Price of tin gods ( Discounted! )

John Thain in his excuse for giving out bonuses to Merrill Lynch hacks in the middle of a corporate meltdown was that top talent would march to other companies. Sure. Go ahead. Tired, broken, worn-out Reaganesque style obsolete American corporate talent - walk - look for comparable employment - welcome to the real world!!! (It’s a bitch!)

President Obama in an attempt to restore reality ( sanity would be too much to ask even from him ) to the corporate boardrooms in America, set a maximum salary cap for senior executives in failed corporations. If your bankrupt hack company wants a government handout - guess what - the talent that caused the meltdown is not worth millions a year in salary - just thousands. What a refreshing breeze has whofted over the land of America suddenly.

As for talent, a few MBAs got decent salaries for their slide rule approach to ransacking corporations and putting it all neatly onto a spreadsheet to act as ponzi cover to quarterly reports and paper profits, bonuses, corporate jets, Caribbean weekends, drugs and hookers!

The quarterly report scam thing has been going on for over a quarter of a century. Can’t we just keep up appearances for a few more quarters? “Hell I even had money with Madoff!” goes the line of many sad songs on the corporate penthouse world built not on factories but more like Blow.

I have a pint of air. I invest in that pint of air and declare that it has increased in value to half a quart. I declare a dividend. Borrow money from giant useless banks to pay the dividend and I am in business. Bring on the last few remaining state and municipal pension funds to invest in my air corporation. Not many suckers left to fleece in America or globally.

Oh the Pubs fucked up real bad when they couldn’t get the Average American Joe to break off from Social Security and invest his government nest egg in Wall Street.

Bush dropped the ball on that one. The American people will sort of go along with national security and wars in the middle east but don’t touch my privates - my Social Security thingy.

It is still a mess in America with many more quarters before real corporations declare real profits and start hiring native born Americans back at a living wage. But one thing for sure is that the Tin Gods of Wall Street just got a deflationary wake up call as to their Titanic views of themselves and their supposed talents.

It is a new day dawning in corporate America. I can smell the coffee above the pollution free future of electric cars on the newly built highways, solar power on my roof and a realization that reality starts with real things and not theoretical corporate spreadsheet profits, Keating, Lay and Madoff style.

John Thain - Nihilist in Chief - goes Bye Bye

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Merriam-Webster on-line definition for Nihilism:

“a:a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless b: a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths…”

Maybe I am just mortal or I live in a scale of things that does not match reality on the lofty heights of Olympus where large corporate CEOs play with virtual reality spreadsheets instead of inspecting authentic reality factory assembly lines.

The abstract world of numbers and corporate spreadsheets has eliminated the human factor out of all corporate equations for decades.

When I read about outgoing Merrill Lynch chief or is it thief awarding 3-5 billion dollars in bonuses to corporate sycophantic louts before he dumped the Merrill Lynch toxic waste portfolio onto Bank of America I am not shocked especially when U.S. taxpayer money is being used to prop up this drunken nihilistic behavior. This drunken frat house nihilistic behavior has been going on for decades in corporate America. Congress will not change anything. Get real.

A microcosm of Thain’s ego and acceptable lack of morals in the business world is his million dollar office makeover in the past year while the company is losing money, hemmoraging it in fact. Nero fiddled while Roma burned. Thain and others redecorated. No doubt this was to improve one’s mood and to enhance positive attitude toward a future pickup in profits.

In his little cocooned privileged world of American business he managed to spend $87,000 dollars on an area rug for his office. This sounds outrageous but here is the good point. Bank of America can take a two year rapid depreciation on a nineteenth century antique Persian rug. That saves money. And in Thain’s contract he probably has exclusive bidding rights on obsolete property in his office. When he bids $10.00 and drags away the obsolete rug, he is being green. The Persian rug will not be dumped into a landfill.

Oh they say that American business can’t hack it in these tough days ahead. Just look to Mr. Thain for examples of courage and nihilism and antique corporate rugs rapidly depreciated from the federal government’s virtual reality spreadsheets.

Good riddins to obsolete corporate trash!