Greed Is Good (at TD Bank?)

TD Bank announced additional layoffs both in their US and Canadian operations. Listed below are some interesting online comments from observers who are not fond of TD Bank or the decision to layoff employees...
"Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank... Give a man a bank and he can rob the world."

"The TD Bank has been cutting staffing and FTE (full-time equivalent) hours in the branch banks for the past 4-5 years now. Ask any Branch manager that is willing to say something about this and you will find out that in the same of some "productivity" measure most branches barely have enough staffing compliment to keep a branch open according to the compliance standards set by the TD banks themselves."

"This is a problem that starts with shareholders. Shareholders expect a certain return; call it $1B in profits. Why $1B; so that their shares keep their value and the Corporation can keep paying dividends to keep them happy. When the bank can no longer meet expectations of their forecasts, they have to reduce their largest expense; salaries. The problem; Greed. Executives will do whatever they have to keep their jobs, and their 7 or 8 figure salaries. Do they need this much money; absolutely not, and they could keep ten, or hundreds of jobs if they each took a pay cut. But why would they? Their objectives are to meet very aggressive forecasts, in an economic climate that is quite unstable with potential downside. So, the question is why not set a more realistic forecast, that is risk weighted, and would not upset analysts and investors. Again, it comes to shareholder greed, and the need for executives to keep them happy. It's a circular loop, that at the end of the day, comes down to profits. Although profits are important to reinvest in the company, when you hold significant cash balances, you can have a bad year. Agreed? Certainly the case at the public company that I worked at!"

"TD makes billions but will give you next to zero return on your savings."

"Make $2B profit, cut staff. Disgusting."

"As a shareholder I do feel the expenditure of millions on consultants to tell a business that maintains its own HR department and has row after row of executives that could do an in-house review does not speak well of senior management that are paid to run the business. I doubt you will find the report suggested the layoff of any of the executive management or the rollback of any bonus programs for same. As for those laid off, they are but the victims of the CEO protecting his pay package."

" Restructuring 101, Rule 1: Restructuring begins at the level immediately below yourself."

"You work at TD, so does someone I know. My friend knows a whole whack of people at the lower levels that have been shown the door or told their job will no longer exist.
TD has been cutting, cutting and cutting for some time -- and yet the "goals" for the front line staff have been increased substantially -- my friend says there are at lot of really stressed out, really unhappy employees. And of course a lot of these back-office function cuts that have been going on only make it worse, since now it takes forever to reach someone or get something done from the back-office. I also know a person in the mutual fund industry - his comment is that TD is by far the slowest when it comes to transferring monies -- once again, back-office cuts. Obviously these are only some of the stores -- I have a lot of other ones that are a lot nastier, but suffice to say, this bank has cut too deep, and yet continues to cut further. I've been a client for over 30 years, and have a lot of TD shares, but I'm very seriously considering abandoning ship on both fronts. Not happy with the direction I see them going in."

The Republicans’ Incompetence Caucus by David Brooks

I am publishing David Brooks's article in its entirety. The italics below are mine. This article should be read by every intelligent voter and citizen in this country as it's dead on correct.

"The House Republican caucus is close to ungovernable these days. How did this situation come about?

This was not just the work of the Freedom Caucus or Ted Cruz or one month’s activity. The Republican Party’s capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly, over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals. Basically, the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.

By traditional definitions, conservatism stands for intellectual humility, a belief in steady, incremental change, a preference for reform rather than revolution, a respect for hierarchy, precedence, balance and order, and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured and responsible. Conservatives of this disposition can be dull, but they know how to nurture and run institutions. They also see the nation as one organic whole. Citizens may fall into different classes and political factions, but they are still joined by chains of affection that command ultimate loyalty and love.

All of this has been overturned in dangerous parts of the Republican Party. Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.

This produced a radical mind-set. Conservatives started talking about the Reagan “revolution,” the Gingrich “revolution.” Among people too ill educated to understand the different spheres, political practitioners adopted the mental habits of the entrepreneur. Everything had to be transformational and disruptive. Hierarchy and authority were equated with injustice. Self-expression became more valued than self-restraint and coalition building. A contempt for politics infested the Republican mind.

Politics is the process of making decisions amid diverse opinions. It involves conversation, calm deliberation, self-discipline, the capacity to listen to other points of view and balance valid but competing ideas and interests.

But this new Republican faction regards the messy business of politics as soiled and impure. Compromise is corruption. Inconvenient facts are ignored. Countrymen with different views are regarded as aliens. Political identity became a sort of ethnic identity, and any compromise was regarded as a blood betrayal.

A weird contradictory mentality replaced traditional conservatism. Republican radicals have contempt for politics, but they still believe that transformational political change can rescue the nation. Republicans developed a contempt for Washington and government, but they elected leaders who made the most lavish promises imaginable. Government would be reduced by a quarter! Shutdowns would happen! The nation would be saved by transformational change! As Steven Bilakovics writes in his book “Democracy Without Politics,” “even as we expect ever less of democracy we apparently expect ever more from democracy.”

This anti-political political ethos produced elected leaders of jaw-dropping incompetence. Running a government is a craft, like carpentry. But the new Republican officials did not believe in government and so did not respect its traditions, its disciplines and its craftsmanship. They do not accept the hierarchical structures of authority inherent in political activity.

In his masterwork, “Politics as a Vocation,” Max Weber argues that the pre-eminent qualities for a politician are passion, a feeling of responsibility and a sense of proportion. A politician needs warm passion to impel action but a cool sense of responsibility and proportion to make careful decisions in a complex landscape.

If a politician lacks the quality of detachment — the ability to let the difficult facts of reality work their way into the mind — then, Weber argues, the politician ends up striving for the “boastful but entirely empty gesture.” His work “leads nowhere and is senseless.”

Welcome to Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and the Freedom Caucus.

Really, have we ever seen bumbling on this scale, people at once so cynical and so naïve, so willfully ignorant in using levers of power to produce some tangible if incremental good? These insurgents can’t even acknowledge democracy’s legitimacy — if you can’t persuade a majority of your colleagues, maybe you should accept their position. You might be wrong!

People who don’t accept democracy will be bad at conversation. They won’t respect tradition, institutions or precedent. These figures are masters at destruction but incompetent at construction.

These insurgents are incompetent at governing and unwilling to be governed. But they are not a spontaneous growth. It took a thousand small betrayals of conservatism to get to the dysfunction we see all around."

Immoral U.S. Economy??

"We’ve witnessed over the last two decades in the United States a steady decline in the willingness of people in leading positions in the private sector – on Wall Street and in large corporations especially – to maintain minimum standards of public morality. They seek the highest profits and highest compensation for themselves regardless of social consequences.

CEOs of large corporations now earn 300 times the wages of average workers. Wall Street moguls take home hundreds of millions, or more. Both groups have rigged the economic game to their benefit while pushing downward the wages of average working people."

Robert Reich  America's Economy is Immoral

Feeding Your Mind

Just as there are a lot of choices to feed your stomach, there are a lot of choices to feed your mind. And just as there is too much junk food to clog your arteries and negatively impact your health, there is too much information junk (you see many of these from magazines at the cashier's station when you are ready to pay for your groceries.)

The internet is full of junk reading. Lies, rumors, slanders and inaccurate information abounds.

Too many people read articles and books that feed their prejudices and not enough materials that may open their minds and improve their judgments.

Hypocrisy of the Thumpers

Trump-ward, Christian Soldiers?

Let me get this straight. If I want the admiration and blessings of the most flamboyant, judgmental Christians in America, I should marry three times, do a queasy-making amount of sexual boasting, verbally degrade women, talk trash about pretty much everyone else while I’m at it, encourage gamblers to hemorrhage their savings in casinos bearing my name and crow incessantly about how much money I’ve amassed?

Seems to work for Donald Trump.

Polls show him to be the preferred candidate among not just all Republican voters but also the party’s vocal evangelical subset.

He’s more beloved than Mike Huckabee, a former evangelical pastor, or Ted Cruz, an evangelical pastor’s son, or Scott Walker, who said during the recent Republican debate: “It’s only by the blood of Jesus Christ that I’ve been redeemed.”

When Trump mentions blood, it’s less biblical, as Megyn Kelly can well attest.

No matter. The holy rollers are smiling upon the high roller. And they’re proving, yet again, how selective and incoherent the religiosity of many in the party’s God squad is.

Usually the disconnect involves stern moralizing, especially on matters sexual, by showily devout public figures who are then exposed as adulterers or (gasp!) closet homosexuals. I’d list all the names, starting with Josh Duggar and working backward, but my column doesn’t sprawl over an entire page of the newspaper.

Frank Bruni NYT 8-26-15

Smartest Thing I Read Today (GOP and Trump)

From  The New York Times article by Paul Krugman "Trump on down, the Republicans can't be serious."

For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.

It has long been obvious that the conventions of political reporting and political commentary make it almost impossible to say the obvious — namely, that one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. Or as the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier … unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.” It’s a party that has no room for rational positions on many major issues.

Can Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement.

Philly Strikes Again!

Sad to say, Hitchbot had the same chance that a Cowboy fan wearing a Tony Romo shirt at an Eagles pep rally in getting through Philadelphia unscathed.

Hitchbot traveled safely through Europe and Canada. Shame he tried to go through Philly...