Thursday, December 04, 2008

Global Biz Cabal Theory debunked?

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Well, it's pretty clear. For me 5/5 small businesses I've worked for/done business with I've been screwed over on payday or had the pay severely cut arbitrarily. Anecdotally this seems to be the case for many of my friends. I'm tempted to go to some forum and make a public query to see how common this phenomena is, but that'd be far too unscientific

However, If it's as common as I think it is, you'd think this would be played up in the PR press because it's all to the advantage of "big business"/corporations to drive labour to their door. But there's no play on this story at all in the media. Which, to my mind, proves that all the conspiracy horsesh1t about the "1lluminati" and big business conspiracies is exactly that: horsh1t. Because it's not in any particular industry, it's a cross-field phenomena. So any PR utilisation of this would require cross-industry collaboration. Which we're not seeing for such an advantageous topic.

Is it the case that once again the conspiracy theorists who claim big, top echelon business are all in cahoots together are suffering from what I call "the eye of the Panda"? Looking at the cute black circles around a Panda's eye, application of "natural logic" will make people swear that such a design is so incongruous, it must be intentionally placed. It seems conspiracy theorists probably fail to see that things happen through the statistical preponderance of a million small selfish actions of individuals. From what I've seen of the inside of Corporations, I'm amazed they don't go bankrupt on the spot (oh... they are!)

My most relish-able example is Fortis Bank. I supported them in Japan in 2002. And every time I went there I was totally bemused and would bring them up in conversation later in bars. "I go there and there's just 12 people sitting in cubicles with a laptop. They don't seem to be anything special and I don't find them especially more intelligent than I am but these guys are responsible for investing and making this bank all their billions! All from the comfort of a cubicle!" People dismissed my musing as jealousy of rich people. "There's something they're doing that you're not understanding", they'd say mostly.

My arrogance refused to believe they were any better than me at all (hey, I was right!) , so my conclusion was that once you get big enough, its almost impossible not to make money (the game is rigged). I'm happy to see I was wrong. They went bankrupt. Those guys didn't know or do anything better than me (or anybody else for that matter), e.g. , since I picked the Ghana stock exchange index as a prime investment opportunity and it was near the no.1 global performer that year, (2006) I did a sh1t load better than them. As I said, anybody could outperform Fortis Bank frankly, it's just a matter of confidence.

(Ghana's also now just discovered oil near the city of Axim where they are... yep, predominantly muslim. Dog does seem to like those people..)

My theory on Ghana was based solely on the assumption that investors naturally undervalue any African country (rightly so in many cases, but racist-ly so in more cases) but my experience told me they were being unfairly slighted. I had two Ghanian's stay with me (excellent fellows!) and I asked them "What does Axim mean? Without looking up from their meal they both made chopping motions with their hands... "When de fella no good... we AXE 'IM widd da meat cleaver... (they were kidding). That's one place in Africa I could like to live. All Ghanaians I ever met were funny, decent, reliable people... unlike my experiences with their neighbours (whom Ghanaians loathe) the Nigerians where corruption and poverty is the cultural norm.

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