February 3, 2009
 

“Greed is good,” proclaimed Gordon Gekko, the main character in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie, Wall Street. In the actual New York business area on which the movie was based, it is now clear that too many traders, arbitragers, hedge-fund managers, et al, believed in and assiduously practiced that mantra, as did those on Capitol Hill who jumped in the shark and became financial sharks themselves.

Greed, political opportunism, and political malpractice coalesced and the “greedsters” rejoiced!

“Dem” financial chickens came home to roost and they “roosted” all over the Brooks Brothers’ suits of the “greed is good” crowd. Unlike those high-fliers, however – who probably only had to downsize from mansions to mini-mansions – folks on “Main Street” lost their jobs and housing. To add insult to their injury, no one rushed to bail the “Main Streeters” out of their financial misery.

Taking a page from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where Mark Antony, came to “bury Caesar, not to praise him,” I declare that I am here to bury greed!

I fully realize that could be an impossible task. Greed is as old as mankind and will always resist being stamped out. But, maybe, if We the People stop condoning, emulating or enabling this venal behavior and demand more from the “greedsters,” and from ourselves, just maybe our Republic can be saved from those who have polluted the financial and social atmosphere and have graduated to fraud.

Some of the disciples of the Religion of Greed made out like pirates, boarding the Ship of America, looting it of millions, and then jumping ship – all very legal of course. I saw a stat that lists the wages of CEOs as having “progressed” from 40-times the wages of Joe Slug in the 1980s to 600-times in 2008. While progress is a wonderful thing, capitalism turned into cannibalism is not.

Charles Ponzi would be proud to know that the practitioners of his infamous scheme – in veering off the legal path to wealth – made quite a haul when they were at the top of their “game.” Two Ponzi graduates accounted for $50 billion each. Other variations of Ponzi’s school of attainment also include those who were or are “gainfully” employed as government “servants.”

David Z, an e-mail friend and retired patriot, has been maintaining a list of “perps on parade,” including union officials, politicians and businesspersons. In perusing his list, I realized that the glass ceiling has finally been smashed – women made the list of perps. At last, equality in employment!

How are we going to fix this?

First we must stop offering ourselves and our progeny up as cannon fodder for the mad political scientists who are drunk with power and think that the way to ensure their own immortality – while simultaneously lining their pockets – is to impose tax after tax and law after law that curtail our freedoms to make a living and our rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Second we must start to rebel against the fact that every time we open our paychecks, we find that anywhere from 15% to an unlimited amount has been “voluntarily” confiscated by our government. It is not gratifying, in fact it’s infuriating, that we are being forced to support able-bodied people who choose to cultivate moss on their sofas, surf television programs, and turn their minds to mush just because they have an uncle named Sam. Are they all listening to that Dire Straits song about “getting my beer for nothing and my chicks for free!”? Rebel? Yes ...by getting involved in the political process, contacting elected representatives and the White House to tell them, “I don’t support your high-tax, distribution-of-wealth, feed-the-globe-before-Americans policies!”

Third we must pay more attention to the “system” in which ordinary citizens do all the heavy lifting and the greedy politicians and their cohorts perform the ‘light-fingered artistry.” According to investment guru, Louis Navellier, one American bank, snuggling in its bailout blanket, used $15 billion of bailout bingo money to up its stake in China Construction Bank, which is owned by the Communist country. That is $15 billion that was not lent to US businesses and homeowners. Then there is the bailout money sent to American banks in which at least $18 billion was spent on corporate bonuses! Ah, now there is an AP story that the same banks that received much of the bailout largess, about $150 billion, are the same ones that were on a binge to hire foreign workers. Some 21, 800 visa applications were submitted to bring in foreign workers at salaries of almost $91, 000. So to sum up, from the perspective of the bailout beneficiaries, there must be a nice synergy going on in the bailout dough going towards “bonus lottery,” layoffs of American workers, excessive importation of foreign workers, and exportation of American dollars. I feel certain, that like me, you fail to appreciate the synergy. Outraged by this? Good! Again, get active!

In the beginning God created the world, and He saw that it was “good.” In the beginning of the outsourcing age – which can be traced to the last century and has accelerated into this century and the current economic crisis – many of the greed-is-good set saw markets to exploit at the expense of the American people, and that was not good. Finding that $2 a month is a fortune to some foreign workers, they moved their labor needs or manufacturing plants and promptly imported the falling-apart goods we routinely buy with our rapidly shrinking paychecks. They promised that more “technical” jobs would replace the less technical jobs that were shipped overseas, but of course those “replacement” jobs never materialized.

Ironically though, a strange thing happened with this outsourcing. Those exploited workers discovered their own version of a “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” They began to demand $4 an hour to be “happy.” Faced with these escalating demands, the greed-is-good set realized they were not making as much money as they had anticipated and their customers discovered they were not saving as much money as they thought they would.

Maybe the decreasing outsourcing revenue led to the fall of the firm that formed its own outsourcing “kingdom,” in arranging outsourcing of jobs from America. The leaders of this firm appear to have been outsourcing their own books to fairies. These fairies apparently spun profits out of fairy dust, to the tune of $50 billion, and more. As it turns out, no fairies were arrested for the discrepancies in those books. However, some auditors from one of the big accounting firms, were arrested. I think that I can safely assume that rather than expecting and receiving a bailout, these auditors will be looking to be bailed out!

In the quest to save our country, we must go beyond the canned news to find the truth for ourselves. The minute we hear a candidate for office being besmirched because he or she believes in the right to life, to your right to hold onto the money you earned, your right to more than “change” in your purse, and your right to question the “gods” in Congress or the White House, vote for that candidate.