convenience for our Corporate Barons, be sure to louse up EVERYTHING you do for them. Spill their drinks, disconnect their calls, drive the golf cart over their favorite putter, pretend you don’t understand when you really do. Not enough to lose your job, mind you. Just an ‘honest mistake’ as often as is safely possible. Make yourself as utterly incompetent with them as their corporations are with us.

We need to remember that everything they have and do depends on little schmucks like us, so we have more power to annoy and delay them—far more—than they have over us. Maybe if their lobster is undercooked and their wine not properly chilled one time too many, we can get better treatment.

I mean, they’re sunning themselves on their yachts and hurtling themselves aloft in their private jets while we sit on the phone, hour after hour, waiting, and waiting, and waiting…..

COPYRIGHT 2008

WILLIAM B. MC LAUGHLIN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Smedley Butler - My Hero

In addition to identifying war as a racket (see my previous post on the subject), did you know that Gen. Smedley Butler--almost singlehandedly--saved the U.S. from a fascist coup in the 1930s?

It was planned by a group of super Big Shots, like the honchos of the J.P. Morgan banking empire, Irénée duPont, and the bosses of GM and several other major corporations.

Here's an excellent documentary from The History Channel, The Plot to Overthrow FDR.

Bet ya never heard about this in history class!

WAR IS (STILL) A RACKET

In one of the early scenes of Warren Beatty’s great movie, Reds, Beatty’s character—a journalist who had just returned from Europe during the early days of U.S. involvement in WWI—is asked to make a speech about what he’d seen. In introducing him, the emcee asks, “What would you say this war’s about, Jack Reed?”

Reed rises from his place at the dais, looks out at the audience of prominent citizens and says, “Profits,” and sits back down.

When I first saw the movie in the early 1980s, I thought the characterization a bit naïve and simplistic. But in the intervening years—as I’ve learned more of history and have observed the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—I’ve decided that Beatty’s character was right.

And it isn’t just leftist radicals like Reed who think this way. Back in the early 1930s, none other than Major General Smedley Butler, who received the United States’ highest medal for valor—the Congressional Medal of Honor—not once, but twice, said,

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”


What Gen. Butler said seventy-five years ago sounds like it could’ve been written last week. With the revolving door between the Pentagon and defense industries; Barack Obama’s promise to withdraw (some) troops from Iraq (maybe), but increase the number of troops sent to Afghanistan; his appointments of hawks and defense lobbyists to top positions in his administration; it’s clear that little will change for those making their fortunes on the dire misfortunes of millions.

We’re told again and again that we’re in Deadly Danger from terrorists around the world. So what did Bush do? He mounted two invasions that his own advisors in the CIA told him would increase the incidence of terrorism against the U.S.

Now, we’re told by critics of his administration that this is proof of his rank incompetence and stupidity. But is it? I mean, terrorism is a tactic—virtually the only effective tactic—used by small forces when fighting a much larger force. Mind you, I’m not defending it. I don’t endorse any tactic of war on the grounds that “War is all hell” to quote Gen. Sherman. But the Big Shots know that it’ll be used by weaker countries and groups if they feel threatened by the U.S.

And by going ‘round the world shoving sharp needles into the butts of countries like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, and Bolivia, to name but a few, they’re ensuring a constant supply of desperate, outraged people who just might do something horrible that will spur us into giving up ever larger chunks of our wealth and surrendering ever larger chunks of our freedom.

It’s as if I went to a blighted, impoverished African-American neighborhood, mounted a soapbox on a busy street corner and began yelling the N-word over and over at the top of my lungs. As you might imagine, there’s a fairly decent chance that I’d soon get the living snot beaten out of me by outraged passersby. Now, the people who did the beating would undoubtedly be guilty of a crime, but any competent judge would hold me at least as responsible as my assailants, probably more so.

The same goes for the U.S. government. If one believes the propaganda that their policies are designed to thwart terrorism, they appear completely stupid—criminally so. But if one supposes they’re intentionally ‘yelling the N-word’ in order to encourage terrorism and the extravagant increases in their wealth and power that go with it, they make perfect sense.

With all of their bubbles bursting one after the other, the Big Shots are desperate to keep the money flowing out of our pockets and into theirs. All that is required is to keep pissing off (or, more to the point, pissing on) the poor of the world, combined with periodic scare alerts from the mainstream media, and they can keep on fleecing us forever.

After all, the so-called War on Terror is, by definition, unwinnable. I mean, there’s no capitol that can be conquered, no enemy leader to be captured or anything else that might constitute ultimate victory. As long as anyone, anywhere is angry enough to lash out against the U.S., the gravy train will keep on a-rollin’.

The War on Terror, the gift that just keeps on giving! It offers the opportunity to expand U.S. hegemony abroad and it keeps the Common Folk toiling for their Masters at home. Better still, in a few years it’ll bust the budget so they can have a convenient excuse for scuttling Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (not to mention any economic stimuli that might protect the jobs and security of those of us not fortunate enough to have been born into an aristocratic family).

With a constant bombardment of fear-mongering in the news and entertainment media, the Big Shots want to keep us perpetually cowed and fearful, willing to do anything, pay anything or give up anything for relief from the danger.

It’s like a protection racket in one of those 1930s gangster flicks, where a sleazy character sidles up to a shop-owner and hisses, “That’s a nice little store ya got there. It suuuure would be a shame if anything was to happen to it!”

That’s how the racket works. Our Masters manufacture a crisis and then take our time, money and blood in return for promised salvation (which never comes).

COPYRIGHT 2008
WILLIAM B. MC LAUGHLIN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED