lunch eaters-post 2 of 2 today

LUNCH EATERS-post 2 of 2 today

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Way back when Orlov was just a guy writing a blog rather than a Global Publishing Empire too important to communicate with the proletariat for mere pennies in compensation, he came up with the term “lunch eaters” to describe American business leaders.  Perhaps the Russians had a similar term for front line management, like “vodka swillers”, denoting the singular activity they seem to be engaging in rather than what their job titles suggested.  American managers seemed to only ever be busy with business lunches.  The second boss I ever had as a manager ( the military doesn’t count as junior NCO was a position fraught with inactivity, more a pay grade than position, at least in practice ) was pretty gay over business lunches.  He had them almost every day, and if a fellow small business owner wasn’t available I would get drug along.  After a time it became pretty obvious it was more about slurping coffee, chugging cigarettes and shoving mediocre food than it was about conducting business.

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And that wasn’t even a corporate lunch meeting but the Main Street version.  I can’t image the indigestion caused by the overuse of the Suits lingo mixed with the food.  Back when air fair was cheap, safe ( it might still be safer than highway travel, but it isn’t as safe compared to historic air travel, due to the differed maintenance and lesser quality parts and other cost cutting measures.  We are most assuredly back in the Rail Baron days of yore when workers were a disposable commodity and customer deaths were the cost of doing business with corporates ) and trouble free as terrorism was directed at the front line in the communists war-Other Places-rather than at the Intelligence Communities fellow countrymen, I was hanging around LAX waiting for a flight and had the life altering, mind melting displeasure of seeing the spectacle of a gaggle of businessmen trading high speed corporate gibberish with each other, competing seemingly as to whom the Brown Lips Award would be bestowed upon for the best jingoistic presentation.  I would imagine that a Pentagon table full of lesser officers pretending to communicate, awash in acronyms and Politically Correct code words, would sound about the same.

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Perhaps a convention of college professors used to sound like this ( prior to schools of lower learning turning into a contest to see which pasty white professor could kiss the most Black ass trying to save their jobs, no pride left as they know their subset specialty knowledge has no application in the real world except blog publishing with its much lesser pay.  Thank Sweet Baby Jesus for graciously allowing me to cultivate a poor attitude so as to curtail any college attendance so I didn’t follow my love of social sciences into that death trap ).  All junior positions blatantly jockeying for power positions by attempting to appear the most knowledgeable.  Certainly the military has to be like this.  When officers are as incompetent as ours were, the larger the unit the more obvious, how else do you curry favor if not for performance than the appearance of performance.  Busy placing fresh coats of paint on the false fronts of prop Potemkin villages. 

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What exactly do middle layers of management do?  They are supposed to manage information up and down the chain of command.  The old railroads formed according to this military system of command to organize more efficiency and increase profit making.  Each schedule and freight organization increased productivity.  This was a very good way of organizing a manufacturing economy, with its layers of parts and movement incomprehensible to a single mind.  Now, with computers, in theory, none of this manpower is necessary.  Yet you still have the layers of management.  Why?  Perhaps because leaders at all levels of the corporate structure are so idiotic that they are just playing the parts they learned in business school, themselves seventy five years out of date.  Perhaps the only role of leaders is to micromanage since few jobs are all that essential and all jobs must be molded to that business school façade of essentiality.  Form over function.  Perhaps because business is so inefficient and wasteful nowadays it doesn’t even matter what the Suits do as long as they look busy.

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Noise passes for action.  Now, to travel back to yesteryear and borrow another phrase, if The Business Of America Is Business, and our business is poorly run, little more than asset stripping operations which by definition is a one-off event, can we extrapolate to conclude that the entire organization of empire is very poorly run indeed?  I mean, forget the multiple Trillions with a T in military spending unaccounted for ( I tend to believe those WERE accounted for but we are not entitled to know for what-such as, they were merely bribe monies for the declared enemy to not try too hard to defeat us militarily ), and just focus on your corner of the world where every organization on every level ( even our towns Food Bank, with three total levels of organization from worker bee to board of directors is hideously mismanaged.  Unless the whole point was to bilk the government and corporations of high un-entitled management salaries, then it might be considered a success ) simply does not work properly under any definition.

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How do you take a small library and see it to financial insolvency?  The building is paid for.  You have a budget.  The budget includes salary, electric and books.  The budget is cut, you cut books and hours.  How is it always in financial mismanagement?  It isn’t even a retail business, which have to worry about lack of customers ( lack of library patrons is used as the excuse to cut budgets, granted, but that isn’t an immediate cause of closure ).  How do you screw that kind of stuff up?  An explanation would of course be that since everything surrounding you is dysfunctional, even when you bring common sense management to an organization to restore its solvency, you are not allowed to successfully implement it.  My point here today is that with your own eyes you are witnessing the Titanic crew all out on the deck watching the iceberg.  Nobody is at the controls.  It is as plain as the nose on your face.  If bad management is rewarded and good management is forbidden, it isn’t an absence of adequate leadership we are seeing but a systematic failure which is separate from that aspect.

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You know what I’m going to say.  Energy.  You can try to ignore it, like a doctor looks at a bulimic and prescribes pills for the symptoms, completely ignoring the malnutrition and psychosis underlining causes, but that kind of ignorance is bliss only for the physician.  For the patient, not so much.  It isn’t because we are running out of energy, it is because we have already run out of enough conventional high yield energy.  That ship sailed in 2005, and all the fuss trying to fix a date for total energy peak-unconventional low energy being the main source of fuel now, even to some large degree in Saudi Arabia- is as productive as closing the barn door after the livestock got out.  Peak Oil is already baked into the cake because our entire global infrastructure ( to include banking and physical structure ) was built on cheap, abundant oil and we are only just slowing the decline with all of our efforts however misplaced and foolish they are.  You don’t expect a system built on one energy source to function on another, do you?  Try putting gasoline in your diesel and get back to me on that.

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So we have a system of management built to manage a energy growth system, and the energy is not growing anymore ( even if the gross amount is increasing the net amount delivered is decreasing-follow the BTU’s.  Just like human organization is all about the food, systems organization is all about the surplus of resources or lack thereof.  No different, and even ultimately using the same fuel.  What started our modern banking system?  The flood of excess silver and gold into Europe, eventually making its way not to the Spanish government but to the Dutch who created an empire by banking.  Britain successfully picked up that organization and built their own empire with it-it wasn’t industrialism as much as central banking that fueled them although coal didn’t hurt.  But colonialism by industrial gunpowder armies, funded by the bank rather than the Crown, started it ) but contracting and is it any wonder we don’t know how to manage the opposite of what our system was?  Just as you can’t get a Soviet manager to take over a capitalism based firm, you can’t teach managers to manage growth and then have them take over shrinking economies.  And, to be fair, it wasn’t all that hard to manage growth.  Contraction without systematic support is a lot harder. 

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How easy is it to manage your household budget if you get a raise every year?  Compared to how hard it is to manage as your hours are cut and the cost of living increases with no matching compensation?  That is our economy.  Decreasing energy to manage a high energy economy.  And, as I keep harping on but I don’t think most of you want to accept it, the PetroDollar arrangement is going off the rails and that is the only thing keeping this mess together right now.  Even the intentional money pit of financing fracking can’t continue if we can’t get free oil from overseas.  The dollar isn’t worth spit once we can’t print debt for others to buy oil with.  Our empire would have crashed with the defeat in Vietnam, as the Soviets did after Afghanistan, if it hadn’t been for Kissinger et all and the PetroDollar arrangement.  We just shifted from industrial army colonialism to oil economy colonialism.  That is endangered as oil supplies contract.  Mismanagement isn’t causing our economic problems, it is merely indicative. 

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