"We have met the enemy . . . "

This evening I spent an occasionally fascinating, often confusing, ultimately useless, and in some small ways infuriating 30 work-less minutes listening to our company’s quarterly report to its shareholders. The CEO and CFO gave informative speeches full of numbers and acronyms and bottom lines and goals for future growth, along with congratulating themselves subliminally for having met this past quarter’s goals, and almost all the numbers involved “millions” (well, the individual share price increase was more like $1.34 or something like that).

The number they seemed most proud of, the one that really made them beam (telephonically) like so many new dads and moms, was “46%.”

What is WITH us and our percentages, anyway? 1%, 99%, 53%, and now a “46%” tossed in there.

Okay, fine, we all know who the 1% and 99% and 53% refer to. What is 46%?

The percentage of my company’s work that is now happily off-shored. You know, moved to India or the Philippines, etc. That’s up from “just” 44% last quarter; the goal, I surmised, although nobody said it, was ultimately to move ALL work offshore.

The company’s “net revenue,” which I understand to be “profit” (I don’t remember enough of Econ 101 to be certain about this, and regardless, I took Econ 101 in about 1976--and I DO know that a lot of Econ terms’ definitions have been “redefined” over the past three decades), was somewhere north of 400 million, which probably makes us a pretty small-potatoes company in the grand scheme of things, but still, nothing to sneeze at.

Just a few months ago, the company lowered a lot of transcriptionist/editor pay scales, which means that we all contributed to that wonderful profit, which, of course, we won’t see because it took our sweat and dwindling bank accounts to create it.

From a purely Christian standpoint--and aren’t ALL of our happy Republican overlords “Christian?”--I suppose we should be happy to be able to contribute our tiny little portion to, well, SOME poor downtrodden corporate executive’s general welfare and well-being.

What gets me about all this is that most of the shareholders of the corporations, the people with retirement plans (or who are already retired, etc., and counting on the dividends for survival), probably are “99-percenters,” themselves. Many, if not most, of them probably are not even aware that they hold stock in the little company I work for. A lot of them are likely following Occupy Wall Street and cheering from the sidelines (in Florida or Arizona or wherever “normal” people retire, these days)--because the majority of them have been 99-percenters, and definitely 53-percenters, their whole lives. The vast majority of them cannot even begin to identify with somebody who gets a 100-million-dollar retirement bonus, or even with the “district manager” who gets a “handsome” one.

And most of them have absolutely no clue how purely lucky they were to have been there, from a chronological standpoint, to catch the economic train just as it was building up steam, to have lived and come of age in the “golden era“ of American workers. Or, if they do have a clue--and a lot of those folks have read or been taught history--they’ve chosen to ignore it.

In the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”