Slightly depressed

From time to time I have a moan about the greed of the legal services and financial services industries, taken in the round, sterling service by many foot - and not so foot - soldiers notwithstanding.

I am also conscious of the role that union greed & stupidity played in the smashing of the unions by Handbag Thatcher.

But I was still a bit depressed by a piece in the Guardian the other day about the way that our universities are going. It seems that while some of those at the top of the heap are getting themselves paid in excess of £500,000 a year plus perks, quite a large proportion of those at the bottom of the heap are on zero hours contracts, with little job security and are having to scratch around to make up, say, £30,000 a year. To the point where some of them are on welfare, and a far cry from the relatively sheltered life of an Oxbridge don (see reference 1). Depressed by the fact that those at the top of the heap, despite their fancy education, don't seem to see the need to set a better example.

Salt was rubbed in the wound by a further piece in the lastest NYRB about the workings of the class action industry in the US. It seems that the biggest money spinners are the class actions against big corporations for some failing or other, possibly more or less banal, possibly not, but failings which affect a large number of people. Maybe some food packer forgot to include a warning about peanut allergies on their jars of peanut butter. There are legal firms which specialise in this sort of work, actively seek it out, the upshot of which is often that they make lots of money and sometimes that one lot of more or less innocent shareholders in the corporation concerned have to stump up compensation for another lot of shareholders. Or possibly stakeholders. And to pay off the lawyers - with such paying off sometimes more or less amounting to paying protection money. Some shareholders find themselves in both lots. The executives responsible for whatever it is get off more or less scot free.

To be fair to the US authorities, they do know about all this. But no-one has yet dreamed up a better way to punish or otherwise curb corporations which do bad things.

On the other hand, authorities generally show no sign of understanding that unless they start to do something about all the inequality swilling around, both within countries and between countries, something some day is going to go bang, just as it did in what was, and what is again, Russia, just about 100 years ago.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/just-like-us.html.