thoughts from an empty head

Let’s play a game.

Let’s say that you’re 14 years old. You and your parents live in a very nice house (Mom even redesigned the kitchen to have a Tuscan motif) in a very nice neighborhood. You got to nice schools and have ostensibly nice friends. Your life is a hell of a lot better than most.

One day, before they go to work, your parents tell you to clean up the garage and make sure that you and your friends don’t make a mess. You’re a good kid, so this is no problem for you. You take your time about getting to the garage because, hey, there’s no rush. Besides, your friends are on their way.

An hour later, your friends show up at your door with a large bag. They’re the typical good kids that one sees in your neighborhood: good parents, good school, good grades, no trouble. Today, though, they brought trouble; once they get to the kitchen, they open the bag and pull out a DIY crystal meth kit and several bottles of cough medicine. And a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels. Also, your friends, now that you notice it, seem a bit unsteady in their cups.

You now face a critical choice: do you demand that your friends, who are well respected by their peers in the community, get the hell out of your house with that crap, or do you tell yourself that there’s no way they can get into too much trouble in the hour or so that it will take you to clean up the garage?

You immediately lay down the law: no making any crystal meth and no drinking. Then you go out to the garage to clean up. Fifteen minutes later, you smell smoke.

Long story short: your crazy-ass drunken meth head friends start a fire that burns down your mom’s kitchen and damage several load-bearing walls, thus necessitating the possible demolition of your parent’s very nice house, which means that you are homeless. Your parents are under investigation for drug activity and criminal parental neglect. Your friends are in the slam. And your prospects are not looking so good, either – you’re grounded for at least the rest of your life.

What do you when faced with such misery?

Well, if you’re anything like Jake DeSantis, former executive vice president of AIG’s financial products unit, who had absolutely no idea what his drunken meth-addled associates were doing, you sit down and post a long, bitter tirade on the internet about how none of this is your fault because you were cleaning out the garage like the good kid you are.

I give you this analogy because of a debate that a number of us on FriendFeed just had concerning Mr. DeSantis’ very emo op-ed piece in the New York Times, kicked off by a post by that most restrained of bloggers, the Rude Pundit. Some of my fellow commenters at FF felt that DeSantis was one of the good guys in a very bad situation, primarily due to his having no idea what those crazy co-workers were up to.

Well, boo freaking hoo.

Every company I’ve ever worked for the past 20 years has drilled a single concept incessantly into my head: WE ARE ALL ONE COMPANY. What happens in one group or one unit affects us all. “No man is an island”, and all that. And now DeSantis wants to rewrite the same corporate rules that help make him three quarters of a million dollars? NOW we can plead ignorance, as long as we keep our noses clean. Hey, who knows what those other guys are doing? I’m doing my part! Why should I care if those other executives are using the pension fund for Brazilian hookers and trips to Atlantic City?

Right.

And now I’m supposed to feel sorry for a bunch of clowns who directly profited from the unethical acts of others? Oh, sorry, you didn’t push any Jews into the oven – you only greased the tracks to the camps so that the trains would run on time. How did you know who or what was on those trains?

(And for those of you crying “GODWIN!!”: grow the hell up.)

Worse still, some immediately bleat about “nationalization” and other such socialistic horrors. To which I say: yes, let’s continue the system along on its downward spiral. Letting the market regulate itself? Yeah. that approach has just done a bang-up job so far.

So, I have no interest in feeling sorry for a guy whose ethical sense of right and wrong is arrested in his teens. Doubly so do I feel no sympathy for anyone who gets freaking Op-Ed space in the New York Times. If the Times had any ethics at all, they would have charged for ad space, just like they do the rest of the hucksters with something to sell.

You helped burn down the American economic house, DeSantis. Time to face the music.

Dear Wall Street:

Re: your latest whinging over how unfair that big meany Obama is by making you work for less money:

“That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus.” [James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates]

“If I didn’t pay [bonuses], the people were going to go. … These people didn’t choose to cure cancer. These people didn’t choose to do public service work…These people chose to make money.” [Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric]

“The consequences of it are going to be a massive brain drain of senior talent from those companies that have taken TARP money to those companies that have not.” [Donald Straszheim, managing principal at Straszheim Global Advisor]

“Companies that need the most talented people to fix their problems won’t be able to pay them.” [Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer]

Gentlemen (and I use that term very loosely), let me offer you some free advice: SHUT. UP.

Just who the hell do you think you are, anyway? You brilliant captains of industry didn’t just deep-six your own companies – you also managed to take down the American economy, to say nothing of the damage you boneheads did to the rest of the international economy as well. By all rights, you fools should be living in a wet, moldy cardboard box under a freezing freeway underpass, if not spending time in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for gross negligence.

We do you rat bastards a solid by not letting you go down in flames as you so justly deserved, and now you want to dictate terms? The hell with that. How about we go ask the teachers, firemen, police officers and garbage collectors in NYC if they can live on half a million a year? Governments all over the world are shaking in their hundred-dollar wingtips right now, and you assclowns want to whine about staying competitive?!? Mother. Fuckers. If you gave two tugs of a dead dog’s cock about your businesses, you wouldn’t have treated them as your own personal piggy banks.

And no, I don’t want to hear about how much President Obama makes. You know why? BECAUSE HE HASN’T COMPLETELY ARSED UP HIS JOB. Granted, he’s only been in office for a few weeks, but he’d have to work triple overtime to come close to the level of rank incompetence you morons have reached.

Oh, and by the way, compared to you idle idiots, Obama does more in one hour than you jackasses tend to all freaking year. He has to worry about the failing infrastructure that his idiot predecessor neglected, the health care his people don’t have because clowns like you constantly complain about the cost, the complete lack of defense this country while our armed forces beat their heads against the rocks in the Middle East, the skyrocketing unemployment made possible by fools like you not being able to find your own asses with two hands and a flashlight, and the choking environment that keep getting jacked up by criminal enterprises like yours. And he has to do this while putting up with the slings and arrows from wiseass Republicans who got their asses kicked in the polls but good last November, to say nothing of a lazy-ass press that would rather read back corporate press reports than do any actual journalism.

Oh, yeah, and Obama has to do it on $100,000 per year less than what he wants to give you.

In conclusion, Wall Street whiners: eat a dick. If there was any justice in this world, your heads would be adorning pikes in front of the New York Stock Exchange as a warning to the next ten generations to stop fooling around and do your fucking jobs.

Up yours,

Steven Perez
Observer, raconteur and extremely pissed-off taxpayer, thoughts from an empty head

CC:
President Barack Obama, White House
111th Congress of the United States, US Capitol

Quick, what’s the unemployment rate? Around 7 or 8%, right?

Wrong.

As many as 25 percent of Americans were unemployed during the days of bread lines that symbolized the Depression, but that figure is more than three times the current 6.7 percent unemployment rate, the economists say. Even the most pessimistic estimates only foresee the rate rising barely above 10 percent.

“We are in a very, very different place than the U.S. economy was in the 1930s,” James Poterba, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research told a recent Reuters Summit.

Or are we? Figures collected for Reuters by John Williams, from the electronic newsletter Shadowstats.com, suggest that, while we are not there yet, the comparison is not as outlandish as it might initially seem.

By his count, if unemployment were still tallied the way it was in the 1930s, today’s jobless rate would be closer to 16.5 percent — more than double the stated rate.

“I expect that unemployment in the current downturn, which will be particularly deep and protracted, eventually will rival, if not top, the 25 percent seen in the Great Depression,” Williams said.

16.5%?!?

I can hear the thought forming in your head already: C’mon, Steven, the government keeps track of this kind of stat, and they do a better job of it than some stats geek.

Right. That would be the same government who didn’t see the economic meltdown coming, right? Or the subprime housing meltdown? Or the credit crunch or the job losses or the stock market tanking? The same government that waited two years to finally call the recession “a recession”?

I’m calling this a depression from now on.