Whales

The last blog was about how Americans like being BIG.

But the blog was too small to fit in some important big things.  I had to leave out some things Americans do big, like eat really BIG meals. To read a good story about the new trend in eating big, check out the article by Jim Hightower on Nation of Change.  Hightower describes the new trend-setting "Heart Attack Grill" in Vegas where, if you weigh over 350 pounds, you can eat for free!  They serve things like a "Quadruple Bypass Burger", "Butter Fat Shakes", and "Flatliner Fries" cooked in pure lard, all with "Taste Worth Dying For." As Hightower notes, “two diners have collapsed so far this year while pounding down Bypass Burgers.” 

I also had to leave out the story of really big bank losses ($2-$7 billion in the case of JP Morgan Chase.)

To the ordinary person $7 billion, or even only $2 billion, seems like a big amount to lose, but for a bank as big as JP Morgan Chase, $2 billion is considered chicken feed. Chump change.  JP Morgan Chase has more money than most countries do. It is too big to fail on steroids. Greece can fail. So can Portugal and maybe even Italy, but JP Morgan Chase is way too big to fail.

What does “too big to fail” mean?  It means that when the too-big thing starts to fail, the little guys and poor people have to bail it out.  This is what we taxpayers did for the biggest insurance conglomerate in the world, AIG, when it looked like it was going to fail and bring down lots of other companies with it.

A bank or other financial institution becomes too big to fail when its impending failure involves losses referred to as “systemic” because they will set off a chain reaction causing the collapse of the entire financial system worldwide.  Apparently, because several banks and other financial institutions are now so big, this can happen any time now, more or less at random.

What else is big?

Whales, that’s what. The largest known animal in the world is the Blue Whale.  The biggests of these ever found was, a female 110.14 feet in length weighing about 150 tons.[1]

Whales are the biggest mammals on the planet now that dinosaurs have become extinct due to global warming or an asteroid hitting the earth near Yucatan—or whatever it was.[2]

Whales are so big that you can get swallowed by one and wander around in their stomachs. That is what happened to Noah –or was it Jonah or Moses?  Anyway, it was one of those old testament dudes.  This is the God’s truth because the Bible is God’s word, translated for us by some illiterate goat herders out in the Saudi Arabian desert.

We also know that the whale story, and all the other bible stories too, are the real history of the way things went down back in the day because we have the polls to prove it. Polls show that 77 percent of Republicans believe every single word of the bible to be the historical truth, together with 59 percent of Democrats, and 50 percent of the other smart citizens of the USA.[3]

Today there is a new species of whale, known as the “London Whale.”  This creature brings us right back to the America's biggest bank JP Morgan Chase.

The London Whale is –or was—employed by that too-big-to-fail firm.  The London Whale was a very big trader; hence his name. However, he personally was not too big to fail. He gambled away $2 billion, or maybe even $7 billion, and got fired after he was found out by the ever watchful Jaime Diamon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase.

How did the London Whale do it?

The Whale by his other name was Bruno Iksil.   He was a trader for JP Morgan Chase in London. He bought credit default swaps (CDSs) to cover the firm’s exposure to high yield bonds. OK. No problem there.

The London Whale

But…. when he realized he was losing money on the swaps because the bonds were looking better,  he bought some different CDS’s betting in the opposite direction to cover the possible losses on the first basket CDS purchases.  Now it is getting dubious.

Then when the market started moving against the second CDS package, he bought a third package betting in the other direction, a package of CDS betting on investment grade bonds.

Iksil was like a snake chasing his own tail around.  He was hedging, then hedging against his hedge and then hedging against that hedge.

The problem was that the Whale's purchases were so big that he threw the entire market out of whack.  Some hedge fund managers were getting hurt by his moves. Hedge fund managers are known as “sharks.”

The sharks were pissed. They decided to eat the whale.  And they did. To the tune of somewhere between $2 and $7 billion. So far.

Those who want to learn more about the trades (a.k.a. g “bets”) made by the Whale, which were horribly complex and about the tasty big meal that the sharks enjoyed, can read about it here.

And if you think this is over now, think again. J.P. Morgan Chase may still be about to go off the cliff.[4]

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[1] For more fun facts about these big critters click here.

[2] Scientists think that the asteroid created a bunch of dust that clogged up the atmosphere and caused global warning. This wiped out the dinos very quickly. The theories are discussed here.

[3] The survey appears on the wind website.

[4] The link refers to an article by Colin Lokey, advising investors to stay as far away from J.P. Morgan Chase as they can,  or maybe take a short position on the company which, Loeky says, could be in for losses in the $31 billion range as they try to unwind the Whale’s mess.

REAL Americans

How can you be a REAL American? Amazingly, a lot of people don’t know the answer to this simple question.

Not to worry. In this blog, the secret is revealed.

In the last blog, which most of you never even read, I discussed No Impact Man. No Impact Man obviously has no clue about how to be a real red-blooded card-carrying American.  Further research about No Impact Man led me to the discovery that--as I cleverly suspected-- he was not even born in the USA. Like Obama, he came from afar. In No Impact Man’s case, his origin was in a puny island nation in the north Atlantic south of Scotland.  This left him with a profoundly weak grip on American culture.

Many readers complain that I should leave the sensitive and controversial topic of American exceptionalism alone because—what the heck does it have to do with lying, cheating, or stealing?

My answer to that is—READ THE WARNING LABEL!  Every single one of these blogs has a label at the bottom advising the reader that this is a Free Range Organic Blog.  That means the blog can go anywhere and say anything so long as no facts are included or in any way referenced. So stop whining, and back to the subject at hand.

Real Americans know that the most important thing about America is that it is BIG.  We are not only big in our impact on the planet, the world economy, the environment, and all that, we are big in every possible way.

We have big egos.

Big business.

Big bubbles.

We like to eat big.

The most popular sporting events in America today are eating contests. It all started with hot dogs, but now there is a contest for who can eat the most of almost any food. The winners of these contests are some of the most admired athletes in America.

Now McDonalds is building bigger seats because all the customers, after eating burgers and fries all day, are too big to fit into the standard seats. This had led to some big fatness. The Centers for Disease Control reported recently that  97% of the population of Putnam County, Alabama, will be clinically obese by the year 2014, resulting in a local diabetes epidemic rarely seen anywhere else in the world.[i]

Real Americans have big cars and even bigger trucks.

Real Americans have big asses. If your ass is too small, there is now a website to help you grow a bigger butt.

(For more scientific research on the fascinating topic of America's exploding butts see this website.)

Our President has big ears.

Back in the hippy days when Nixon was burglarizing the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic party, a fruitcake named E.F. Schumacher wrote a subversive book entitled “Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.”[ii]

He was subpoenaed by the (now extinct) Committee on UnAmerican Activities, the McCarthy Committee. Fortunately, Schumacher's communist schemes have been extinguished.

Real Americans know that Schumacher had it all backwards and inside out. Big is beautiful.

Especially BIG houses.

Recently, the Washington Post reported on the planned construction in Great Falls Virginia of a 25,434 square foot, $15,000,000 house that would be an almost exact replica of the Louis XIV palace of Versailles.[iii] It would have the same number of rooms and be exactly the same size, with all the same architectural features as the original palace, pictured below, all on a 5-acre plot (as opposed to the 10,000 acres on which the original palace is located.)

Neighbors in the tony area fought the construction of the home to a standstill because they all lived in monster McMansions that would end up looking like tiny shacks or outhouses next to this gimoungous new house.  The owner finally dropped out of all the lawsuits and moved the  construction over to the other side of the river to Potomac, Maryland, where the motto is “NO House Too Big: Potomac, MD.”[iv]

Here is how you can tell if you are a real American or some kind of worthless pink slime, based only on your housing ideals.

Answer Yes or No.

Would you prefer to live here?

Or here (in the blue house)?[v]

Or maybe even here?

If you answered yes to any of the above, you are either a communist rat f--ker or a Francophile.

For more un-American houses, click on this link.

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[i] The statistics and predictions can be viewed here.

[ii] The book is still available on Amazon.

[iii] The article is online here.

[iv] The Post article quotes the builder as saying “This type of house is more in keeping with Potomac [Maryland] than Great Falls [Virginia].”

[v] For more information on this communist small house located in Alexandria, VA, click on the  article here.

No Impact

For some time now, I have been following the career of this nutty character who calls himself “No Impact Man”.  Let me introduce him to you-- in case you have never heard of him. His name is Colin Beavan. He is the so called “wealth reporter” for the Wall Street Journal.[1]

Beavan took on the challenge about 5 years ago of living his life with as little impact as possible…in, of all places, New York City.  His wife and young daughter were passengers on this quixotic voyage, at least for a while, but—big surprise-- Mrs. Bevan jumped off the train and now calls herself a “Bad No Impacter.”  The Beavans no longer live together.

The idea of making no impact on anything is intriguing. You would have to be nothing and do nothing. You would be like some kind of ephemeral vapor.How would you distinguish yourself from empty space?

The first thing that strikes me about this is: it is profoundly un-American. 

Most Americans understand that the way to be happy is to have a big impact on everything and everyone around you.  As a nation, we like to have an impact on foreign countries, preferably with powerful weapons that create shock and awe. 

Result of American Shock and Awe Attack

As high school and college students, we Americans know that we should strive to be B.M.O.C.s.   In high school, one needs to bully a few faggots and give them a friendly hair cut now and then.

After graduation, it is best to join a big vulture capitalist operation.  Get to be the CEO. Make sure you make more money for yourself than anyone else in the firm or any other firm.  If anyone anywhere makes more money than you do, give yourself a raise.  Make your company too big to fail.  Then, when you fail, the poor suckers known as taxpayers have to bail you out, but you get to keep the money.  Now that’s IMPACT.

If anyone gives you any crap about being bailed out, give the government the finger. Tell the government to go shrink itself (after you get the money, of course.).

Build the biggest house you can imagine. Drive a big car, the bigger the better. Guzzle gas to show that you don’t give a flying f- -k about what may be left for the next generation.  On second thought, drive several expensive big cars. Bigger is always better. Take on big debt. Spend big bucks. Take big systemic risks. Eat big meals. Supersize everything.  Get a yacht, the biggest one you can find.  Or get several. An airplane or two also.[2]

Making an impact may mean that you impact a lot of people in a lot of ways. Maybe you can make a big  impact on them by firing a bunch of them.  

Anyway, you get the idea.

This is the American ideal.  It is how our system works. And it works damn well. No one has to stop and think about the impact so long as it is BIG.  If someone has a bigger [car, house, yacht, etc.] than you do, you need to get cracking and trade UP!  This is how our economy keeps on moving onwards and upwards. It is what makes us who we are.  More consumption. More waste. More GROWTH. [3]

Having no impact would be subversive.  It would be profoundly un-American.

Where are the incentives?

That is why this weird Beavan dude is so sick and perverse. His concept is to put the American Big Impact Idea in reverse and see what happens. You can check out his ridiculous blog here.

Bevan was trying to fix every so called "problem" created by big impacters singlehandedly: food system sustainability, climate change, water scarcity, and materials, energy resource depletion, and blah blah blah.  He proclaimed:  “I can’t stand my so-called liberal self sitting around not doing anything about it anymore. The question is: what would it be like if I took the situation (or at least my tiny part of it) into my own hands?”

What an ego! Talk about impact!

Beavan ended up polluting the planet with a book, a documentary film, and a blog with 1.8 million people following it. (This make me a little jealous because I now have only 1.8 people following my blog.)

Beavan’s personal experiment was to live “producing no trash save for compost, purchasing no goods except for food grown within a 250-mile radius, using no carbon-based transportation, and using no paper products, including toilet paper. “[4]  For a close up of how Beavan and his family lived for a year, check out this article.

This guy is a menace to the planet. If everyone lived like this, we would be in one Hell of a mess. Toilet paper companies (and other important Koch Brothers industries) would go bankrupt overnight, plunging the entire nation into yet another economic catastrophe.

So I say, get out there and have an IMPACT.

Buy more toilet paper. (Get the sensitive kind.)

If you are in neighborhood watch and have a concealed weapon, or  maybe even an unconcealed weapon, you might be able to have an even bigger impact.

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[1] See this article.

[2] Sadly, this system can go bad rather quickly as indicated in this article.

[3] In his book “Richistan,” Robert Frank notes a few kinks in the system. When one rich person encounters another richer one, it can be very stressful for the less rich one. Frank explains how depressed one billionaire became after buying a monster yacht, only to take it to the Ft. Lauderdale Boat Show where he had to park next to an even bigger yacht. It ruined his day. The smaller billionaire, and all the others also, were so worried about who had the bigger yacht that they missed entirely the thousands of newly homeless people only a mile or so away without food or electricity as a result of the hurricane that wiped out their homes a week before the show. For a discussion of the book, Richistan, click here.

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Beavan

Eggs

Don’t egg me on!

I have enough egg on my face already because of this blog.

“You are what you eat,” the old cliché says.   And I used to eat eggs.  Until this morning, that is. When I sat down to my scrambled eggs for breakfast, I realized that they looked just like my brain on pharmaceuticals. That kind of ruined my appetite, so I decided to find out what’s up with eggs these days.

It is not pretty.

Mostly its tons of hormones and antibiotics.

Bra for Men who Ate Too Many Chickens

First, the hormones.  If you eat the standard eggs for sale in grocery stores, your breasts will grow huge, and your wrists will get limp.  You may even have to wear a bra.

Regardless of which sex you started out as, you will soon be begging for a same sex partner. Maybe marriage even-- if Hopey Changey can get that off the ground. It’s all the eggs at the so called “White House Mess” (Who could imagine a better name for their dining hall?) that have led Obama and Biden into making the recent shocking announcement of their plans to marry each other.

Then, the antibiotics.  Even worse. The big chicken growers (Purdue, Tyson Foods, Pilgrims Pride, and THE KOCH BROTHERS, who are in this game too!)  feed chickens so many antibiotics that almost all micro organisms have now become resistant to every known antibiotic. This means that when you go to the hospital and get a dose of antibiotics to kill some deadly germ, it won’t work because the germs have evolved to be immune to antibiotics.

The Food and Drugs Administration has been wringing its hands about this and finally “urged farmers to give fewer antibiotics to livestock and poultry to reduce the risk of superbugs, multi-drug-resistant bacteria, that can be transferred to humans and can cause infections that are difficult or impossible to treat, are more likely to be fatal, and can require longer and more expensive hospital stays. [1]

The reason that so many antibiotics are required is that chickens are raised in their own excrement.  Piled up on top of each other in giant chicken condos with no space to even move, the pee and shit from the upper chickens rains down on the ones down below, making for an awesomely unsanitary living situation.[2]

The antibiotics are no longer even working at the chicken farms. According to the Poultry Site, an industry website,  “87 percent of chicken carcasses tested positive for e. coli after chilling and just prior to packaging…Every year, contaminated poultry products cause approximately 1.5 million illnesses, 12,000 hospitalizations and 180 deaths. However, most people eating cooked chicken feces have no symptoms and are unaware of what they have ingested.”

In addition to all the drugs and hormones, the egg producing chickens have their beaks cut off so that they won't peck each other out of frustration created by the unnatural confinement. “After their bodies are exhausted and their production drops, they are shipped to slaughter, generally to be turned into chicken soup or cat or dog food because their flesh is too bruised and battered to be used for much else.”[3]

The Department of Agriculture[4] has decided that this situation requires immediate action. So what to do?  The decided that the best course of action is to pull their inspectors out from the chicken farms (because they were not doing any good anyway) and told the industry to regulate itself, like a good capitalist should. Same as the banks did. Kind of like Glass-Steagall repeal for chicken farmers.[5]

So what do the smart people do when faced with this situation? They steal eggs from wild sea gulls.  And its legal under Federal law! In Alaska the National Park Service even approves of opening currently closed off areas within Glacier Bay National Park to local native egg raiders.[6]  Alaska Senators Murkowski and Begich are pushing a bill (S.1063) to allow the eggs to be taken from within the park. [7]

Senator Murkowski

In his July 28, 2011 testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on National Parks, a notorious Alaskan eggologist testified that if the Huna Tlingit natives were allowed to raid glaucous-winged gull eggs within the park,  that activity would result in about a 22% reduction in the number of fledglings in the area.[8]

But what are our other options? More hormones, bigger breasts, and the loss of valuable antiboiotics.

Glaucous Winged Seagull in Glacier Bay, Alaska

So I say, let’s get us some fresh wild eggs-- no hormones,  no antibiotics! 

Write to your Congressman and ask that you be given the same rights as the Huna Tlingit Tribe to raid eggs in the national parks.

Or maybe you can just pick up your eggs in Washington, DC, at Senator Murkowski’s office.

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[1] For more detail, follow this link.

[2] According to one source "laying hens" are “crammed together in wire cages” with no room to spread their wings. Crammed so closely they  “urinate and defecate on one another.” http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/chickens.aspx

[3] For more on the delightful fun of chicken farming, hit this link.

[4] As usual in the Federal government, regulators are tripping all over each other and confused about who is supposed to regulate what. The USDA regulates the farms and the FDA regulates the drugs in the feed, but neither one really has responsibility for the health of the egg consumers. That is left up to the Grocery Store Owners Association.

[5] The story on the new chicken regulations can be found here.

[6] http://www.cfr.washington.edu/research.cesu/reports/J9W88050018_Tech_Report.pdf.

[7] http://www.energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republican-news?ID=ab1a5b96-b6a1-49d9-afdf-37c11fe0e7aa.

[8] Statement of Eggologist, Dr. Jack Hession (PhD), of the Sierra Club on S.1060-Huna Tlingit Gull Egg Use Act of 2011 before the Subcommittee on National Parks of the United States Senate, Washington, DC, July 28, 2011.

Inequality

Is economic inequality bad or is it good?  Does it even matter?

How Your Brain and Mine Got This Way

How you answer that question depends on what kind of lobotomy you have had. If you have had a left wing lobotomy, inequality is always bad. If you have had a right wing lobotomy, inequality is always good, necessary in fact.

And so it goes in politics. Lobotomized voters on one side or the other already know the answer. There is really no debate. Just vote for the guy who wants more inequality or the guy who wants less.

Problem solved.

Why this is even a question in politics at all is because of the rapidly growing extremes of wealth and poverty in America. There is not much debate about these statistics (a little but not much.) The growing extremes of wealth and poverty are relatively factual. The more interesting question is: is growing inequality a problem or not?

Fortunately, our lobotomies are not totally irreversible. We can (for a few moments) sometimes crank up the damaged parts of the brain and actually think logically about the question for a few minutes if we want to. Naturally, the rabid advocates for both sides of the debate are starting to come out of the wood work to “help” us figure this out.

The lefties were first to emerge because any sign of even a miniscule shred of economic inequality have always been anathema to them. But the righties have a few advocates too. Back in the Regan days, there was Arthur Laffer with his “trickle-down” economic theory.  Most recently, we now have Mitt Romney’s recent boss and mentor at Bain Capital, Edward Conrad. Conrad is a billionaire who is about to publish a new book extolling theories about the benefits of extreme inequality.

Conrad’s book, "Unintended Consequences," has not yet hit the bookstores, but is already generating some heat.  According to pre-publication interviews in the news media, Conrad argues that a society with great inequality of income is the best possible society.  Inequality of wealth is a sign, not of crony capitalism or plutocracy or some other kind of economic or social dysfunction as so many lefties have argued, but of a healthy economy.

The key to his theory is that the poor and middle classes benefit from the vast wealth of the super rich but are too ignorant to realize this fact. “Most citizens are consumers, not investors,” according to Conrad. “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.” While most of us are spending our measly earnings on drugs, alcohol, survival and entertainment, the super rich spend only a tiny fraction of their money on such things. Most of their money “is invested in productive businesses that make life better for everyone.”  They have the luxury to take business risks that end up benefiting everyone.


Conrad's argument is only one of the big three pro-inequality arguments. For a French socialist perspective on the other two principal arguments, check out the Inequality Watch website article by John Roemer. On the web, it is translated into English from the socialist language it was written in.

On the other side of the fence, left-leaning pundits and economists argue that, while the  arguments for inequality may have some plausibility, once inequality goes too far, the 99% of the world who don’t have spending power anymore will not be able to buy the consumer goods needed to keep the economic machine going. An economy cannot work if the only goods being purchased are high-end bling, yachts, and Maseratis.

On the lefty side of the debate, you always have the usual loud mouths such as Paul Krugman who blasted Conrad in a NY Times article.  More detail is added by Paul Buchheit in his flame out on the subject in Common Dreams. Buchheit lists 5 reasons why the 1 percent are NOT deserving of their huge slice of the economic pie:

1. Productivity tripled in the last 30 years, but the average wage earner’s share did not increase while the 1 percent tripled their share.
2.  American companies have been ruinously mismanaged by the elite (bank failures, bankrupt companies, jobs disappearing) while CEO salaries continue to skyrocket.
3.  Greedy billionaire innovators take tax-payer subsidized research and turn it into products from which they alone benefit.
4. When all taxes (not only income) are counted, the super rich pay only 10% of their income in taxes while the poorest quintile of the population pays 22%.
5.  Many of the super rich are guilty of bribery, fraud, and other crimes against society, the environment, and even each other (e.g. Bernie Madoff, John Paulson, and the owners of Monsanto, Exxon, Koch Industries, Chevron, Blackwater, Walmart, and Halliburton) yet they usually go unpunished.

For the full dose of inequality hatred, studies of executive overcompensation, and a list of all the new books about inequality in the U.S., check out the articles on Too Much.


Taking a different and less hysterical tack on the issue is Richard Wilkinson.[1]

Wilkinson gave a fascinating lecture about inequality on TED. He has conducted studies looking at the overall health, well-being and psycho-social condition of entire societies using measurements of involvement in community life, economic mobility, child health statistics, stress levels, homicide rates, imprisonment rates, education, levels of trust, etc. Wilkinson’s extensive studies seem to show that the quality of human life is better in societies with less inequality than in those with extremes of wealth and poverty.  Rather than inadequately summarizing Wilkinson’s lecture, I recommend that you listen to the real thing here.

Then, get back to your more comfortable lobotomy, and I will too.

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[1] Wilkinson is a British professor and the author of the provocative book, The Spirit Level.  For more about his studies click here.

Nuggets

Believe it or not (best if you don’t), I occasionally do some research for the smorgasbord of stuff dished out in this blog.  In the process, like finding a shiny coin on the street, I sometimes bump into a few enjoyable lines.  These are little thought burps, not anything amounting to an entire blog article, but worth a chuckle.

So-- in today’s blog, for your enjoyment, I am cleaning these tiny morsels off my table, in no particular order.

From the most recent book I read, “This is Where They Leave You,” Jonathan Tropper’s extremely peculiar novel about his dysfunctional family’s response to his father’s demise:

“…I wondered what I could do to distinguish myself as anything other than a waste of space.”

“It’s amazing how harmless the world can sometimes seem.”

“That’s the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.”

From Mae West:

“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.”

From Robert Reich:

“If you took the greed out of Wall Street, all you’d have left is pavement.”

From H.L. Mencken:

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are all the greatest liars…”

From David Haury, Professor of Education at Ohio State U.:

“Research in neuroscience has shown that when there’s a conflict between facts and feeling in the brain, feeling wins.”

From Voltaire:

“The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.”

From the National Rifle Association:

“We are all safer if everyone has a gun.”

From John Bright:

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.”

From folk singer, Gillian Welch:

“I wanna do right but not right now.”

From Forrest Tucker:

“He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.”

And best of all, from Anonymous:

“Never miss a good chance to shut up.”

Feel free to send me any good ones you may have recently run across. I will put them in an upcoming blog for all to enjoy.

This is a certified organic free-range blog.

To comment on this blog or add a nugget of your own,  click on the hyperlink at the bottom that reads “Post a Comment.”

Failure

Etch a Sketch keeps on repeating over and over and over again his mantra about Hopey Changey’s “failed Presidency.” Hopey failed, the narrative goes, because he is not a businessman and, therefore, does not understand economics and business like Etch a Sketch and other business CEOs do.  As a consequence of his lack of business leadership experience,  according the Etch a Sketch logic, Hopey Changey was unable to bring the country out of the Bush recession as fast as he should have.

Sure-- he killed off Bin Laden and passed a health care bill identical to Massachusetts Romneycare for the whole nation, but any third rate President would have done the same thing.  Even Jimmy Carter.

Let’s break this argument down, starting with the benefits of CEO leadership.

What do CEO’s typically do to benefit America?

1. 
     1. They make bucket loads of money for themselves and make sure not to share any of it with lower level executives, workers or shareholders.

  2.They fire people. (This establishes better discipline.)

  3. They appoint their cronies to the company boards of directors. (This insures that their salaries will continue shoot into the stratosphere and maybe even outer space.) [i]

 4. They demand and get immense perks, like private planes and exclusive hotel rooms.

Book About the Nation Within A Nation

     5.  Some of them get their own islands. (e.g. Richard Branson’s Necker island in the BVIs.) Others move into Richistan, a country within the country composed of gigantic micmansions inside gated communities with their own law enforcement, road maintenance, gardeners, yacht maintenance, golf courses, and other necessities required to free them from any and all contact or association with the hoi polloi. (Read the wonderful anthropological study of the nation of Richistan by Robert Frank.)

    6. They get their companies to take on back-breaking debt (because debt is tax deductible and because the company is probably going broke and there is no other way to get the cash to keep their salaries up).

    7. They send all the company's remaining profits (assuming anything is left in the till after paying their salary) to offshore tax havens so as to reduce U.S. corporate taxes to zero, and, meanwhile, shut down factories in the US, sending the jobs to China.

      8. And finally, after valiantly achieving all these difficult objectives, they drive the entire company off the cliff. (Countrywide Finance, Citigroup, Kodak, Enron, Lehman Brothers; the list is endless.)

These are exactly the kind of people we want to lead America to the promised land.

Newt Gingrich calls them "vulture capitalists." One well-known psychotherapist and political commentator calls them "sociopaths."  I call them "obnoxious shitheads."

A good example of great business leadership by a sociopath shithead--and how it translates to politics, would be, John Corzine. Once a leading CEO, then a politician, now a CEO again. According to CNN Money, Corzine lost $1.6 billion dollars… as in “lost and cannot be found”. It mysteriously disappeared from customer accounts at his firm, MF Global. Now he is headed for jail. (By the way, the cash was luckily found in a suitcase at LaGuardia.)

Management experts say that CEOs have bad strategic thinking because of what it takes to get to the CEO position in the first place.[ii]

Dr. Tim Irwin, a student of business leadership, says that CEOs today typically have similar characteristics. He studied big company CEOs like Carley Fiorina of HP, Bob Nardelli of Home Depot,  Durk Jager, Steven Heyer, Frank Raines of Fannie Mae,  and Dick Fuld of Lehman Bros.

According to Irwin’s book “Derailed,”  chief executives are often the smartest and most respected individuals in their industries, with glittering resumes and histories of successful leadership. Yet they astonish us by driving the train dramatically off course, blinded by unchecked power and arrogance. 

The characteristics that got a 21st century CEO his job are the same ones that make them think they would be great political leaders. 

What are these characteristics? Think John Corzine.

According to Irwin’s studies, the keys to getting to the top in today’s large corporations are qualities that can lead to big problems for the companies concerned and their beleaguered shareholders.  Typically, says Dr. Irwin, the CEO gets to the top through competence combined with arrogance, dismissiveness, egotism, ruthlessness, and a lack of self-awareness.

These ingredients get you to the top of the dog-eat-dog battle for executive supremacy, but they also lead to extreme personal greed at the expense of the rest of the company.

For example, Nardelli created a 9-car parking space for himself at the Home Depot corporate headquarters with a private elevator to his own office, ruining the morale in the rest of the company.  Nardelli even went so far as to tell board members not to bother to come to board meetings. Home Depot got into serious financial difficulty before the board was able to unload Nardelli. He took home a gigantic bundle after almost reducing the company to a worthless rubble.

In one of the most incredible episodes of CEO wreckage, reported today by Clifford Krauss in the New York Times, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy, Aubrey K. McClendon was caught with a secret hedge fund making millions by trading in commodities against his own company! The company lost $71 mill and its shares are in the dumpster, but McClendon is raking it in.

It's all good though  because according to Etch a Sketch's mentor at Bain Capital, "having a small elite with vast wealth is good for the poor and middle class." (Quote of Mitt Romney's friend andmentor at Bain, Edward Conard, as reported by Adam Davidson in The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy, NY Times, May 1, 2012.)

Psychologist, Wray Herbert, explains the recent research conducted on how to spot the kind of leader in business or politics who is dangerous fruitcake. Check out Herbert's fascinating Huffington Post article out here. The dangerous ones may be brilliant and successful but they have "an unsettling disregard for others' needs, shallow emotions and lack of remorse and empathy...also ... signs of narcissism, like bragging a lot, [is seen] in many adult psychopaths."


One clue might be cruelty to animals (as in dogs.)

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[i] David Stockman, The Great Deformation: How Crony Capitalism Corrupted Free Markets and Democracy. Also see the interview on bill Moyers.  

[ii] Roger Martin, “Why CEOs are Bad at Strategy,” Harvard Business Review.