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Dear Friends:
A very brief synopsis follows for those of you who are impatient, or pressed for time in your struggles to find employment, pay debts and keep your lives (and sanity) together:
Breaking News Alert: The New York Times, Saturday, March 14, 2009 -- 8:23 PM ET-----
A.I.G. to Pay $100 Million in Bonuses After Huge Bailout
Despite being bailed out with more than $170 billion from theTreasury and Federal Reserve, the American International Group is preparing to pay about $100 million in bonuses to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year. [End of summary]
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After Merrill Lynch's pilferage, and numerous other widely-known and shameless acts of incredible selfishness and brazen wastefulness, this should not strike anybody as particularly unexpected. Rest assured that there will be some balking on the part of numerous regulators and the usual background white noise of the public "outcry," but that these generous rewards for fiscal irresponsibility, gross misconduct and profligate lifestyles of shameless entitlement will be paid out in full to each of the crew members. Rest assured that there will be no major civil investigations or criminal proceedings brought against any of these payees, or of the government policymakers and politicians who have failed to stop this leakage in the once-proud American Republic. The mythical character Gordon Gekko was a petty thief by comparison.
Those who have violated the basic tenets of moral decency shall be richly rewarded. Those who have been displaced, dispossed, foreclosed upon and destroyed emotionally, as well as fiscally -- perhaps the American Public At Large -- will continue to 1) be punished, and 2) to pick up the tab for the unindicted criminals and social miscreants who victimized them. Liars, thieves, con-artists, hypocrites, as well as their cadre of aiders, abetters and enablers, shall live more comfortably than ever before, while the impotent, disenchanted, war-weary people receive no relief, and ever-heightening abuse. For some, the United States was once indeed perceived as the land of opportunity. The once highly-regarded notions of fairness and justice have been exiled, leaving a sorrowful vaccuum in their wake. I am in mourning for the United States, the country that my grandparents came to to find opportunity, a fair chance at success, human dignity and constitutional justice.
Banks are getting out of the business of all consumer and commercial lending. They are cutting back on credit card credit limits, without reasonable notice and due cause, and have the unmitigated temerity to charge good, paying customers "surprise" over limit fees. New credit solicitations are going out, but they are purely a public relations ploy. If banks no longer finance either production or consumption, they are merely safe deposit deposit boxes with overly-large offices. They are worse than useless -- they are economically destructive. But their executives are being rewarded with colossal bonuses and an absence of controls, oversight or regulation. Jeez...don't you wish you owned a bank?
Insurance companies are getting out of the business of writing insurance policies or paying reasonable claims. This means that your premiums are merely an extorted, one-sided annuity for the companies that are supposed to protect you when you are ill, unable to earn income, unable to pay your bills, or to collect on debts owed you by defaulting creditors. If you become disabled or die, you cannot count on them to provide promised payments to your family to permit their survival -- and if you have a medical procedure, regardless of how critically necessary, expect to do battle with their legal counsel in order to be reimbursed for the inflated and exhorbitant costs of your treatment. Like the banks, they are in the business of stealing your money, and never returning it to you. And like the banks, their executives continue to be richly rewarded.
Automobile companies, long-known to be inefficient and low on quality, want government subsidies (and are receiving them) so that they may continue to pay out large bonuses to key individuals while they actually decrease production of automobiles and continue to layoff thousands of workers.
It has become virtually impossible to draw the line, any line, between an incompetent and ethically-compromised government, and the heads of the large corporations that control them like mad puppeteers. These carpetbaggers are filling their pockets and every other available container with all of the money that they can take.
It comes down to bahavioral psychology. Simply, when there are no rewards for ethics and responsibility, people, particularly those in power, will abandon them for other, more remunerative pursuits.
Capitalism, without any parameters of ethics and responsibility, has a propensity to self-destruct and deteriorate to a form of feudalism. It is happening today. There are even some who believe that the stage is being set for revolution in the United States. I find this prospect very frightening.
Capitalism is not the enemy, per se...it is the perpetrators, both in government and in corporate America who need to be brought to account.
Within these next few years, the only people who will be left standing in this science-fiction desertscape will be 1) the thieves and miscreants who are busily stealing at the expense of the national and global economy, and 2) the few entrepreneurs and networkers among us.
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Neither the government or the large corporations can save us. Look to the ingenuity of the entrepreneurs, the business visionaries and the newly-emerging leaders of small business and private entrepreneurship to rebuild from the rubble.
Faithfully,
Douglas Castle
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