The Bug In The Compensation Culture System
The “compensation culture” is often portrayed as the system whereby feckless, work-shy, grasping misfits exploit legal loopholes and institutions’ fears of legal action in order to extract payouts for imaginary or, indeed, entirely concocted wrongs.
It is a type of ‘money-for-nothing’ parasitism, which bleeds the state dry of the tax payments it receives from normal, hardworking British families.
There is, of course, another type of compensation culture, typified not by the staggering lout sloshing his tin of Special Brew, who then trips over his shoe laces and sues the local council for not keeping the pavements in proper repair; but by the suited executive who is promoted beyond their level of competence and then wants a handout when things go predictably (by anyone but them and their bosses) and spectacularly wrong.
When this happens within a company, you can say it is just a normal, sleazy commercial transaction. The two parties employ their respective lawyers and in the end one of them wins and the other one has to cough up. Effectively, it is nobody’s business but theirs.
Of course, it can also happen in circumstances where the taxpayer is again the one who has to cough up, as if both the funds and the patience of the ordinary working poor were both infinite, to be squandered by those who already, perhaps, have had too much of a good thing at other people’s expense.
Here is a little nugget, picked up from the increasingly dodgy annals of the National Health Service (NHS) which obviously carries a public health warning, as it is riddled with the usual encrusted clusters of disease which Gordon Brown and his mop-happy taskforce are even now trying to eliminate before the target for the “NHS Hospitals Do Not Have To Kill You” initiative are reached.
From The Telegraph:
The health chief blamed for a hospital superbug outbreak which killed 90 patients has rejected a pay-off of £75,000 and wants twice as much.
Rose Gibb left her job “by mutual consent” as chief executive of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust in Kent last October after a Healthcare Commission report criticised her handling of the C.difficile infection which hit 1,176 people in three hospitals between 2004 and 2006.
Over a two year period, about 1200 people were affected by the virulent bugs which are now seen as a necessary part of the NHS culture and just one of the risks you have to run if you want to be treated in a hospital. In Maidstone, the Kent and Sussex and Pembury hospitals, about 180 people either died or had their deaths brought forward by the rampant bugs which lurked and festered in filthy wards and other areas.
Here is a little test. Under these circumstances, what should happen to the manager who takes responsibility for this? Should they:-
A. Be given the sack and threatened with legal action?
B. Be given a massive payout?
So, the question is now how much money the manager should be given from taxpayers’ funds in lavish compensation for not being able to do their job.
Apparently £75 000 was considered the least acceptable amount by the NHS, but the culprit wants twice that.
Tony Charlton, the son-in-law of 86-year-old Florrie Field who died of C.diff in May 2006, said: “It shows the utter cynicism on her part - more than that, it is callous.
“Rosa Gibb should not have been allowed to go the way she did, being allowed to leave four days before the report came out.
“If she had stayed she would have been sacked for gross misconduct and then she would have got nothing.”
Yes, you could say that.
But surely, if you are struggling on a normal wage of about one sixth of the offered compensation and doing your job properly, but with no chance of ever seeing the dizzying rewards for incompetence that NHS managers take as their right, you must see that £150 000 is simply fair.
Surely you do. It might take you ten years to earn that, slaving away day in day out and doing your job well, but of course it is fair that someone gets that sort of money when they are useless.
No? Maybe you are just not suited to today’s compensation culture for the very rich.
Fake War On Fake Terror
The thing about The War On Terror is that nobody actually believes any of it any more.
Nobody, that is, except politicians who have become so embedded in the rhetoric that they are actually inhabiting their concocted fantasy world, like a mentally unhinged method actor; along with their undiscriminating cheerleaders, for whom a politician’s pronouncement is a substitute for independent thought.
Simon Jenkins, in an article in The Guardian, has it just right. He finishes with this:
It is leaders, not bombers, who have the power to balk the advance of freedom. Already those leaders have used the war on terror to introduce the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay and a $1.5 trillion war in Iraq. In Pakistan they have used it as an excuse for emergency rule, the imprisonment of senior judges, and the provocation of unprecedented insurgency in the north-west frontier territories. In Britain leaders have used the war as an excuse for 42-day detention without trial, the world’s most intrusive surveillance state, and not one but two contested military occupations of foreign soil.
This so-called war on terror has filled the pockets of those profiting from it. It has killed thousands, immiserated millions and infringed the liberty of hundreds of millions. The only rough justice it has delivered is to ruin the careers of those who propagated it. Tony Blair was driven to early resignation. Bush has been humiliated and Musharraf’s wretched rule brought close to an overdue end. It may be an ill wind that blows no good, but it is hardly enough.
jsbachUSA responds:
It is absolutely, 100%, completely, totally IMPOSSIBLE for any organization (country, state, city, etc.) to protect its members from random acts of violence.
Unfortunately most people are extremely uncomfortable with the fact they could randomly die tomorrow, so they are willing to believe any fool that will lie to them and tell them that the fool has a “plan” that will somehow magically prevent so-called terror.
The reality is, out of 6 BILLION plus people on this earth, the number of crazy people that are trying to kill others for irrational reasons, numbers in the low thousands! Yes, that is the bare truth, the people that are out to kill you are a minuscule number of the people on the earth and there is nothing you can do about it.
No matter how many innocent people you kill, those irrational folks will still exist and just may succeed in killing you or someone you know.
We need to start putting the deaths from so-called terrorism in a better perspective. Sure there were 3000 “innocent” people killed on 9/11 but several orders of magnitude more “innocent” people have been killed in response. The US has more people killed every year from drunk drivers than were killed on 9/11. Is it sad they are dead? yes, but not the huge tragedy that it has been portrayed as. Lets face it, ALL HUMANS DIE sooner or later. Some die fairly young and others die much older (95 for the LDS Church President), but everyone dies. Death is not a big deal and we shouldn’t make more of it than it is.
The sad news is it takes an extremely brave and intelligent leader to bluntly say … “yes it is unfortunate that those people died, and in the future others will die, but there is nothing we can do to prevent it and in fact anything we do will be counterproductive and lead to more deaths. The only thing we can do is quietly hunt down and kill any of the perpetrators that are still alive, since the killers are already dead, there is nothing we can do to them. Fighting any type of war will not solve the problem.”
Bush is an egotistical fool and was able to take advantage of many scared fools to create a phony “war” that while it has succeeded in getting lots of people killed has not actually accomplished anything useful. The irrational idiots are still running around and will randomly kill again until they are killed themselves.
Until the people of the US, Israel UK, etc. realize they can never be safe, they will continue to make stupid decisions that only make their world LESS SAFE.
Credulous Babbling Idiots
The tendency is that you believe what your parents say when you are a small child. You soon learn, however, that they do not really have any more of a clue than you and so start to look for more credible sources of knowledge.
This should be a continuous process in which we do not meekly accept any old drivel which is foisted on us from people who appear to hold positions of authority. If that were true, we would all believe the nonsense spouted by intellectually challenged fantasists like George Bush and Tony Blair as if it had even a remote connection with reality.
One problem is that we can look at precedent and say that the vast thrust of general opinion has been wrong plenty of times before. Before Galileo, we thought the sun revolved around the earth, so there seems to be forever room for crackpots to ponder the mysteries of the world in the hope that they might come up with some enlightened theory which has eluded all the other great thinkers hitherto.
Except, of course, that this is not what happens: they just come up with harebrained ideas which only appeal to other mentalists and nutters, but aided by the fact that the internet acts as a magnet for all these other delusionists to congregate, somewhat in the manner that governments always attract the dross of society to coalesce together.
So, over at The Telegraph, Damian Thompson runs through some of the conspiracy theories regarding 9/11, Creationism and Aids and how credulous people absorb some of this nonsense willy-nilly, as if by osmosis and the fact that it then dilutes real science and real knowledge and leads to people being unable to make rational and intellectually rigorous judgments.
Once the wonder of the internet wore off, we all saw that it is mainly a massive pile of doo-doo and nobody sensible takes it very seriously. It is a bit like the old illusion that financial institutions were run by incredibly clever and honourable people, when we now know they are controlled by psychopaths with a lemming mentality, whose only intellectual ability is doing sums quickly in their head.
The problem, though, is that we get stuff like this, from Damian Thompson’s ‘Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and False History’ :
The fingerprints of the alternative medicine lobby are all over the worst British health scare of recent years, in which thousands of parents denied their children the MMR triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella following the dissemination of flawed data linking it to autism. In that case, distrust of orthodox medicine increased the danger of a measles epidemic.
But that is nothing compared to the impact of medical counterknowledge in underdeveloped countries. In northern Nigeria, Islamic leaders have issued a fatwa declaring the polio vaccine to be a US conspiracy to sterilise Muslims: polio has returned to the area, and pilgrims have carried it to Mecca and Yemen. In January 2007, the parents of 24,000 children in Pakistan refused to let health workers vaccinate their children because radical mullahs had told them the same idiotic story.
These incidents cannot be dismissed as examples of medieval superstition: these people are not rejecting life-saving vaccines because they reject modern medicine, but because their leaders are spouting Islamic takes on Western conspiracy theories. Counterknowledge, with its ingrained hostility towards a political, intellectual and scientific elite, appeals to anti-American, anti-Western sentiment in the developing world.
My father used to say, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” and he was speaking from experience. I say, “Never believe what you are told”.
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