OWS, Hope, Change . . . yada yada yada.

From where I sit, out in northwest Missouri farm country, I can’t yet decide if OWS is going to have any immediate or long-term impact on the direction of our nation, or of the world. The movement seems largely to be tilting at windmills.

For instance, I’ve read--and many OWS’ers are well aware of this--college tuition has increased 900 percent over the past 30 years, yet salaries for entry-level jobs requiring a college degree have remained fairly stagnant. Is there any chance of the OWS movement significantly rolling back tuition costs? No. None. And in a sense, they wouldn’t want to--rolling back tuition costs would mean elimination of a lot of jobs on campuses all over the country. Is there any chance of the OWS movement significantly increasing salaries paid by the lovely corporations running this country? No. None.

Does OWS have any shot at all at decreasing corporate influence on our nation’s government? No. We have the best Congress money can buy, and congresspersons will NOT give that money up. Even if OWS managed to find, back, and get elected “pure” candidates, those candidates, once elected, being human and all, very likely would very quickly succumb to monetary apples offered them by the myriad corporate “Eves”--and they would find ways to justify that to themselves.

And the evil corporations are not comprised solely of their CEOs and other multimillion-dollar executives--they also employ a lot of real people, most of them among the 99% who aren’t the “movers and shakers” of our political and economic world.

I love OWS and everything it stands for--but I still cannot figure out how it can succeed, and trust me, I’ve been trying.

It is going to take someone with a lot more imagination than I’ve been blessed with to come up with a real, tangible, doable plan--with real, tangible, accomplishable goals. It is relatively easy to see and rail at problems. Solutions are more elusive. The people--or “persons,” as the Supreme Court refers to corporations--will never give up or even minimally share their power. Why would they? Politicians will never give up the bounty they receive from those in actual power.

Much as I would love to see 435 representatives and 100 senators, maybe even a president (and I actually like Mr. Obama) out on the unemployment line, along with a few hundred or thousand corporate CEOs, I do NOT want to see their secretaries and housekeepers and cooks and on and on and on in the same line.

The question is how to “hurt” the bosses enough to get their attention, without hurting the many people who depend on them.

I would make a LOUSY revolutionary.

What I’m afraid of is that we’ve already slid too far down the slippery slope towards the end of “America as we know it” ever to recover.

OWS gives me some faint sliver of hope, but it’s just that, a faint sliver. People seem to be waking up, to be catching on to the essential etiology of what ails us, but it may be too late. We have reached the point of wanting “change,” but are essentially powerless to effect that change, on anything more than a purely individual level, if even that.

Come to think about it, maybe that IS the key--we all must find ways to effect change on an individual level.

When I figure out what that means, I’ll let y’all know.

Nothing like watching old movies . . . .

Watched again the other day an old movie, “Independence Day.” Okay, it’s not THAT old, but it has been around for a while. Anyway, there is one scene in it where the president of the United States gets locked into an alien’s mind and sees what the aliens have in mind for the human population of the planet. “Extermination,” he says, when he is finally freed from the alien’s telepathic grip.

Upon revisiting that movie scene, it dawned on me why listening to my company’s quarterly report the other day had so shaken me.

Our “bosses” have in mind for us, the American medical transcriptionists and editors who do the work the company sells and greatly profits from, exactly the same plan that the aliens in “Independence Day” had for human beings: Extermination.

That is not isolation paranoia-borne hyperbole or exaggeration, it is simply fact.

The more work they can send overseas, the better their profit margin. They were positively gleeful over the fact that they’ve managed to offshore 46%--up from 44%!--of transcription in the last quarter, and the picture only gets brighter (for them)!

They were equally happy that 77% of dictation now goes through speech-recognition programs before it gets to a transcriptionist. This makes them happy because they pay us much less, and in fact, unfairly less, for lines we edit than for those we transcribe. Anything that makes us, the workers, poorer, makes them richer--of COURSE they’re happy about that.

There was also some mention of a 19-million-dollar tax windfall of some sort or another, no specifics were provided although I suppose they are all still bowing and praying to Mr. Bush for that. Astonishingly, they didn’t use that tax windfall to enhance or create American jobs. Go figure.

I will never name the company for which I work, for a variety of reasons, some of them pretty obvious, and also because it doesn’t matter. The same scenario has been playing out in a lot of companies, a lot of industries, over a whole lot of years. If it hadn’t been, there would be no “Occupy Wall Street” movement--there wouldn’t have to be.

What I still have not figured out is what the corporate and political honchos, the 1%, think the result of all this will be. To me, it looks like, at some point, the misery will have to begin to trickle UP. Our economy is about 75% consumer-driven, last time I heard. What happens when you eliminate consumers by eliminating anything above a subsistence wage? What happens to the healthcare system (10% of the economy, I think I’ve heard), for instance, when only 1% of the people can afford healthcare?
I don’t know, I honestly don’t.

When I figure out some way to prevent what looks increasingly to me like the impending destruction of America, and not just economically, I’ll happily post it. Unfortunately, I’m just not that smart, so I suspect I’ll never have to write such a post.

Cheers!

"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.”

Sorta random notes, on account of I'm tired.

100.  Million.  Dollars.

For quitting, sort of, at age 81.

100.  Million.  Dollars.

One man.

Who had already "earned" three-quarters of a billion dollars over the past quarter-century or so.

Poor guy.  The 100 million was barely more than a third of what he HAD been promised, until shareholders realized that 267 million was actually a lot of money (and money out of their pockets) to pay a guy for dying or getting fired.

100.  Million.  Dollars.

In a world, and a country (ours), in which 100 (no million) dollars would make the difference between living--you know, "eating," stuff like that--and dying--you know, dead, not breathing, "disassembled" to quote a long-ago movie robot--to a huge number of people, maybe even 100 million of them.

I cannot even wrap my mind around a number like "100 million," or even tease it into any tiny cracks in that number.

Eugene Isenberg must just be loving how he managed to game the system and suck the blood out of everybody who ever worked for or held stock in him and his company.

The shareholders in Nabors, Inc. must be wondering who in hell ever thought that contract with Isenberg was "good."

Gotta wonder sometimes how "value" is assigned to different people at different "ranks" in our originally "rank-less" American society. 

I'm running out of steam on this post because it wasn't what I originally intended to work on tonight.  I was thinking instead about how we have become all about "bread and circuses," without having really voted such for ourselves.  I do NOT remember where I first heard that phrase, "bread and circuses," but think it was from a Robert Heinlein novel and his assertion that when people are allowed to vote themselves bread and circuses, the world immediately spirals downward, or something like that.

Well, we DO have "bread and circuses" now, but we are not voting for them.  We are having them tossed to us like so many scraps to hungry dogs.

A few years ago I worked at a children's hospital.  We were (supposedly; we only knew what our "masters" told us) going through some tough economic times, and we were going to have to cut some corners, shave our expenses, etc.  I was an office coordinator then, sort of a glorified secretary who supervised other, less-glorified secretaries, and, as such, had to attend monthly meetings with other glorified secretaries and our immediate masters.  At one or two or a few such meetings, we discussed how to keep the "masses"--those we supervised--happy, and how we could retain them.  There would be no pay raises, of course.  But the head master confidently explained to us that "job satisfaction," for people like us, had very little to do with income, with fair payment for services provided--"no," he said, "they care more about 'other' stuff, about 'recognition'" and so on.  Basically he "educated" us that we care more about pats on the back than food on the table, and he had studies to prove it (although he never produced such).

So we wound up, at his direction, coming up with "awards" for our underlings--plaques or gift certificates, accompanied by admiring speeches, etc.--that would keep the masses happy, and at very little cost to the hospital, the "corporation."

It was like an occasional treat, a milk bone, would prevent the masses from bailing on us, keep them feeling all warm and cuddly to us.

"Demeaning" was what I thought at the time.  Dehumanizing. 

We have become "worker bees," somehow less than human.

"All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others."  Orwell (more or less; I don't swear this quote is verbatim--it is from memory).

I don't care if somebody makes more money than I do--a LOT of people make more money than I do.  But dammit, I am no less human simply because I make less than you do.

At its heart, I think that is what Occupy Wall Street is all about.

Packratting

I’m a terrible packrat when it comes to pictures I’ve taken or words I’ve committed to paper (or email or fax). For instance, I have more than 35,000 pictures stored on Flickr, a notebook full of copies of letters I’ve sent to one old friend, still MORE notebooks full of printed-out email “conversations” with people. This may strike people who’ve grown up with computers as a huge waste of time, and I suppose it probably is (well, except that technology has a bad habit of replacing itself every so often; whatever words I saved on 5-¼” floppy disks, for instance, would be lost forever had I not also printed them out, and the same can be said for whatever I saved on my old Smith-Corona word processor. Paper takes up space, and takes time, but at least it is more or less “permanent”).

Going through some of that today I came across a letter I’d written to a former boss about 16 years ago, part of which I’ll reproduce here just for chuckles, grins, and because it may show some of the roots of my “99-percentness” (which of course is not a word). (Names of specific people and the institution for which we worked are changed).

One of the hospital’s ubiquitous vice-presidents came by PCC yesterday to give a brief presentation on our “Mission Statement” and “Strategic Plan.” She talked of downsizing, reduction by 20-25% of FTEs and so forth, cross-training remaining workers so that they can be moved hither, thither and yon, wherever the work happens to be on any given day. Robert, your ever-so-shy former secretary, had the temerity to ask how the hospital’s administrator-to-worker ratio compared with that of other hospitals. “We have a CEO, COO, executive vice-presidents, senior vice-presidents, administrative chief of staff (whatever HE is), vice-presidents. For two years we’ve heard nothing but 'do more with less,' yet you bring in a whole herd of administrators to tell us how to do it.” Barb--the VP--blushed and admitted that, yes, our hospital has more administrators than the average hospital.

She also talked about “outsourcing” certain services, like food services and housekeeping. After the meeting I took her into the hall and showed her the stained carpet. “This is subcontracted housekeeping,” I said. “What I would ask, as a customer, is, ‘if you can’t keep your carpet cleaned, how are you going to do all the fancy stuff you brag about?’” Barb admitted I had a point.

Listening to Barb chatter on about the hospital’s “vision” and where it wants to go in the next few years, I found myself imagining a huge beehive full of interchangeable “worker bees” completely devoid of individuality, all hustling and bustling noiselessly in service to some sequestered queen. This is not the first time that image has appeared in my mind; I see it whenever I listen to Steve at one of our office coordinators’ meetings, too, especially when he talks about “leveling the playing field,” which basically means reducing every support job in the hospital to the least common denominator, thereby allowing us to hire nothing but Secretary 1’s at right around minimum wage. The ultimate purpose is to reduce us all to the point of easy expendability.

I’m not a complete idiot or idealist--I KNOW that we are all expendable, as inherently worthless as a Confederate dollar or a politician’s promise. Nevertheless, that the hospital’s administration has decided, apparently, that it is perfectly okay, even preferable, to slap us in the face with that knowledge every day, while at the same time telling us how “important” we are, is disconcerting, at best.

I should have become a plumber (NOT one of Nixon’s).

In retrospect, I wrote that particular letter at about halfway through the 31 years since Reagan’s election and maybe even about halfway into the “housing bubble,” the stock market’s “irrational exuberance,” etc., all the bad banking practices (or outright thievery) that nearly collapsed the world financial system a couple of years ago. Nostradamus I am not, but, like some kind of weird coal-mine canary, I think I--and a lot of others--sensed the shitstorm about to crash down around us, even if we couldn’t describe it with anything more than, “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.”

If I were going to dress up for Halloween today, I think I would go as a vampire (speaking of coal-mine canaries, isn’t the recent popularity of vampires a neat coincidence or something? Maybe there are a LOT of coal-mine canaries out there) with a big Goldman-Sachs or Wells Fargo logo on my back, or maybe a photo of our congressmen/women clustered around a TV, guzzling Dom Perignon and laughing at OWS people being tear-gassed.

Trickle-up Economics

When I first went to work for a herein unnamed transcription company in 2002, I was paid a given amount per line, plus a differential--if I scheduled myself more than 50% after 5 p.m., I would be paid more per line for ALL lines I produced; I was also given a differential for scheduling myself at least one weekend day per week. The company also provided our internet access. Accounts back then also were assigned a level theoretically representing their degree of difficulty, and our pay was based in part on that--higher difficulty level, higher line rate.

Let the “trickle up” begin:

1. Instead of paying the differential for all lines produced, pay it only for those produced after 5 p.m. or on weekends. Small thing, right--but dollars out of my pocket, right back into the company’s.

2. Eliminate the weekend differential. Dollars out of my pocket, right back into the company’s.

3. Stop providing internet access, but “generously” give the transcriptionist a small monthly amount to cover about 1/3 of the cost. (Sounds like a small thing, right? But if you were taking home $2000 a month, the net difference between what the company gave you for internet access and the actual cost, say $20, amounts to a 1% pay cut after taxes. Money out of my pocket, etc.

4. Never raise the line rate. After not many years, the company is paying much less per line when adjusted for inflation (but you can bet, although of course mere employees weren’t privy to such information, that what they were charging hospitals for our services didn’t stay the same or go lower).

5. “Restructure” the pay scale so that pay wasn’t based on account level of difficulty anymore, but rather on experience/ability level of the transcriptionist. At some point or other we lost the level 6 account that I had been working on, and I was shifted to what had previously been a level 8 or 9 account. Under the “old” system, I would have received about a 10% increase in line rate. Under the new system, I not only didn’t get a raise, but was in fact basically informed that the company graciously and benevolently wouldn’t be reducing my pay by a tenth of a cent per line, which logic I never really got, but then, I was a mushroom.

6.  Keep raising the percentage of the health insurance cost paid by the employee (and reducing the percentage paid by the company).

(My "favorite" line uttered by a supervisor, a woman whom I actually liked, during this period:  "We can't keep being the highest-paying transcription company.")

And that is how a corporation can nickel-and-dime its employees from relative “comfort”--that is, ability to pay the mortgage or rent and keep food on the table, with maybe a little left over for “extras” like, I don’t know, new clothes once in while, or dinner out, a movie, etc.--you know, luxuries--to edge-of-the-precipice, how-can-I-pay-for-an-oil-change or something besides chicken or beans or rice, day-to-day uncertainty.

You wonder sometimes how your employers can live with themselves or even sleep at night, knowing what they do to the workers who keep their companies alive, even as you know that they simply don’t care--and in fact, some corporate heads or other higher level executives actually get bonuses based on how much they “reduce costs” (that is, how many workers’ lives they destroy).

This is partly why “I am the 99%.” And, Dear Mr. 53%? I’ve been paying taxes all along; I’ve gotten no government handouts and haven’t asked for any. So please, shut the fuck up.

Waste

Enjoyed my usual Friday lunch with my parents yesterday. At some point in conversation with my father, talk turned toward combines (the humongous machines used to harvest grain, not NFL scouting combines, etc.). He’s in the market for a new one (well, new to him--he doesn’t have a quarter to half a million dollars or more for a brand-new, state-of-the-art machine with a $15,000 seat, etc.). He is also not sure what to do with his old one. He was talking to a neighbor who had a couple of old combines, or parts of them, stored in sheds and barns, who told Dad that he had once asked a combine repair guy what the old motors, which were still in practically mint condition, might be worth. “Surprisingly, nothing,” the man said. “These old motors will run forever, so nobody ever has to replace one.” So there are hundreds, maybe thousands of perfectly good combine motors rusting away in barns and sheds and salvage yards all over the country, partly because nobody has stepped forward with a potential use for them (trust me, I would step forward, if I had any brilliant ideas).

I was thinking about that during this morning’s perambulations with assorted critters in the bean field to the south of me. The beans were harvested weeks ago, but for some reason I started noticing a lot (relatively speaking) of beans that were left behind by the combine, mostly because they were too close to a weed-overrun fence line, or in corners outside the turning arc of the machine, or in wrinkles of terrain that the combine’s head, because of its sheer size, simply passed over. In the general scheme of soybean farming, what was left behind didn’t amount to much, but multiply that field by hundreds or thousands of others and you would probably have a pretty impressive pile of beans.

It would be too easy, and in fact to some degree inaccurate, to call those left-behind beans--which did their job, they grew and matured as best they could in conditions this past summer that were, well, “suboptimal” in terms of rain, etc.--and rusting combine motors a metaphor for the American middle and working classes, but the temptation is there. In the case of neither the combine motors nor the beans was their ultimate waste due to deliberate intent of the farmer, however. The farmer did not profit from refusal to maximize their potential.

Contrast that to what corporations, in concert with the federal government, have done to American workers over the three decades since Reagan and his “trickle-down” economics entered the picture. Essentially they maximized their own immediate profits by ensuring that nothing “trickled down;” in fact, an argument could be made that they reversed the “trickle”--dollars they did not pay us enhanced their profits.

Unfortunately, with their slow but relentless destruction of the middle and working classes, they’ve laid waste to unfathomable amounts of human potential. Instead of reinvesting in the workers who helped build their companies, they’ve basically done the opposite.

These same “job creators” who are crying that the relative pennies spent on social programs are “mortgaging our children’s futures!” are the people who have ensured that many of our children HAVE no real future.

At some time in the future--and probably not the distant future--when historians conduct an autopsy on the corpse of the United States of America, they’ll probably find that the source of the fatal cancer was rooted in the 1980s, with the overt shift from a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” to a government “of the few, by the few, and for the few”--the 1%; when "what's good for General Motors is good for America" became "what's good for General Motors is good for, um, General Motors management and stockholders, and if something happens that is NOT good for same, taxpayers will fix it for them."

Imagine the possibilities if they truly HAD let some of the profit "trickle down," if they had invested in the potential of American workers rather than simply exploited it?

If there ever is an epitaph for this country, maybe we should just borrow the one Herman Wouk used for Youngblood Hawke, from the novel of that name:  "Death is only a sadness.  Tragedy lies in waste."

Sacrifice

With some time off this week and, until today, nice weather, I’ve had time to spend sitting out on the front porch, reading an actual book (with printed pages and everything! I didn’t even have to plug it into surge protector!). Why I picked “Walden,” I’m not sure; certainly it turned out to be a serendipitous choice because it gave my mental kaleidoscope a half-twist and my whole view changed.

Perhaps most important, it changed my view of the “1%” to whom the share of America’s wealth has so inequitably shifted (or been transferred to by tax policies, among other factors). Instead, now I see that our corporate leaders have all embraced Thoreau’s espousal of a simpler, less encumbered life, and collectively they are striving to channel American workers to the same. In order to do this, they sacrifice their own potential freedom from luxury, opulence and all the hindrances to a truly “good” and “well-lived” life so as to preserve our freedom from the same. They know, as Thoreau said, that we are often more possessed by our possessions than the other way around, so they struggle mightily to ensure that we can never afford to be encumbered by so many of them.

It strikes me also that many of them have taken up Michelle Obama’s fight against childhood obesity. A diet of beans and rice would be a healthy one, and so the children of the 99% will be channeled economically to beans and rice, simultaneously sparing them life-threatening temptation of richer fare. If to do that means keeping the 99% from being able to afford a more varied diet, well, the 1% will sacrifice by carrying more of the burdensome profit themselves.

It stuns me that I’ve missed until now the incredible generosity of the 1% and how they’ve so sacrificed their own freedom from wealth in order to ensure our own. It is the economic equivalent of throwing themselves on a hand grenade, just to save the rest of us. I am humbled by my belated recognition of this.

Language

As noted before, I'm a medical transcriptionist, or, as they've begun calling us now, a "medical language specialist."  Whether that change came about as a way of trying to describe more accurately what we do--it ain't all about typing fast--or whether it was just another managerial bone tossed to a bunch of dogs in order to make them feel "better" about themselves or "more empowered," I don't know.  Given that the change in title did NOT bring with it more actual income, I suspect it was just a bone.

Whatever we are--medical transcriptionist (MT) or medical language specialist (MLS)--we have to possess some facility with the language.  We are not necessarily all writers, but we all DO--we MUST--pay attention to, and CARE about, words and their meanings, and MUST forever be aware of the context in which they're used.  We HAVE to know, and care about, the difference between "its" and "it's," between "they're" and "their" and "there."  We MUST care about "nuance," how the same word may mean one thing in one context, something altogether different in another.

The majority of people apparently care about none of this, and I suppose that's okay, in everyday life--as long as communication is happening, fine.  With a medical report that's carved in proverbial stone (or computer program, ether, whatever), it DOES matter, and we have to care.

So, we--MTs/MLSs--maybe have a more acute sense of linguistic bullshit than many other people do.

And there is a lot of linguistic bullshit flung about in today's workplace.

"Personnel" offices became "Human Resources" quite a while back--it was an "empowerment" "thing."  "Layoffs" became "downsizing" became "reallocation of resources" (as a nurse manager I used to work with said, it means "you have been reallocated to the unemployment line") became (my personal favorite) "headcount reduction."

A "head" is a person, by the way.  Just in case any of y'all lost sight of that uncomfortable fact.

I can barely remember a time--think 1970s--when corporate bosses used to seem to be honestly sorrowful when economic forces of nature forced them to "lay people off."  It wasn't long after that, though, that they became sort of "matter-of-fact" about it.  Not long after THAT, they began taking pride in how many heads they could count, how many people's lives they could destroy--hell, they got BONUSES for it.

But they're not to blame.  They've invented language to absolve themselves from any of THAT.  For instance, I once-upon-a-time worked at a hospital in Kansas City.  We got a new CEO in about 1992 (with "connections" to the Clintons, everybody said all breathlessly) who promised "NO LAYOFFS."  But there might be, um, "reductions in force" via "attrition," etc.  He wouldn't be personally responsible for that, of course--he would direct his "people" (and he brought a whole herd of them with him) to direct THEIR people to cut their budgets by 10%.  In our section, we'd already carved costs to the bone--our budget was 90-something percent "personnel"--you know, "people"--and we didn't really have as many of those as we needed.  Yes, people saw their jobs disappear.  But the CEO wasn't to blame--the department heads were. 

Sometimes I find it difficult even to fathom what incredibly self-centered, selfish assholes these CEOs can be.  I accept that they must sometimes make hard decisions, and that the decisions may, will hurt real people, but that those decisions MUST be made.  If you're going to MAKE those decisions, at least have the balls to own up to them, and to take the responsibility for them.

Yeah, yeah, I know--it's just business, not personal.  But it can become pretty fucking personal when you're the one suddenly without a job.  The CEOs, and the politicians, too, need to stop hiding behind words and simply take responsibility.  Stop feeding us bullshit.  Tell us the truth:  "I'm here to feather my own nest, and to hell with all of you little people."