girldetective

Extra! Extra! Exxon just released their profit for the last 3 mos = 11.6 billion. This was less than Wall Street expected.

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Fed minimum wage as of today = $6.55.

As of 2006, Exxon's corporate documents filed with the SEC revealed their CEO's retirement deal and his $51.1 million paycheck in 2005. It was equivalent to $141,000 a day, nearly $6,000 an hour. I dont have figures for current CEO compensation.

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__________________
As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons...be cheerful; strive for happiness - Desiderata

Cynthetiq

Extra Extra!!!!! Investors are doing well in some sectors and markets!

Yep if you're got any oil holdings it's great!!! I'm glad that I have some in my portfolio! I can share in some of the wealth that the CEO has generated.

Lesson: Don't be an unskilled, uneducated worker, if you must save some money and invest it in stocks and bonds, not this frivilous "I'm going to invest in a computer..." kind of statement. Words and actions are important. Instead of squandering money on depreciating items and services, save your money even if it's $100 every year. Get in the habit of paying yourself first and and saving money.

Now some of you will say, "But Cynthetiq, how on earth can someone save money when they only get paid minimum wage?" Well, it's really quite simple, they somehow figure it out. They move to where the opportunity is better for them. They get skills that pay better. Last year overseas Filipino workers in the United Arab Emirates alone remitted $.5 billion last year and sent back an estimated $15 billion last year, Mexico reached an all time high of $23.98 billion last year. Understand what the remittances mean, they SAVED money and sent it back to their homeland. They still had to house, feed, and transport themselves to and from a job.

You reap what you sow.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

roachboy

explain to me, loquitor, how to disentangle specialization and deskilling please.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

girldetective

Reuters, 04/10/08:

Exxon also disclosed the 17 shareholder proposals that will be presented at its annual meeting on May 28, all of which the company suggested shareholders vote against.

Those included seven proposals about the company's environmental policies and impact and three proposals on Exxon's executive compensation.

__________________
As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons...be cheerful; strive for happiness - Desiderata

Cynthetiq

And the best part is that the shareholders get to vote on the proposals. A number of votes are required in order to pass the resolution so it isn't as simple as a majority wins.

You may not like it, but there you are. Be a stockholder. Even one share gives you one vote as to the direction of the company. OneShare.com has a listing of stocks you can purchase Exxon-Mobile for $168 and it comes in a nice frame.

But you're really getting very far far away from a minimum wage discussion...

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

roachboy

it's becoming funnier and funnier that the just can't keep the working people in the picture

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

loquitur

Isn't specialization an increase in skill? at least in a specific area? I'm mystified as to why you asked this. Is it your contention that we should be raising our own food, making our own clothes and building our own homes, as our ancestors did 10,000 years ago? that was nonspecialized skill but I'm not sure it's such a good idea.

Cynthetiq

Actually lots of investors are workers. Many people who have 401(k), 403(b),457, traditional IRA, and Roth IRA should be quite interested in the performance of stock markets and sectors. Union members have a vested interest in the stock market. The working man has a very big stake in this. Minimum wage earner? Maybe not initially. I recall reading about these things when I was making $4.35/hr. and knowing that when I had the opporunity I would take it. I would seize it. And low and behold when the time came to actually put money into a 401(k) that was matched up to 6% by my employer.... I did nothing with it.

I was 23 at the time, retirement is far away. Did I save any money? No, not at all, why? Because I wanted those new shiney gadgets, games, clothes, and dinners. I have nothing from that period in time to show for it save for a few tshirts that are very thread bare.

But again, people will cry out,"That's good for you Cynthetiq, but what about those other people out there... it's not about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." You are right, it isn't ALWAYS about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but I guarantee that if you did the simplest things as exampled by http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/tilted-...frugality.html you'd find you're slowly ahead of the game.

Again, I'll cite that there are people who've come to this country with little to nothing but some skills and determination and they seem to as a collective send BILLIONS of dollars back to their homeland.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

roachboy

specialization is complicated, loquitor, because it changes with the type of work---what holds the various definitions together is the fragmentation of tasks, fragmentation of information. routinization of a small task. repetition. repetition repetition. loss of control over work. in skilled areas, it is a diminuition of range, but can be ambiguous as to outcome--at semi-skilled and unskilled areas, specialization is in the main the logic of the assembly line.

in academic work, the main obvious symptom that can be linked to the above is the fragmentation of information--but the social position retains considerable autonomy at the level of skills within that---shot through with other problems that are institution-specific.

lawyering--i dunno, like alot of activities, the index of the extent to which your organization is capitalist in its organization is a matter of scale.

and it does not follow from posing a critique of a particular capitalist practice or form that the idea is shake the etch-a-sketch and send all those sand particles zipping backward in time to some lot as 10th century peasant.

===============================================
cyn---it's really hard to know whether when you write these things you do it for the pleasure of repeating the horatio alger story or if there's something else: what your position most clearly comes down to is that story-line and capitalism is its necessary
background.

so you define your main character----the perky abstraction "the guy who shows up here with 2 bucks"---and you endow your perky abstraction with every petit bourgeois virtue---you make vague reference to the narrative pattern of pilgrims progress---and so the adequately virtuous perky abstraction was able to reach the promised land because endowed with every petit bourgeois value. and so the context that enables the rise of the righteous to the promised land must be rational, otherwise it would not favor the perky righteous abstraction's trajectory. and because the existing order is "demonstrated" in this circular manner to be rational--because it favors the outcomes that you say it favors---then is must necessarily be legitimate.

because in the end what is real is rational because it can't be otherwise.

once motoring about in the bourgeois promised land, your perky abstraction can be linked to other features like pension funds in order to effectively claim--not argue, but claim---that the Moral Order of the Capitalist Universe which you demonstrated through the stories of your perky abstraction holds Benefits and Financial Redemption for all who are possessed of Adequate Virtue.

there's really nothing to be said about these horatio alger stories.
they can be based on "real life" but their appeal as stories has to be intuitive---they either seem to signify or they're just stories. if they don't signify for you who reads them, there's really nothing to say---that's a nice story. it might be well written, it might not be. it might have been fun to read, it might not have been.

but these nice stories are not arguments. they aren't about argument at all. they're just nice stories.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Cynthetiq

I don't claim for it to be legitimate, I'm stating that it's in the realm of possibility because there are people that it has happened to in better odds and greater numbers than those who have won the lottery in all 50 states combined. I'd even extrapolate based on the remittances that it's not endemic to the US, but anywhere that there is the ability for someone to fairly setup a business get employment, from street food vendor to white collar worker.

So while many of these other people who read "stories" how people are being put down by the man in various states of skills, dress, and nationalities, there are other stories of men in various state of skills, dress, and nantionalities, that do make a better life for themselves and their families. Just in remittances alone, it's almost $40 billion dollars last year, there's no documentation to show how much they keep for themselves.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

roachboy

ok, but there's a trick in the story: you effectively counsel that people adapt themselves practically to whatever their situation happens to be. if you "live within your means" you constrain your actions so they correspond to the limits symmetrical with a particular social position. that position can be determined by any social arrangement, it doesn't matter which. if you constrain your actions in this way and live within them, you adopt a set of practices---which, repeated, are rituals---and you live within them--you repeat them---so you operate in a pascal-mode: in the wager, the problem is that someone does not believe there is a god. the other voice tells that someone: figure the odds: probability will show you that it's only reasonable to bet there is a god. that someone figures the odds and arrives at this conclusion. but, that someone says, i am so constructed that i cannot believe. well, the other voice says, you have to act like you believe--adopt the rituals, condition the flesh, control the desires--and eventually this will work on your as things work on animals---you'll condition yourself--and once you condition yourself, you'll forget you don't believe.

what comes through in the stories, then, is an argument that what is proper is that one "know one's place" and condition oneself into accepting that place---this is an interpretation of the emphasis you place on "living within your means"----and that those who do not know and stay in their proper place are Problems. they violate the moral code that, somehow, gets imputed to the overall system when the fact of the matter is that this sense of moral code follows from conditions that your perky abstraction imposes on him or herself.

so the argument you present is an argument that capitalism represents a moral order.

i don't buy it.

i think that's a better way of saying what i was trying to say above.
i'm still not sure it's clear because it is early in the morning and i am still drinking that consciousness-trigger we collectively name coffee.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Cynthetiq

actually, it doesn't require that anyone believe anything. The idea of belief, means something to the akin of trying to see the fairy man hiding in the clouds. No, there's no fairy man here. It's simple, you can SEE that this has happened to people. There's not wait for death to find out if there's god or afterlife.

It's simple, if you don't spend $1 today and everyday, after 20 days you have $20. You can not believe it if you like, but if you try it, you'll see you'll have $20. If $1 is too much, you can even try it with less, $.50, $.25, $.10, $.01. After 20 days you'll have 20 times more. It's really rather simple. There's no laws, economic theories, intellicutal discussions of poverty, captitalistic versus socialisitc discussions. It's simple fact.

In fact, you can even stop at the first day, today I didn't spend $1. That's $1 more than what I would have had if I normallly would have spent all the money in my pocket.

You aren't praying to have money to buy that larger than 1 paycheck item. You can even see it in the old idea of layaway in department stores. Lay away with no credit, no interest. It was paid for in installments, no different than actively saving for no reason.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.