Societies that have realized in themselves the meaning of human existence in all its fullness do not exist at the moment.
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Now let us move to Obama’s statements on the questions of economical justice in social life.
In 1980, the average CEO made forty-two times what an average hourly worker took home. By 2005, the ratio was 262 to 1. Conservative outlets like the Wall street Journal editorial page try to justify outlandish salaries and stock options as necessary to attract top talent and suggest that the economy actually performs better when America’s corporate leaders are fat and happy. But the explosion in CEO pay has had little to do with improved performance. In fact, some of the country’s most highly compensated CEOs over the past decade have presided over huge drops in earnings, losses in shareholder value, massive layoffs, and the under funding of their workers pension funds.
What accounts for the change in CEO pay is not any market imperative. It’s cultural. At a time when average workers are experiencing little or no income growth, many of America’s CEOs have lost any sense of shame about grabbing whatever their pliant, handpicked corporate boards will allow. Americans understand the damage such an ethic of greed has on our collective lives, in a recent survey, they ranked corruption in government and business, and greed and materialism, as two of the three most important moral challenges facing the nation (“raising kids with the right values” ranked first). Conservatives may be right when they argue that the government should not try to determine executive pay packages. But conservatives should at lease be willing to speak out against unseemly behavior in corporate boardrooms with the same moral force, the same sense of outrage, that they direct against dirty rap lyrics.” (p.62)
Is there any Russian politician that has publicly brought up such questions? – No, there isn’t
Publicly discussing greedy ethics of ‘elite” of Russia and its basic flawed morality of praising itself and other hedonism – representatives of “elite” in Russia (inc. politicians) tend to avoid, although in doing that they can theatrically reproach so-called “social greed” – discontent of those who did not receive “elite” positions. So-called “social greed” in fact exists, because as it has been known or centuries, a large part of slaves are not dreaming about freedom, but about having their own slaves. However, reproach os social greed should not replace discussions of issues of justice and reproach of other forms of injustice, besides the “social greed”. In particular this concerns economic aspects:
Justice manifests in the fact that statistics of distribution of finances in executive level of sate and business should not be different from statistics of financial statistics in all other fields. Justice in this sense is really economically functional despite the Wall Street Journal’s opinion that effective management is army of “fat and nice” executives, and to make sure they are nice and fat their incomes must be many times the average salary.
Besides, there no biological or cultural objective reasons to lift top executives and their families according to their consumption above social statistics to the heights unreachable to the rest of the society.
However Russian political “elite” is fundamentally against public discussion of problem of social justice. Here is a recent example: Once a well-respected Russian newspaper “Vedomosti” published an article discussing injustice in relationship between bureaucracy and common people in conditions of crisis, it immediately received a warning “on necessity of strict obedience to the law of counteraction to extremism” from Federal Service on Supervision over the Legality in the Sphere of Mass Communications (). It seems that for Russian political ‘elite’ it is rather easy and common practice to issue a law of extremism counteraction. But it is a lot harder to raise and discuss the matter of social justice and expressions of injustice of system of social relations, inherited from soviet times, on the congress of “United Russia” and then take real binding decisions and implement them in life – for the ‘elite’ and its ‘entourage’, from party mass gathered at the congress. In such conditions issuing orders on “necessity of obiding the law of counteracting extremism” means purposefully charge revolutionary situation. And therefore it is those people who issued this order who should be taken to court.
More to the point:
From purely managerial point of view, price of a good in conditions of somewhat free market is a measure of its defecit. This also concerns the price of qualified personnel in all industries.
In other words, if a society is ready to pay executives according to “the higher in hierarchy – the deeper is the gap between your salary and average one” principle, then such society is experiencing an acute deficit of effective managers. Sittuation is aggravated by the fact that various aferists, that neither are able to nor are willing to learn to do anything useful, can successfully penetrate managerial field driven by greed for high incomes and irresponsibility in the face of their employees and hard workers.
This is exactly the reason, according to Obama, why it was namely high-paid executives that made the worst mistakes in their company’s management
It is no surprise that Barack Obama noticed this – at least for those who are familiar with articles of Concept of Social Security. They described this phenomenon already back in 1994 in the paper of IP of USSR “Short course…” giving examples of USA, then GDR and Japan.
However such materials are only an obstacle for Russian bureaucrats and top executives crushed by their ethics of greed in their work of dividing the budget and obtaining gigantic salaries on the basis of the laws taken by themselves and in their task of extortion of bribes.
And we repeat:
Subject of justice in specifics of displayed injustice – is also a banned subject for public discussion amongst all representatives of “elite” (political, corporate, “intellectual”) in post-sovier Russia, including editors of mass media under their control.
And if in non-public circle of representatives of political “elite” they were forced to address the issue of injustice in its full, then instead of dialogue and talking to the point we would receive only cheap talk of the sort “those people deal with increased responsibility, and therefore to reward them for taking such burden we have to pay substantially higher salaries”
But when directly asked “which of those bearers of “enormous responsibility” has actually been called up on their mistakes? Which of them have actually paid for making mistakes of strategic gravity?“ those adepts of inflated salaries get stunned, often turning to hysterical remarks that “repeats of Stalinism must not be allowed”. And even less often some of them start mumbling something incoherent on “guilty conscience” and mistakes they have made (M. Gorbachev, B. Yeltsin, A. Yakovlev, A. Tchubais, E. Gaidar, B. Berezovsky and many others – those are just victims of their conscious???). But agree with us, please, that real victims and real tortures of guilty conscience are actually beneficial and priceless and therefore cannot be financially estimated and paid and therefore – super-incomes of top executives as compensation for “damages caused by guilty conscience” are inappropriate.
Besides, in such extent of income comparison of top executives and other people manifests deviation from God. In particular, Koran clearly expresses on the choice of leaders: “Follow those who do not ask you for reward and who is on the straight path!” (Sura 36:20) – in other wards managers should be as righteous as possible and do not ask for any consumption privileges from the rest of society.
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From above arguments it is clear that in public discussion of the problems of social justice Obama, if necessary, can beat any Russian politician (Putin, Medvedev, Zuganov, etc) either because for them social justice is a banned topic because of their “elite’-corporate obligations and deeply rooted psychological blocks, or because their understanding of the problem is very vague because they see the world from the window of their corporate cars and luxury apartments and from behind the backs of bodyguards, living in the conditions that everything they need is already prepared for them and paid from state funds.