You’ve all seen the ‘Perp Walk,’ where they parade the alleged perpetrator of some alleged crime before the TV cameras amid throngs of pushing and pushy reporters armed with microphones and shouted questions. It has become an American media staple. I recorded TV coverage of the ‘Perp Walk’ by the corporate Masters of the Universe before a Congressional Committee Wednesday and it was really something to behold.
With each talking head, MSNBC put up the amount of BailOut Billions that each one’s corporation received. Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup: “We did not adjust quickly enough to this new world,” explaining Citi’s purchase of a “foreign-made corporate jet” for a mere $50 Million of your and my tax dollars. With appropriate-looking contrition on his face, Pandit continued: “and I take personal responsibility for that mistake. In the end I cancelled delivery . . . I get the new reality and I will make sure Citi gets it as well,” having ridden into Washington from his New York office via Amtrak, learning well from the mistakes of the heads of US AutoMakers who had come hat in hand to Congress last Fall on corporate jets, only to be rebuffed and nailed for their arrogance, then to return via more appropriately humble transportation.
Congressman Barney Frank, presiding over the televised hearings, was on top of his world, giving this wordy slapdown: “In an effort to get the credit system functioning, things will be done that will be to the benefit of the institutions over which you preside because there is no alternative. But, you need to understand, I think many of you do, how angry that makes people.”
Eight CEO’s sat all in a row, grey hair gleaming atop finely tailored suits, ties and what looked like all white shirts, spiffed up for TV broadcast purposes.
From their CEO: “For Morgan Stanley’s point of view, if you go back and play the clock over again, we’d do it differently,” was immediately greeted by one of the questioning Congressmen with: ” We listen to you and we hear words, words, words, and no answer. It seems to me, and some of us, that this money hasn’t reached the street, that you’re not loaning it out . . .” Now there’s an understatement of the problem.
Credit remains frozen solid, despite months passing since last Fall when we were all breathlessly told that BailOut funds of something over $800 Billion, all given without any conditions or accountability, and which were largely spent on things which did not thaw the credit markets one iota, had to be appropriated in the hair-on-fire emergency of all time to keep the American financial system from locking up and shutting down. An additional $827 Billion of Obama’s Stimulus Money later, if the House and Senate can play nice and harmonize what each has now passed, and a couple of Trillion Dollars more for Treasury Secretary Geithner’s explanation of what we do with the failing banking sector, so inarticulately delivered with cracking voice and a dearth of specifics, that it caused the Dow to have a nearly 400-point heart attack, and many other Billions spent shoring up AIG, Citi, the US AutoMakers and others who are being handsomely rewarded for their abject failures, and we are now at around 4+ Trillion (the T-word) Dollars into this Supermarket Sweep of a spending orgy with only last month’s nearly 600,000 jobs lost to show for it.
A hallmark of Capitalism is that businesses which fail are left like roadkill while others hurry past to either succeed or fail and, in turn, also be left by the roadside. It is Survival of the Fittest and with good reason because Capitalism has itself succeeded by rewarding success, not failure. Yet, somehow, in this crisis of crises we have now reversed the equation, amid news of huge bonuses being paid last Fall, some timed exactly to outwit and frustrate those in Congress with the best of intentions in making over $800 Billion available to the Losers in the Corporate jungle, not the winners. Every parent knows that rewarding bad behavior is the way you turn a child into a raging monster. But that message has now been lost amid calls for more and more money to be paid to the Losers instead of the Winners.
I have a poster on my office wall which is a satire of US auto makers’ advertisements, that begins: “You Wouldn’t Buy Our [expletive deleted – think of an adjective for barnyard animals’ droppings] Cars, So We’ll Take Your Money Anyway!” and proceeds to mock a real auto advertisement with glowing text extolling the virtues of the US Automakers’ receiving your money, whether spent on their vehicles produced or received via BailOut money in lieu of you buying vehicles they produce. That poster could as well apply to the financial sector, as exemplified by the eight testifying CEO’s ‘Perp Walked’ through Congressional Committee hearings Wednesday, or to any other sector or industry standing in line with their hands out for your tax dollars and mine – even to Larry Flynt, Publisher of Hustler and other adult-genre magazines and videos, and to the CEO of the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ videos, advertised incessantly on late-night TV, who both had the chutzpah, albeit tongue-in-cheek, recently to actually ask Congress for a $5 Billion Dollar BailOut for the porno industry! Rewarding failure in business with huge BailOut Dollars of your tax dollars and mine is no way to run an economy or a government and it distorts the most fundamental Survival of the Fittest principles of the Capitalism that made this country the leader of the modern world over the last couple of centuries. And, oh yes, I’m getting really, really tired of it.