Snapshots of The Crisis

And I mean much more than the "financial crisis", but also the global ecological, social and paradigm crisis.

On one side we have this almost unbelievable (but cheered up) news from London: the United Kingdom has introduced a 50% tax on bank bonuses. The super-executives of the banking sector, widely blamed of the current financial and economic crisis, can still be paid enormous bonuses but their banks would have to pay also an enormous tax on them, so they may think twice before such a waste. Some warn that this will cause a "brain leak" of most demanded experts to other countries but the fact is that anyone who wants to earn so much money (maybe a thousand times what you earn) should be in prison or a psychiatric institution, not managing anything. So it will not be a loss if they go elsewhere and maybe it is a gain. For once, applause for the UK government for daring to confront, even if shyly, the substance of the problem: the rich have and earn way too much.

But even this is just a social-democrat patch, nothing else. Global economic criminals like the executives of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers got out of the mess they had created with neat benefits of several hundred million dollars. They should be in jail like Madoff but they are enjoying freely the succulent benefits of their legal crimes against Humankind.

In this context, these patches are far from what is needed. I can understand that a qualified (and effective in the long run) manager or expert may a greater reward than an unspecialized worker who cleans around... but how much greater? Twice, five times, ten times maybe? But more than a thousand times, earning the salaries of a thousand regular workers for doing nothing good in the end? That is totally disparaging and extremely unjust!

I would hence suggest that salaries are capped to 10 times the minimal salary, which would still allow these supposed experts to have a luxurious way of life, being able to spend as much as ten normal workers, which is much more than the so-called middle class can normally.

Another snapshot comes from China, where a good deal of the country is being devoured by the sands due to global warming and general ecological mismanagement (China's autocracy largely shuns environmental protection and has formed an alliance with the USA to prevent diplomatic solutions to global warming).

I say I am optimistic in regards to the good will of people but, damnit, I am really pessimistic when it comes to Humankind solving its urgent, colossal and unprecedented problems in any effective manner, at least before global revolution takes place (and that's not tomorrow for sure). With the shortsighted and corporativist leadership that we find today in most of the World, we are going nowhere but to a massive disaster.

I wish it was different, really.