Nothing Personal, Just Business

OK.

I am giving fair warning to the reader: this will be a major rant, but it's my blog and I am entitled so if you have problems with that you can leave now. I hope my opinions expressed will have value, but I make no assertions or guarantees. Read on at your own choice.

So, I have been without employment or income except for unemployment compensation for over 1 year now. I was an employee for 8 years and a contractor for almost 2 with a major US based multinational company.  Due to mismanagement and flawed strategy, as has been the case with what seems to be most corporations anymore, myself and many others who had done valuable service to these companies were "terminated". I am quite intelligent, creative and have never in my life had a "bad review" by any of my managers. I have worked on 2 earth-imaging satellites for a company doing contracts for NASA. I have many skills and have yet to find a task I couldn't learn to accomplish any objective, though some may now take me longer to learn as I have gotten older. However in the final analysis, my skills and abilities were not wanted by this last corporation. In the current failed economy, opportunities are no longer extant.

For a long time I was a fervent believer in capitalism. I saved money as best I could and invested hoping that in time I could achieve a safe, comfortable future for myself and my family. I drank the Kool-Aid and believed in the dream. This Greatest Depression has destroyed that.

I have suspected for many years that it is the current distorted capitalist model that has failed. I lay a lot of the blame for this at several doorsteps. Probably foremost is the universities and their business schools. The idiotic stuff that I have seen and have been forced to deal with apparently is rooted in academic institutions such as Harvard Business School and corporations looking for the "secret formula" for success have embraced these totally non-real world theories and implemented them. Instead of focusing on creating products that have value and servicing the customers that want to purchase them, they devote huge amounts of resources and capital to indoctrinating those below them to achieve so-called "goals", "achieve quality", "milestones". "ethics", Kaizans and a plethora of (to me) useless and non-productive activities which ultimately fail to give the customer a product with value and make a profit for the company providing it. Satisfying the customer becomes a low priority.

So if I understand this,  and I'm so goddamned smart why can't those in power who are supposed to be so much smarter? I don't have an answer to that. It makes me nuts trying to figure it out. To get some mental peace I ultimately just figure it is part of some kind of mass insanity. Their supreme levels of greed (which apparently are insatiable) drive them forward taking and taking as much as they can possibly grab in some kind of terrible orgy of acquisition, trampling the people who make it possible and never reflecting for 1 second about the ramifications of their actions.


I feel that the capitalist model more resembles a Hieronymus Bosch painting of grotesquery than an ideal system for human beings to live under.

I will probably post more of my opinions about this in future, but I am exhausted now and very depressed.