“Are there no Work Houses?” Or, What C. Dickens Didn’t Tell You.

[The Whiskey Priest]

Most everyone knows of A Christmas Carol. A brief summary for those who do not: Scrooge the main character is a skinflint deluxe….who hates Christmas (baa humbug). Christmas eve he has the bejez scared out of him by Old Marley and three Ghost of Christmas, past, present and future. Also in the story is poor wage earner, Bob Cratchit and his family, which includes his young and disabled son, Tiny Tim.

Well after the experience with the Ghost Old Scrooge is a changed man. He has the spirit of Christmas in his heart….and keeps it well according to Dickens. That spirit flows over into helping Bob Cratchit with a raise and another lump of coal ( by the by Bob was freezing his arse off due to the rationing of coal to heat the office).

You get the picture; lost, confronted and redemption. It is a nice little story of a return of human kindness to instruct us? What Dickens didn’t tell us was what happened afterwards!

At the April Board meeting, while going over the financial reports, one of the members the Board notices the increase in expenses of one-farthing and a lump of coal. Scrooge explains these expenditures and the reason for them. Well, now Board members do not want to hear about human kindness, Spirit of Christmas, or Ghost. They begin to question whether or not Old Scrooge has begun to exhibit the signs of dementia (not uncommon when people start in on Ghost of Christmas, past, present and future).

The internal grumbling of the Board, grumble, grumble, damn social programs, giveaways, class warfare, grumble, grumble, soon reaches the ears of the stock-market. It wasn’t long before articles started appearing in the WSJ, alluding to mismanagement of SCROOGE Inc (SCI). Shortly thereafter L. Kudlow was advising his TV audience not to buy SCI and saying straight out that Senior Management at the firm had lost its marbles.

Soon the slide of SCI stock had turned into an avalanche and Old Scrooge was at his wits end of how to reverse the trend. Of course, about this time there were rumors of a hostile takeover, which did not help matters.

Old Scrooge decided that the time had arrived when he needed outside help. He placed a call and soon his office was filled with financial advisors. The financial advisors scurried about going over books, checking the coal bin and secretly auditing B. Cratchit. Time/motions studies were done, new strategic plans written, and finally a solution was found.

In July a meeting of advisors and Old Scrooge took place in which the financial advisors made a recommendation to Old Scrooge that would save the company. All Old Scrooge need do was to raid B. Cratchit’s pension plan, which was worth a plated gold pocket watch and fifty-farthing. The pension plan would be used to fund stock dividends. Also, it was advised the Old Scrooge take bankruptcy, pass the unfunded pension plan off to the Federal Government, restructure, move off-shore where he could find cheap labor and stop with the Ghost stories.

Old Scrooge was filled with the Spirit of Capitalism and followed to the last jot and tiddle the financial advisors recommendations. It is said that no man kept that spirit better than did Old Scrooge. B. Cratchit went to work for Wal-Mart and his family slept in a refrigerator box.

The End.

[BloodyWilliam]

1. Mod this +5 Insightful

Executives are often corporate creeps, but even without them there are absurd and disgusting requirements made by shareholders and abstract economic validations made by "the market" that force them to do terrible shit.

[htuttle]

2. The Chicago School of Economics has left a trail of destruction

I blame the whole damned mess on Milton Friedman and his philosophical descendants. They popularized (and taught) that the job of a CEO was to rip off a company's wealth for the sake of the short term bottom line (which would lead to a bigger CEO bonus). When you've consumed one company's capital, you move on to the next, and so on. This attitude is what has been behind so many problems nowdays, from outsourcing, to poor worker safety, to financial fraud ala Enron, etc...

It has absolutely NOTHING to do with what Americans traditionally used to consider 'good business practices'. It has a lot more in common with how the mob loots a company after they take control of it.

[EVDebs]

13. Yes, sometimes creative destruction is actually destructive destruction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

As Kevin Phillips points out in Wealth and Democracy, when the concentration of wealth exceeds a certain limit, even economic empires start to fail: Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and now US.

"You can have great wealth or a democracy but you cannot have both"- Louis Brandeis

[demnan]

3. Yesterday in the carpool I couldn't help it

they were complaining about what a hoax Social Security is - And that people should have saved their money etc.etc.

So I just break out into "Are there no prisons, are there no workhouses".

[pop goes the weasel]

5. what did they say?

Did they even get your point?

[demnan]

7. Yeah they did

one of them even went to see a live presentation of "A Christmas Carol" recently - they were hip.

[dcfirefighter]

4. The Chicago school's problem was conflating Land with Capital

Were it not so, labor would have so many opportunities as to force wages higher, and people would not spend a quarter of their time paying private parties for access to the natural world.

[nashville_brook]

6. i can't wait for the regional theatRE version of this!

bravo! bravo!

permission to use in my holiday mailing? please please!!!!

[The Whiskey Priest]

16. Thank you...sure use it anyway you wish.....

Lawful of course.

[greatauntoftriplets]

8. That is so much the way that corporations work!

Even ones that are privately owned and not beholden to a board of directors.

[Odin2005]

9. Everything the Neo-Liberal Freidmanians touch turns to shit.

[tomreedtoon]

10. Right concept, wrong implementation. A literary critique.

First of all, does this story say that the ghosts stopped intervening? If you were a ghost, whose only satisfaction in life was correcting the ills of a few selected people, would you stand for Scrooge backsliding?

Second, is the moral that Scrooge is "misled" into betraying Cratchett by business advisors, and is still morally innocent, or is Scrooge still a bastard and the ghosts failed? The latter betrays the Dickens original, which makes this story weak.

Third, again, the absence of the ghosts. The underlying idea of "A Christmas Carol" is that God (or some implementation thereof) cares enough to save the soul of Ebeneezer Scrooge. In this story, it's strongly suggested that the ghosts (and therefore God) either don't care or don't exist. I'm sure that will gain points from the more hostile atheist types who visit here, but it contravenes the original story.

It also suggests that the liberal principles at the heart of "A Christmas Carol" are little more than a hallucination, a bit of undigested beef, more Breakstone's Sour Cream than Wellstone's Milk of Human Kindness. This last is what bothers me the most about this story.

(The author might have done better parodying "It's a Wonderful Life," since it did show Pottertown existing in George Bailey's alternate reality. In fact, suddenly having George realize that ANOTHER George had turned America into Pottertown would be a really clever idea. I leave it as an exercise for you, dear student writers, to implement this concept if you wish.)

[EVDebs]

15. The real question is "Am I my brother's keeper".....

for Scrooge, prior to the night visits of the ghosts, the answer was always a resounding NO. Post visitation, a resounding YES.

The universe, and human nature, plays favorites but it's up to us to undo the damage...as much as we're capable of.

[Ms. Clio]

11. This is just great-hope you don't mind if I pass it on to a few people

with all due credit to the "Whiskey Priest," of course!

[The Whiskey Priest]

17. Be my guest......

thank you.

[EVDebs]

12. Bring back those 'dark, satanic mills' all the other jobs have been

outsourced or privatized.

[lildreamer316]

14. KIIIIIICK.