This space for rent
Please join me in this wish...
Sylvia's Wish:
"I wish you would use all means at your disposal -- films! expeditions! the web! more! -- to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet."
I implore you to pass this one to everyone you know. People we need to wake up..
It’s Not the Bonus Money. It’s the Principle.
This is why this man makes me weep. Finally, someone other than 'us' little people are getting it. Finally, someone else with clout (as in the President!) sees it and gets it. Finally, someone with GUTS is speaking up about it. Finally!!!! I sat in Starbucks waiting for a friend and read this:
From the N.Y Times business section..
January 31, 2009
Talking Business
It’s Not the Bonus Money. It’s the Principle.
By JOE NOCERA
And on the ninth day, the president jawboned.
How else to describe what President Obama did on Thursday, his ninth day in office? Angered by news that Wall Street was doling out $18.4 billion in bonuses for 2008 — “the sixth-largest haul on record,” according to a front-page article in The New York Times, despite billions upon billions in losses — the president called reporters in and looked sternly into the cameras. Then he unloaded on Wall Street executives, just as President John F. Kennedy once unloaded on the country’s steel barons.
“That is the height of irresponsibility,” Mr. Obama said sharply, referring to the bonuses. “It is shameful.” Wall Street, he said, was coming to the government for badly needed help — which taxpayers were providing because otherwise “the entire system could come down on top of our heads” — and the government had a right to expect in return that Wall Street would “show some restraint and show some discipline and show some sense of responsibility.” After going on in this vein for a while, he slapped around Citigroup for agreeing to take that new $50 million corporate jet after agreeing to a huge bailout in November. The government’s demand that the plane be canceled should have been unnecessary “because they should know better,” he scolded.
Mr. Obama didn’t take a shot at John Thain, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, who was pushed out last week by his new boss, Ken Lewis, at Bank of America, after Merrill reported a $15.3 billion loss in the fourth quarter. But then, he didn’t have to. The revelation that Mr. Thain had spent $1.2 million remodeling his office shortly after joining Merrill in 2007 — and more recently allotted big bonuses to Merrill’s troops even as the firm’s red ink was forcing Bank of America to seek more government help — has transformed Mr. Thain into the new Richard Fuld. He’s the person Americans would most like to punch in the nose.
This week, American companies announced somewhere around 65,000 layoffs. Caterpillar, Kodak, Home Depot, I.B.M., even mighty Microsoft: they are all cutting jobs. Everywhere in the United States, people are feeling the pain of this deepening recession. Even those with jobs worry about their futures. Their 401(k) plans have been decimated. They are frightened and angry.
Which is why Wall Street should not be surprised that oversize bonuses and $50 million jets generate outrage — and tough rejoinders from the president. “It suggests the selfishness of people on Wall Street,” said Charles Elson, a corporate governance expert at the University of Delaware, who sounded pretty outraged himself. “Wall Street has yet to learn the lesson of what happened.” What happened, put simply, is that the people who thought of themselves as the smartest guys in the room — and were paid accordingly — weren’t so smart after all. They brought down the financial system. They lost so much money that only the government can save them. The scolding they got from the president this week suggests that they’re going to be paying a price — richly deserved, I might add — for a good long time.
•
When you get right down to it, the purchase of a new plane or an office renovation is pretty meaningless for companies as large as Citigroup or Bank of America. It’s not unheard of for executives to spend $1 million or more on remodeling when they get the corner office. It’s pocket change. And companies can usually make a halfway decent business case to justify a new airplane. (It goes longer distances than older planes, can take more executives to meetings, allows the top brass to be more efficient and productive, etc., etc.) The question of whether bailout money was used to pay for these perks — as alleged by The New York Post, which broke the Citi airplane story — is, at best, ambiguous. Indeed, breaking the airplane contract and sending the jet back to the manufacturer will probably cost the bank more than keeping the plane.
None of that matters. You could make the same argument about the auto executives who flew on corporate jets when they came to Washington to ask Congress for help: surely, it was a better use of their time to fly rather than drive from Detroit, as they did the second time around, after being spanked for taking the jets. That didn’t matter either. What matters is the symbolism. At a time when the country is in such trouble — and executives are asking for bailouts — anything that smacks of plutocracy is going to arouse justifiable populist anger.
“This has been building for 20 years,” said Richard C. Ferlauto, director of corporate governance for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “Regular working people haven’t gotten ahead in the economy. They understand that tremendous wealth has been created, and they say, ‘Where’s mine?’ ” He continued: “These guys seem to be living in another universe. So the symbolism of the umbrella stand and the private jet is powerful.” The umbrella stand, of course, was a reference to the $15,000 umbrella stand that the former Tyco chief executive Dennis Kozlowski bought with company funds — and that is part of the reason he is now behind bars.
But there is something else as well. Most people still don’t fully understand what, exactly, Wall Street did that caused so much trouble for the country and the financial system. I spoke this week to David M. Smick, author of a scathing book about Wall Street, “The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy.” In indignant tones, he talked to me about the sophisticated off-balance-sheet vehicles the banks used to hide risk and game the system, and the “mortgage-backed securities they were shoving out the door.” He concluded, “I find their behavior just appalling.”
But words like “off-balance-sheet vehicles” and “mortgage-backed securities” don’t have much meaning for most of us. What we understand is greed — which, ultimately, is what Mr. Smick was talking about as well. For most Americans, big bonuses and corporate jets and office remodelings become a kind of stand-in for the real sins of the bankers. They signify what people hate about Wall Street.
The truth is, this is probably the last year for a good long while that Wall Street bonuses are going to be so out of line with reality. Partly that is because the government simply isn’t going to let it happen again, at least not at any institution that has taken bailout money. The top executives at those institutions already have some restrictions on their pay, and there are other, further restrictions in the works at the Treasury Department and in Congress. One proposed new wrinkle would call for bank executives to get most of their bonuses in stock — which they wouldn’t be able to unload until the government was no longer a shareholder in the bank.
Bonuses will also go down because, after this year’s bonus fiasco, Wall Street finally understands that the public scrutiny is going to be fierce. At many firms, 50 percent or more of revenue goes out the door in the form of compensation. That’s simply untenable now.
Finally, the business model of the investment banks is almost certainly going to change. Over the last 20 years, investment banking went from being primarily an advisory business to being mostly a business where firms traded for their own accounts — so-called proprietary trading. It is the trading business that made the banks so immensely profitable. It is also what propelled the creation of mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps and all the rest of it. Those vehicles generated both enormous fees and enormous profits.
But that game is over. “It will be impossible to rebuild that business model, which relied so heavily on leverage,” said William Hambrecht, founder and chief executive of the investment firm WR Hambrecht & Company. “I don’t think the government is going to let them take that kind of leverage again.” And the government will also tightly regulate complex securities. “So we are faced with an era of sharply reduced profit opportunities, which means a lot less income,” Mr. Hambrecht added. To him, the big bonuses this year signaled that “Wall Street hasn’t been able to admit that yet.”
Wall Street traders are also extremely reluctant to give up the “eat what you kill” mentality that has dominated their profession these past two decades. There is no sense of shared enterprise at most firms, and no belief among the rank and file that they should have to pay a price if the firm is drowning in losses and needs government support. That is why they are so blind to how they appear to the rest of us. They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.
Indeed, Ira Kay, a top executive consultant with Watson Wyatt, told me that this bonus season has been akin to “war” inside many Wall Street firms. “It is a small group of people who caused the problems,” he said. But other bankers had very good years — and all over New York they are now complaining about their smaller bonuses, completely tone-deaf to how this sounds outside their Wall Street silos. You can make a pretty convincing argument that that culture — and the bonuses that flowed from it — had a lot to do with creating the financial crisis. If Wall Street can’t bring itself to admit as much, the new administration and the Democratic Congress are going to be more than happy to point it out.
•
It’s not just Wall Street, either. I’ve long thought that the reason executive compensation became such a flashpoint was because it, too, signaled an “I want mine” mentality among chief executives. It was infuriating to see them bring home tens of millions of dollars even as their company’s stock fell and they laid off employees. Next month, proxy season will begin, and we’ll start to see how much not just Wall Street chieftains made in 2008, but also all executives who run public companies.
I asked Mr. Kay what we should expect. Did corporate executives understand the need to show that they were willing to sacrifice in these hard times, just like the rest of us — or will we see them still grasping for every last dime?
“I am a little disappointed with the reaction of some of the executives,” he replied. “The emphasis on pay-for-performance has gone up to an extent, but the executives are definitely not where their boards are, where the shareholders are, where the media is, or where the government is. They are lagging on this.”
I’m guessing that President Obama is going to be jawboning again before too long.
Mother finds son on MySpace after 32 years apart
See, Myspace isn't that bad after all (unless you are 11 yrs old)...
Mother finds son on MySpace after 32 years apart
January 26th, 2009 @ 10:12pm
By Courtney Orton
Video Courtesy of KSL.com
(I had the video working but now it's not. Don't know why)
Here is the URL of the story- http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=5430...id=5430467
Layton, Utah -- When a Utah mom gave up her son more than 30 years ago she thought she'd never see him again. But the two found each other last week thanks to a social-networking site and a typo.
Thirty-two years ago Terri Fuller put her 2-year-old son up for adoption. "I was young and barely surviving," she said. "I felt he needed a family."
Terri Fuller
Fuller's aunt said she knew a couple who couldn't have kids. "I took him to California, Red Bluff. I walked in the door, and as soon as we did, she took him and took him to his new family," Fuller explained.
It was a day she never forgot and always regretted. "There was still that void of not having him there. I'd often wanted to look for him," she said.
For years, Fuller did look. But her luck changed when she created a profile on MySpace with a note saying she wanted to meet her son.
Rustin Hawver
"I got on the computer. There was this message. It says, ‘Hi, I'm Rustin Hawver, H-A-W-V-E-R. I think I'm the one you're looking for that you want to meet. Please let me know if I'm wrong.' Because I had it spelled as H-A-V-E-R."
Her son, who lived hundreds of miles away, actually stumbled upon her page because of a typo. He missed the "W" in his last name while searching for his blog.
"She had my name misspelled. If it wasn't for Google or that keyboard being messed up, I would have never have found that," Hawver said.
Hawver, now an adult, couldn't be happier. "It has set my mind at ease, lifted a weight off my heart and allowed me to breathe knowing bits and pieces of who I am is now finally there," he said.
"[I] can't wait to see him, put my arms around him and let him know that I never did forget him. My heart never forgot," Fuller said.
The two are hoping to get together in March.
America is officially out of rehab....
Warning!! Don't be drinking anything while you watch this!
Robin Williams on Obama and Bush...
If you don't find this funny then check your pulse!
Robin Williams at his best!!
A man that gets it...
What I Know for Sure About Women~
By Mark Leyner
1. Even little girls, in all their blithe, unharrowed innocence, have a presentiment of sorrow, hardship, and adversity...of loss. Women, throughout their lives, have an intrinsic and profound understanding of Keats' sentiments about "Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu."
2. This sage knowledge of, and ability to abide, the inherently fugitive nature of happiness somehow accounts for the extraordinary beauty of women as they age.
3. Women have an astonishing capacity to maintain their equilibrium in the face of life's mutability, its unceasing and unforeseeable vicissitudes. And this agility is always in stark and frequently comical contradistinction to men's naïvely bullish and brittle delusions that things can forever remain exactly the same.
4. Women are forgiving but implacably cognizant.
5. Women are almost never gullible but sometimes relax their vigilance out of loneliness. (And I believe most women abhor loneliness.)
6. In their most casual, offhand, sisterly moments, women are capable of discussing sex in such uninhibited detail that it would cause a horde of carousing Cossacks to cringe.
7. Women are, for all intents and purposes, indomitable. It really requires an almost unimaginable confluence of crushing, cataclysmic forces to vanquish a woman.
8. Women's instincts for self-preservation and survival can seem to men to be inscrutably unsentimental and sometimes cruel.
9. Women have a very specific kind of courage that enables them to fling themselves into the open sea—whether it's a new life for themselves, another person's life, or even what might appear to be a kind of madness.
10. Women never—no matter how old they are—completely relinquish their aristocratic assumption of seductiveness.
And here is one last thing I know—and I know this with a certitude that exceeds anything I've said before: that men's final thoughts in their waking days and in their lives are of women...ardent, wistful thoughts of wives and lovers and daughters and mothers.
Photo: Courtesy of Greater Talent Network, Inc.
Mark Leyner, a husband, a father, a son, and a brother, is the author of eight books and a co-writer of the movie War, Inc.
I hope a few men out there will contemplate those words...
Have a great day!
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