The Reasons Why Our World is Spiralling Out of Control

Forgive me if I will sound downright pissed off throughout this post but after a weekend of reading several articles where schools now are more concerned with the weight of the kids in their schools and trying to play the role of an active parents instead of focusing on education and having classrooms filled with kids that actually want to be there (instead of causing chaos for their teachers day in and day out) and reading about how the Government of Quebec has opted to try and legislate away the fundamental human right of freedom of assembly because they can't get their way with regards to imposing higher tuition fees without (SHOCKER) students opposing the idea and protesting it for almost 14 weeks now, but our society is a mess and getting worse every day for an abundance of reasons, which I will delve into.

Where to begin....hmmmm. Well lets start with something simple like our white hot real estate market. When I say white hot, I mean we are seeing absolute dumps (as in homes that are just horrid, need work, LOADS of work, and have been poorly maintained) having upwards of 10 different offers for them because of where they are situated; Mississauga, Oakville, Burlington and Toronto. These 4 major markets are seeing homes sell for hundreds of thousands above their original asking price simply because of where they are located. Yes, in the real estate business the 3 most important things are location, location, location. I get it. But when some homes are selling for as much as $1 MILLION above asking (!?!?!?!), then there are problems with our real estate market. It is the same problem that we have in many other areas of our society: Greed.

I want to touch on our schools and this ridiculous article I read in the Globe and Mail about how some school are now including a BMI (Body Mass Index) rating and/or the childs' weight along with their report card. I would like to know where they (the schools and school boards I mean) found the right and rationale to start doing this I would love to know because I am not sure how this fall into their job description. Teachers are supposed to educate and I guess you could make the argument that they are trying to instill healthy eating habits and whatnot but by sending home a report card telling parents that their kids are to fat for their own health just seems like such a cop out by the school.

There are a bunch of societal causes for kids being overweight. Lets go over a few. First of all, the parents of many of our kids today are being underpaid by greedy corporations that would rather cut staff and pay their money hungry CEO's millions in bonuses then to actually pay their front line staff a fair salary that actually increases with the cost of living. 30 years ago, although it was difficult to do, you could still have a 1 working parent family (while the other parents stayed home to help raise the child (or children). They could own a home, a car (maybe 2) have a dog and have 2 maybe 3 kids as well. That's simply impossible today with the cost of everything having skyrocketed since the early 1980's.

Because parents today are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet, they are forced to make tough choices about many things. Now, you see both parents forced to work (just to pay the mortgage). In many cases, this means that the parents are around nearly as much as they should be to do things such as take their kids out for a daily walk or out into the yard to play with them. Even if they do have the time, in many cases they don't have the energy.

When it comes to groceries, in many cases, parents are opting to buy in bulk or the cheapest available because of their budgets. Guess what that means? More fatty foods higher in calories and cholesterol and less time consuming to make. Cheap and fast is what they want because the companies that they slave away for are forcing them to work harder, demanding more out of them all for the same pay. Our parents of today are overworked and underpaid while being overstressed and under appreciated.

Which takes me to yet another of the reasons our society is deteriorating as fast as it has been over the last 15 to 30 years: Corporate Greed. The turning point that everyone seems to point to is the 1986 movie "Wall Street" and it's main villain, Gordon Gekko. His now infamous quote, as he gave a speech to a graduating class of Business students was "Greed is Good". That seemed to sink in to not only the fictional students in the movie but to an entire generation of business leaders who have pounced on that concept and embraced it enthusiastically. Just look at some of the gawdy bonuses that have been paid out to CEO's (even to those that were running companies into the ground) and you will see what I am talking about.

Yes, CEO's should be paid more for keeping a company making money (I guess) and even more if they increase the bottom line but when you are paying your front line staff peanuts and they are the ones that directly contribute to your bonus being so large, the least you could do as a good CEO is cut your bonus down to a more manageable and fair number (do you really need $23 million as a bonus? Even half of that would be sufficient to reward your "work") and divide the excess among your top performers as an added bonus. An extra $5000 for a frontline staff member means a hell of a lot more then it would to a CEO.

Here's an example of what I mean. The CEO of RBC (when I used to work there) made a bonus of about $11 million one year. Did he really need it to be so much? Probably not. Let's say he decided instead to accept only a $2 million bonus. Lets take the other $9 million and see what we could do with that. Remember that this is a bank that makes about $1 Billion per fiscal quarter (every 3 months) and has about 52000 employees in total. Frontline staff make up about 65% of that staff so that's about 33800 employees. Not everyone is a top performer obviously but lets give an estimate that maybe 25% of those 33800 are top performers (what used to be 94% of target and above). That would be about 8450 staff members. Dividing that $9 million among those 8450 staff members as a bonus would give each of them an additional $1065. Not too bad for someone who is generally earning around that much every 2 weeks, on top of their yearly bonus as well.

Lets go a little further and instead of rewarding people with 94% and above, lets only reward those who were at 125% and above. Of those 8450 people, you are looking at probably about 33% of them who would be above that percentile, or 2789 employees. The Top of the Top, the Cream of the Crop as it were. People who really busted their asses all year long in order to ensure that someone like Gord Nixon got his bonus (as well as their own). If you were to then narrow that field even further like this then you would have 2789 families each getting one member being paid an additional bonus of $3227.

Now you tell me, after breaking it don like that, who needs that $9 million more, 2789 staff members of his own company that are barely making $30000 a year as front line staff, working overnight hours, extended hours, being shat upon by managers to do more with less, being told now that their eating habits and the groceries they buy for their families are making their kids fat, having more and more stress placed upon them from all possible corners or someone like CEO Gord Nixon of RBC who does nothing more then go globe trotting on RBC travel expenses, gives speeches about how great RBC is and about banking in general while all these lower staff have to do more with less. He gets huge bonuses he hardly earns while his frontline call center and branch staff have to fight to earn every penny they do on a daily basis. That is corporate greed at it's finest. Remember that he has been earning those bonuses for about a decade now. Should really tell you something.

Having been in the financial field for over a decade now, I totally understand how some people feel about bankers and banking. Just remember that its not the teller or the call center staff member that is making the big bucks. The person you speak to is not someone that has any power whatsoever to change things at a bank. The best way to create change is to do something I used to think was think was a waste of time: Protest, demonstrate, use the power of the people to enact changes.

Forcing the Government to use their power for more then just forcing people back to work with anti-striking legislation is the best way to get things done. Just look at the 14 weeks of student demonstrations going on in Quebec. They have gone a bit too violent mind you but the fact that those pansies in the Quebec Legislature opted instead of negotiating to attempt to make public assemblies illegal tells you all you need to know about how stupid some government officials can be. They are so hard headed with their ideology that after enacting this law, they have drawn wide ranging criticism from lawyers, other politicians and even the UN and Amnesty International. Kind of scary how the power of the people has single handedly embarrassed the hell out of the Government of the Province of Quebec, yet they refuse to back down. I don't see them surviving the next election with the way they have handled themselves with this situation.

But again, this is a fight about money and greed and how corporations, in this case the Quebec Government, is trying to making education more expensive at a time when the only thing that gives the poor an opportunity to climb out of their economic situation is higher education. In the last 15 years, tuition hikes have been the norm in Ontario. I remember when it was about $3500 for a full course load at U of T, Mississauga campus in 1997. Fast forward to this September and I saw some students coming in to pay tuition amounts of twice that amount. The students of Quebec are fighting to keep their tuition the lowest in the country because, having seen what they saw in Ontario and in London, England (which had massive tuition hikes just 2 years ago and massive protests to go along with it).

We shouldn't be chastising the students for protesting what many today would view as modest tuition hikes.What we should be doing is applauding them for trying to stop Quebec from following down the slippery slope that this Province has already traveled along and sees itself at now where higher learning is slowly becoming only available to the rich or those of us who are willing to go into severe debt just at the possibility of a better job down the road. Just ask all those currently out of work, recently graduated teachers how they feel about being severely in debt without a job in their field of choice.

It is time we started to make our voices matter in our society. It is time we began to make a difference in our society and stop allowing big corporations to do and say and get away with whatever the hell they want.The problem is that we are disjointed. We are selfish and can't seem to see anything that matters to anyone other then ourselves. Even this student protest in Quebec, which should be seen by many in that province as a wake up call to fight against government fee hikes, is being seen by many (mind you the "people" are being represented in random polls conducted on the corporate buck) as having dragged on too long and people want them to just shut up already and go away.

We are not united enough as a people to do anything about what is going on around us and that is why the Western world is struggling. We have splintered into special interest groups based on race, religion, sex and sexual orientation to the point where we can't even agree long enough to vote in a strong Majority government (that fact Prime Minister Harper was able to achieve one last year was more about the failure of the Liberals and their pathetic leadership then it was about a powerful message resonating with the bulk of voters as can be seen by the sheer number of people that still don't trust Harper and his politics).

The best way to describe our current situation is to think about the best way to defeat an enemy in war. The best way to do is to first divide then conquer. Well, we are about as divided as we could possibly be right now, all that's lacking is a conqueror. We won't have a single conqueror come upon us and take us over. Instead we are slowly being forced into indentured servitude by the greed of corporations and their leaders. They have been following the mantra of "Gekko" to a tee and are now upon the precipice of destroying the middle class completely just to meet their unmentionable goal: Of attaining more. More of everything. Just as long as its more. Selfishness dominates the day now and there isn't a whole heck of a lot we can do about it.