Being A Deserver Is A Lot Like Being A Decider

Believe it or not, there are people out there who are trying to explain why the guys at AIG (and Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan) deserve their bonuses/deferred compensation/ransom money for starting the financial wildfire that threatens to burn down the whole country.

Their numbers are few, but the rhetoric is strong, the tone is aggrieved, the righteousness is sanctimonious. "You people are dead wrong", they assert. "We're not going to take it any more."

I'll have to admit, I see why these people got to be executive vice presidents or so called economic whiz kids - it takes a well educated mind and a stupendous amount of motivation to concoct the elaborate straw man arguments these guys come up with. It is as if they are trying to maneuver us around the scene of the derivative wildfires that destroyed all the equity in our homes without letting us stare the charred remains of our own financial lives.

Being a deserver is a lot like being a decider - it's one of those things that can't be earned. You have to confer it on yourself.

This means if you are an auto industry chieftain who hasn't figured out how to convince the O-Team in D.C. that letting the domestic transportation industry die is a "systemic risk", they will give you your gold watch (and parachute) and tell you to clean out your desk.

I can see that President Obama is a dispassionate decision maker. He doesn’t seem to have any particular loyalty to a position, but to the logic behind "why this position is important." Which makes the disparity between the way his administration has treated Wall Street execs and the way they are treating the Big Three auto execs make even less and less sense.

Either Obama believes in the Deserver Doctrine - "I am the only one capable of deciding what is best for me and my company, despite all evidence to the contrary that may exist, and am not to ever be to judged, questioned, or doubted" - or there is something so bad in the banking system's books that bribing these guys to stay on and start more fires, the way they do in California to keep wildfires from spreading, is the only way to have a chance with this God awful mess.

You have to live in a bubble to feel the way the deservers on Wall Street do. I've dubbed them the "double bubbliers" (pronounced DOO - BLAY BUBE - LEE - AY - an extraordinary pronunciation for extraordinary people) because they live inside two bubbles. Not only has their lifestyle been unaffected - these people's outlook on their future is unaffected too, as though, despite all the financial carnage and the evaporation of value in the United States, they don't have to make any adjustments to their career paths, or their business plans, or their retirement plans.

The Double Bubbliers are not just symbols of a class divide between the haves and the have nots; they are a symbol of the way the nature of the relationship between the deservers and the deserve not's are finally being revealed in full detail. President Obama has to come up with a better reason than the ones he and his team have been giving us as to why he's standing with the deservers, because being on the wrong side of this is like wearing a capital "E" for elitist on your chest.

Fargo, North Dakota was nearly washed away by flooding last week. The Red River was the highest it had been in decades, and was threatening to set a new record when it crested on Saturday. The ENTIRE community - rich and poor, working and jobless, young and old, tired and tireder - filled sand bags, transported sand bags, and stacked sand bags against the river's onslaught. I don't have any visual evidence of this, but I'm sure an enterprising reporter looking for an angle could find a few bankers who put their boots on and stood next to their borrowers as the whole town toiled frantically day after day to hold back the rising waters.

The next time somebody starts shooting at our soldiers fulltime, we will wish we had GM and Chrysler and Ford - domestic automakers are the only place you can turn out mass produced tanks and light armored vehicles in a hurry. "Strategic strikes" haven’t won a war yet - bodies on the ground are the only way to bring major military conflicts to an end. I would hate to think we’d have to order our light armored transports from KIA, or beg Toyota to retool so they can build us some tanks.

We are throwing trillions out of the back door of the Fed - why is it so hard to send the 50 or 60 billion to Michigan? If their unemployment rate gets any higher it will be hard to get the state's economy back on track. If this industry disappears, or shrinks severely, it will be next to impossible. Can we as Americans in good conscience stand by and watch millions of our fellow Midwestern citizens get left out in the cold for being a part of the food chain of a failed industry while we hock everything we've got to keep the deservers living in high style, deservers who are also a part of the food chain of a failed industry?

Unless our deservers can get off of their high horses and out of their high rise mind sets, and figure out how to become preservers in a hurry, they may not get enough help from the rest of us when they need it the most to keep the whole financial system from going up in smoke.

Mr. President, that means you too.

Acknowledging the idea of the White House "bubble" is cute, but since you went to the trouble of keeping your precious Blackberry, why don't you use it. Call some people who don't sit at government desks all day so you can get some perspective on how bad all this looks to the deserve not's.

AIG Dream Team Holds White House Hostage

GM is practically dancing a jig and mouthing "yassuh, boss" every time they call Washington for emergency cash, while AIG's "Dream Team" impetuously suffers its way through the humiliating process of asking our government for a new truckload of greenbacks. Maybe the management at GM didn't read the same "How To Be Successful In Business Without Really Trying" books as the execs at AIG. You know the ones I'm talking about, where they impart the famous dictum, "in order to get people to give you money, you have to act like you don’t need it."

GM can't get the 20 or 30 billion or so that it says it needs to stay open unless everybody in its food chain - employees, suppliers, bond holders, executives - gives something up. The kind of restructuring they are going go through is a lot like going through a bankruptcy, except there's no judge involved. Even the smart people at GM, the ones considered to be the brains of the operation, have to give up their pound of flesh. I guess this would be the "old fashioned" way of asking the American public to lend a hand when things in your business have gone horribly wrong on your watch.

The attitude that seems to permeate the culture of AIG - "we are impervious to our mistakes" - is the thing that has Americans of every stripe ready to tar and feather anybody with an employee badge from the insurance giant. When we see this kind of arrogance and self centeredness from a company that will need 200 to 300 billion dollars by the time this is finished just to become a shell of its former self, it gets the nation's collective dander up.

The ideological terrorists who crashed those planes into the World Trade Center have had much less impact on our economy and our national psyche than our own homegrown financial terrorists who are reporting to work today at AIG, these Americans of ours who feel so strongly about deserving bonuses for being smart and wrong that they are willing to hold the country hostage in order to get it.

I don't have a problem with paying an office professional more than assembly line technicians because the professional can do complex quadratic equations in his head and manipulate computer models with impunity. What I do have a problem with is the disconnect we have fostered within this group of people when they feel that they are entitled to the reward just for being smart - not for being smart and right.

You won't see this in any study, because the only dysfunctional culture we will identify by name in this country is always in a ghetto, but my own unscientific years of observation in the suburbs has shown me what you already know but may not want to articulate - that the arrogant, reckless and entitled attitudes being displayed by the execs and the rank and file at AIG, who are mostly college educated white men, is homegrown right here in our nation's own suburbs.

If you want to see for yourself, take a ride to your nearest upscale suburban area around the time school gets out and park your car at a gas station near a high school, or next to a Starbucks.

When you grow up in isolation from the factories and warehouses and power plants, when you are cloistered in a bubble of perpetual youth that has no room for the old, the infirm, or the mentally ill, when you are segregated from the people who make the deliveries when you click your mouse, the thing you know as reality is different, different enough for you to believe that the people who turn wrenches and lift boxes and operate heavy equipment need you more than you need them.

Congress could horsewhip AIG CEO Edward Liddy today in their congressional hearing, the way they used to do to runaway slaves - shirt off, blood streaming down his back, the cries of agony echoing across D.C. - but it won't change the way his people think about what they've done, or how absolutely wrong they have been, or how much their errant calculations are responsible for taking America's economy to the brink of disaster.

Whether we can convince AIG's "Dream Team" that this alternate universe they think we live in - the one where it costs you all your marbles when you are dead wrong - is really the real world remains to be seen.

No Degrees Of Separation

I grew up in a plant town.

The largest manufacturer back then was a lawnmower plant that made riding mowers for Sears. Over two thousand people worked there.

We had other plants – a division of Hughes Aircraft, a division of Ashland Chemical, a plant for Purina Dog Food, a subsidiary of General Electric, a manufacturing plant owned by Utica Tool, an assembly plant for Kirsch window treatments – but the lawnmower plant was the biggest.

A lot of these plants would shut down for a week during Thanksgiving, and sometimes for a week during Christmas, ostensibly to retool or do routine maintenance on the big machinery that they used twenty four hours a day seven days a week, but also partly because it was easier than trying to work through a high absentee rate.

Couple that with school closings, and you had a large part of the county roaming around town, running errands, getting haircuts, tuning up cars before they got on the road to visit relatives. The plant's employees looked forward to this week.

Whenever business was slow, the plant would use the break as a way to cut back production, adding a week or two to the layoff. Every once in awhile, there would be a four week layoff. This caused problems for their employees. One week off was a vacation. Two weeks off was hell, three weeks off was torture, and four weeks off was never ending, especially when their employees were used to being paid once a week.

The ones who already had side jobs or small businesses that they ran to supplement their income fared the best. By end of the second week of a four week layoff, you would see people out looking for some kind of work to do until the plant came back online. My own family’s small industrial uniform rental business suffered during these long layoffs at the lawn mower plant too – back then it was our company’s biggest customer.

During Thanksgiving and Christmas break when I was in high school and college, I often made deliveries to the plant during these layoffs. There were no uniforms to deliver, but the maintenance guys usually used thousands of shop towels cleaning and adjusting the hulking machines that the plant depended on to stamp out the main parts of a lawn mower.

The plant itself sat right off of a main traffic artery, close to a major interstate on-ramp. But with the layoff, I didn't have to watch out for the eighteen wheelers being hustled across the intersection so they didn’t have to come to a complete stop. No cars clumped around the two convenience stores at this junction of the main artery and the side road leading to the plant that seemed to have a crowd after every shift change.

It would really hit me when I passed in front of the plant itself. There were empty parking spaces all the way up to the main entrance, a five football field sized stretch of empty asphalt which looked forlorn without the contingent of well maintained cars and trucks that normally sat between the white lines.

The guard at the back gate was bored. The loading dock where I normally had to fight to get a space to park was wide open. I had to walk to another checkpoint to get in the plant at times like these, then walk all the way back through the backside of the plant to open a loading bay door so I could make my delivery.

Pushing the delivery carts that I’d brought through the plant to the tool bay was eerie – a massive building like this didn’t sound right when the machines weren’t running, didn’t look right when the forklifts were idle.

It was at times like this that I realized that the lawn mower plant wasn’t really our customer, it was our partner, a partner I wished would get back to the business of making lawn mowers so my parents could sleep at night and I could stay in school.

General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, for better or for worse, aren’t really just major American employers, they are major partners in our American way of life. You will be affected, whether you work at these plants or not, if these plants sit idle for an extended period of time.

You know those six degrees of separation you hear about, the idea that if you examine the people you know, and then take the people they know, repeating this cycle six times, your life will be “connected” to everyone else on the planet?

There will be no degrees of separation here in America between you and the people who work in the auto industry if our auto manufacturing plants remain idle.