Alan Joyce, the CEO of Qantas, is only my second favourite corporate villain. The first is Howie Hubler. Howie lost about $9 billion of Morgan Stanley investors’ money in a single trade during the American sub prime mortgage crisis a few years ago and managed to leave the bank with a payout of several million dollars. Qantas is only worth $6 billion. Granted, Alan Joyce might be able to lose the whole thing down the toilet and walk away with a $2 million pay rise, but Howie’s effort is far more spectacular. So Howie is my favourite corporate villain.
Their efforts are alarming, and scary – not even Scrooge McDuck can visualise what nine billion bucks looks like – but in reality, they might as well have been playing with monopoly money if you compare their balance sheets with those of America and everywhere-in-Europe-that-isn’t-Germany. Some American companies are doing well of course, but while Apple might have more money in its bank account than the US Government, for much of the rest of the world, things are looking decidedly pear-shaped. The problem isn’t so much that we’re going through a downward cycle, the problem is that the whole system we’ve been using turns out to be seriously flawed.
Capitalism worked great in the 1950s because people didn’t want to buy anything more exciting than a bottle of Coke and the idea of an extravagant holiday was going to a caravan park in Gosford, but then we invented credit cards and everyone got greedy. For 60 years we’ve been paying for things ‘later’. Now it’s later. Now people are finally asking some questions.
They’re asking questions like ‘Why are US banks, which were stupid enough to lend money to people who couldn’t pay it back, who got bailed out of bankruptcy by governments, still paying their senior managers millions of dollars in bonuses?’ They’re asking questions like ‘Why can a CEO of an airline increase his salary by 70% and then shut the whole company down because he doesn’t want to increase the salaries of his staff by 3%?’ They’re asking questions like ‘How does Australia owe $200 billion in sovereign debt when we’ve got enough gold sitting in the ground under Kalgoorlie to fill Fort Knox? They’re asking questions like ‘How come we’re letting mining corporations dig up our countryside, sell the stuff they find to overseas countries and then keep the profit for themselves?’ and they’re asking questions like ‘Why is a country with vast mineral wealth and a large, smart, productive workforce unable to manufacture anything bigger or more complex than a Paddle Pop?’
They’re not dumb questions.
The problem is they’re not getting answers. The problem is our politicians can’t keep their own parties or political ambitions together long enough to move forward more than ten centimetres at a time, and when they talk to us it’s with patronising 10 second party-line soundbites. Their policies are, for the most part, populist rubbish. Our representatives in Canberra are too scared of losing votes to tackle anything contentious, let alone change the system. We lost a Prime Minister AND an opposition leader over the carbon tax and we still have a British Queen as our head of state for goodness sake.
It was inevitable that a movement like Occupy Wall Street would come along and it was inevitable that Australia would follow suit with Occupy Sydney, Occupy Melbourne and Occupy Brisbane. It was also inevitable that, like any good music festival, a camping-based political movement with no leaders and no solutions would start promisingly as a motley rag of fun-loving ideological hipsters who would then either get kicked out by security for trying to sneak backstage, or eventually give up and go home, leaving nobody but a bunch of hippies drinking fair trade coffee and arguing about who stole their quinoa muesli. If you’re going to create a political movement that involves living in a tent for two weeks, avoiding work and not bathing, you’re going to attract the kind of people who enjoy living in tents, avoiding work and not bathing. I’ve got nothing against hippies; it’s just that they’re not very good at changing the world anymore. If you’ve got a Vietnam War to stop, it’s hippies you’re after. If you want to end corporate greed and start a revolution, you need a clear list of goals, an actionable set of solutions and a groundswell of support from all walks of society who want change.
Political rallies are a good way of making the wider population sit up and take notice, but even 250,000 people walking across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in support of an apology to the stolen generations couldn’t convince the Howard government to say sorry. The Occupy protestors are kidding themselves if they think they’re going to make a difference by sleeping in the nation’s squares. We live in a country that won’t allow gay people to marry each other and the person at the very top of the political tree is an 85-year-old British woman who only got there because she didn’t have any brothers. We’re hopeless at changing even the easiest things, let alone the problems of the world.
The world needs changing, but it’s going to take generations to make it happen, and if it does, it will be because smart, savvy, socially conscious people are shaking up the political and corporate systems from within. People will see the issues more clearly if they’re not blinded by the smell of your two week old undies. If you want to end corporate greed and change the world, you should start by occupying the shower.
