Voodoo In West Africa

When you read The Bonus, you can judge for yourself whether the priestess, Satouma, was a fraud or had some power to which we in America don't relate. Is it possible that the outcome of The Bonus was seriously influenced by the rituals she performed on behalf of Rabunto and Shinto (Chapter 14) or was it just a lot of hokus pokus? After all, nobody believes in voodoo anymore.

Thirty million people in West Africa practicing the ancient religion of Vodun would not agree that no one believes in voodoo anymore. In fact many believe that touching a voodoo dancer while he or she is in a trance could kill you and it has been common practice for thousands of years for African sorcerers called botono to be hired to put a hex on someone's adversaries. You'd think after thousands of years such foolishness would have been abandoned as a fraud.

"But the pull of voodoo is so powerful," says a retired Catholic priest in Togo ,"it seems imbedded in the earth of West Africa." Even to this day it would not be too difficult to find people in Louisiana practicing Vodun as ardently as any of the millions practicing it in West Africa. Could there be something to it?

Evolution From The Beetle

The Bonus describes the fictional Ashanti and Mandingo people as ancient tribes with a reputation for behavior considered abominable by current day European standards. (See opening chapter.) They were known for unimaginable brutality in dealing with their enemies and hated foreigners, whether they were Africans from other countries on the continent or foreigners from other shores.

In "The Bonus" some of the people still live primitive nomadic lives in the forests, although there are not many hunter-gatherer societies in Africa today, save some vestiges of the fabled Bushman of South Africa. They practice customs of witchcraft and charms originated by their progenitors thousands of years earlier. The Ashanti and Mandingo people also adhered to "Totemism," a system that separated people into clans.  Although the beetle was generally considered evil under their animistic beliefs, the Ashanti adopted the beetle as their totemic emblem. In fact, they believed that they evolved from it.

While this seems like a strange notion, Totemism reveals itself in primitive people around the globe, even today in one form or another. It shows up in such diverse places as Africa, the Americas (totem poles), Polynesia, Australia and Asia. Strangely enough, it appears that no yellow or white race is Totemic. In Totemic mythology, these people follow tribal lore that suggests they are evolved from their totem, such as the Ashanti in "The Bonus." And as such, anyone living under the totem of the beetle, for example, was considered family to be defended and protected against enemies at any cost. Hence the notion that the Ashanti treated their enemies with brutality.The identification with a totem, however, apparently had a practical aspect. To prevent in-breeding, Totemic people were required to marry outside their family or clan, that is, to people with a different totem symbol, a practice known as exogamy.

While the practice of unusual religious beliefs, witchcraft and charms may seem foolishly primitive, the reader of "The Bonus" can decide whether these practices by the Ashanti had influence on the outcome of Tom Farley's journey to the financial closing.

Read An eBook Week

 

FREE - In celebration of Read An eBook Week (March 7 - 13, 2010) you can download a copy of "The Bonus" for FREE during the celebration. An annual affair since 2004 Read An eBook Week brings together ebook retailers, publishers, authors, device-makers and untold thousands of readers who join in this international literary event of ebook discovery. Read more at http://ebookweek.com.

Can $435 Million Really Be 35% of An African Country's Entire GDP?

Jason Anthony appears to be the most intelligent of the Thunder Oil corporate finance group, so when he says in The Bonus: "Thunder Oil accounts for something like 35% of the Kanbian economy for God's sake," the first reaction is that can't possibly be right. Thirty-five percent of a country's entire GDP?

Kanbia is, of course, a fictional African country, whose miserable GDP is said to be the result of exploitation by European countries for centuries and now by Thunder Oil. So the immediate question is whether there is any reality to such a country actually existing in Africa today.

It turns out one does not have to look very far. Take Berundi, for example, a country formed five centuries ago and occupied (plundered?) during the Twentieth Century by Germany and Belgium. Berundi today has roughly a GDP of $720 million (that's all of $90 per person annually). And as we know, in The Bonus Thunder Oil's annual revenue was $435 million from Kanbia, more than half of Berundi's total GDP.

Is Berundi an aberration? How about Eritrea a country just north of Ethiopia, the cradle of civilization. It's GDP is about $950 million, still less than Kanbia's apparently. But Eritrea is in the Horn of Africa, not exactly where The Bonus story takes place. Portuguese Guinea, now independent and called Guinea-Bissau, however, is right on the West African coast along an expanse of the Atlantic Ocean (as is Kanbia) and has had plenty of European intrusion over the years (as has Kanbia). The GDP of Guinea-Bissau is $240 million (around $160 per capita), a far cry from the annual revenues of Thunder Oil from exploiting the waters off the Kanbian coast. (For a little contrast, you might check out the GDP of a country like Switzerland, which currently stands at approximately $488 billion - or about $68,000 per capita.)

Of course, Kanbia is not Guinea-Bissau, and was not even modeled after her in any way. The point is, though, that there are countries today in Africa whose GDP does not even remotely approach the annual revenues of individual foreign companies who continue to do business in those regions. Is it far-fetched to think that a world class oil company like the fictional Thunder Oil might be taking some advantage there?
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Russian Anti-plague Facilities

One of the fascinating things in "The Bonus" is the Department of Homeland Security's concern for terrorists' potential use of the pathogens harbored in the old Russian anti-plague facilities. These are scientific facilities that the Russians established initially as defensive measures against diseases that might enter Russia (or the Soviet Union in general) but later became offensive in nature stockpiling smallpox, bubonic plague and many other deadly diseases for use in biological warfare.

The truly scary thing about these facilities is that most of the controls over them vanished with the break-up of the Soviet Union so that they now are run by local governments. It is generally recognized that these facilities and their dangerous contents are not well managed or controlled and are a potential source for a worldwide catastrophe if better management is not instituted by the international community.  This is not science fiction. See, for example, this excellent NTI article for more information. And read in "The Bonus" the chilling concern the Department of Homeland Security has with regard to these facilities and their volatile pathogens.

What is the truth about Wall Street bonuses?

There is, of course, this tremendous outcry now about AIG paying huge bonuses again after the U.S. taxpayer had to provide it with billions of dollars to keep it from going belly up last year. Too big to fail. Are these bonuses being paid out of taxpayers money to the same guys who took all the outrageous risks and brought down the world wide economy as a result? Probably yes, I would guess, since money is fungible, as they say, and no one, apparently, had the presence of mind to require that the taxpayers' money be used for something other than bonuses or require that the funds be tracked in any way.

How could AIG management have the unmitigated gaul to declare such huge bonuses once again with this background?  Are they so insensitive to the public outcry that they would basically spit in the eye of the populace, the public be damned. Well, there may be some of that because anything is believable from some of these guys. But it probably isn't quite that callous because, as I understand it, current compensation schemes at the bulge bracket banks and humongous insurance companies (e.g., AIG) are the subject of enforcible contracts.  I hear lawyers generally feel that these contracts are valid and enforcible and the banks and/or insurance companies may be out a lot more after settling the ensuing myriad lawsuits for breach of contract than if they owned up to the contractual bonus commitments.

Now you may argue that contracting up-front to pay these huge bonuses to people is crazy. Well maybe so, but as I have said in previous posts on bonuses, this is standard practice at risk oriented institutions like investment banks and has been for many years. This is the so-called asynchronous compensation system which pays such bankers relatively low base salaries and then large bonuses to those who hit home runs during the year with smaller bonuses to the single, double and triple hitters.  The fact is that someone in this system for a while who has done well often has created a standard of living for him or herself that makes achieving these bonuses a must. As Gardner Bannion tells Farley in The Bonus: "You know this business. You and I live on bonuses. We'd starve on our salaries." And so you may argue with the system (and I do), but the large bonuses are paid to the big hitters for having been "rainmakers," or having closed some huge deals during the year, rather than just dividing up the actual profits for the year among a large group of employees - the common understanding of bonuses. I suppose the question to be asked is whether total compensation paid by AIG or the large investment banks is all that much greater than any other large corporate enterprise with similar revenues and profits? If it isn't, then maybe the singling out of these "bonuses" as though they were paid to people who already earned huge salaries during the year (which we know is not the case, relatively speaking) could be politically motivated. You think?

The bottom line though, it seems to me, is that this system, which pays extraordinary amounts to people who do extraordinary things during the year can lead to the taking of risks, which would never be taken by people being paid under a more conventional compensation regime.  As we have now clearly seen, taking extraordinary risks can lead to extraordinary failures and I would indict the asynchronous compensation schemes as the real culprit.

Press Release - Stonepine Productions, LLC releases "The Bonus"

See press release re: The Bonus issued on January 28, 2010. Stonepine Productions, LLC is offering the electronic version of The Bonus free to the public for a limited time.