Next week marks the publication of my new paperback – How To Relax Without Getting The Axe. It’s a thorough rethinking and repositioning of my seminal work on executive life, Executricks, or How To Retire While You’re Still Working, published about six seconds before the recession hit over a year or so ago. The premise of that book was that he or she who perfects an executive lifestyle can emulate the existence of an affluent retiree. The basic concept of that book, and the suite of executive strategies contained therein, stands tall to this day, and those who acquired the work in hard cover have nothing to complain about. It was clear, however, when I contemplated the publication of the paperback this fall, that nobody at this juncture is thinking about retirement, affluent or otherwise. We’re all thinking about how to hang on to what we’ve got and protect our flanks from competitors, ambitious peers and colleagues and vicious McKinseyites now running down our hallways with silver hatchets.

So as much as I hate actual work, I sat down and rewrote the book for the somewhat despicable times in which we live. I believe it is very important that we all continue to live and work with distinction as true executives do, even if we are not executives, even if many executives now labor in somewhat reduced circumstances. The basic tools of executive life remain as solid and staunch as  they were in better times. People still delegate. They continue to operate from remote and inaccessible locations. They use/abuse the perks of their jobs. They work on the things they choose, for intense, brief bursts. They define their jobs more than you or I can do. They have more fun. And as we see from today’s news from the world of banking, they continue to live without shame and suck up huge bonuses if they can get them.

There is no reason why people like you and I cannot study these executricks, modifying them for the world we now live in, and soldier through the muck and mire to, as much as possible, relax without getting the axe. Others are doing it. We can, too. With, of course, the right guide at hand. It’s now available on Amazon both in print and in a Kindle edition for you e-readers. I discuss the book at some length today on Reuters, if you are interested.

And by the way. If in the next month or so you go to an airport bookstore and they do not have my book, please let me know about it. I’m not in a perfectly sanguine mood these days and there are some butts I’d like to kick if I get the slightest provocation. That’s a well-known executive skill too, you know.

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

I’ve been in a good mood all week about the announcement that Warren Buffett was investing $32 billion in Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the nation’s 2nd largest railroad. “From my standpoint, it’s a lot easier to make a $32 billion investment than 10 $3 billion investments,” Mr. Buffett said, and also noted, with his customary dry wit, that he was probably doing it because his dad never bought him a train set as a kid.

At first blush, this is so radically counter-intuitive a move that you just don’t know what to say about it.  A railroad? Really? Isn’t that hopelessly brick-and-mortar? And so 19th century? Why not an investment in this and that? High-tech wazoos or something? Synthetic brain cells, maybe? Online gadgetrons? There’s so much fascinating new stuff out there! But choo-choos? Seriously?

And then you think, wait… this is Warren Buffett we’re talking about. The guy who never invests in anything he doesn’t understand.  How much of what’s going on right now do YOU understand? Want somebody to explain the business model for the latest Silicon Alley start-up to you again? How about stem-cell research? Cloning? Alternative energy sources that may be commercialized one day?

We do know one thing. As the American economy improves, people are going to need to ship things from one end of the country to another. Rail is a cheaper way for people to do so than a lot of other methods. If you believe in our nation and its businesses, the move makes tremendous sense, even if it doesn’t adhere 100% to conventional wisdom.

How stupid has conventional wisdom been this year?

Let’s take a little quiz. If you had $30 billion and you had a choice where to put it, would you invest in…

• Railroads or Airlines?  (Railroads)
• Railroads or magazines? (Railroads)
• Railroads or newspapers? (Railroads)
• Railroad or automotive companies? (Railroads)
• Railroads or the latest social networking phenom? (Railroads!)
• Railroads or chicken? (Chicken)

In the latter case, you should probably know that I will always bet on chicken if given the opportunity. The ubiquity of chicken in our daily lives shows no signs of diminution. Wherever you turn around, somebody’s eating one.  You can bet that’s going to continue. So compared with most other investments available right now, other than insured triple tax free bonds, chicken is even better than railroads.

Other than that, you have to like the way Warren is thinking.  It says that you don’t have to be nuts or smoking something in order to put your money on the home team, which is not Wall Street — it’s America. It’s a bet FOR something, not against.

Railroads? I’m on board.

Reaction is mixed to the big new eBay advertising campaign, “Come to think of it — eBay.” Of course, reaction to anything is mixed these days. Anybody who does anything worth noting is stuck like a shish kebab by somebody who’s got a bone to pick with something or another.

Personally, I think it’s kinda good that eBay is going to gear up a huge ad campaign at all. It’s the first in 18 months for them, and signals further improvements for the environment.  On the other hand, you want brick-and-mortar stores to do well this holiday season. The more successful eBay is at marketing itself as a place you buy new stuff, the less shopping there may be at the Nordstroms, Wal-Marts and dollar discount stores this Xmas. So there’s that.

Then there’s the slogan itself. “Come to think of it — eBay.” Personally, I find myself wondering about it a little bit. Sure, it’s positive. It says, “Hey, I was trying to think of a place to go shopping. I should have thought of eBay first because you can pretty much find anything you want there.” It’s not altogether dissimilar to the famous, “Wow! I shoulda had a V-8!” campaign that sold millions of confused drinkers on the weird, salty, vegetable beverage that has always been slightly less than top of mind for thirsty consumers. As a slogan, it’s catchy. It makes you think a bit. Maybe too much?

Ah, there’s the rub. Does it make you think TOO much? As in, “I guess I haven’t thought about eBay because it’s pretty much the last place I’d go for holiday shopping,” or “Yeah, I’ll go on eBay right after I’ve tried everything else”? The truth is, I don’t know. I shop on eBay a lot. I think it’s reliable and fun. I’ve bought cameras, rugs, guitars, and other random stuff on it. I go back all the time. So maybe I’m not the right audience for a “come to think of it” strategy. I tend to like slogans that say, “You GOTTA love this!” as opposed to crafty end runs that try to embed themselves in one wrinkle of my gray matter.

I’m a sucker for slogans, of course, as I’m sure are you. Others that have remained with me over the years include:

• Take a puff — it’s springtime
• I’d rather fight than switch
• You can be sure — if it’s Westinghouse
• I want my MAYPO!
• Have you driven a Ford lately?
• I’m a Pepper
• Let Hertz put YOU in the driver’s seat
• Goodyear: Where the rubber meets the road
• Campbell’s Soup! It’s mmm-mmmm good!
• Beef: It’s what’s for dinner
• Alka-Seltzer: No matter what shape your stomach is in
• Pork: The other white meat
• Be all that you can be
• My doctor said Mylanta

We’ll see how this new one works out. I’ll just stash it in my vast vault of fatuous slogans and jingles and see if it stay in there, like the Buster Brown shoe jingle, or vaporizes like so many others have over the years.

What do you think? Will “Come to think of it — eBay” drive you like a hot, dry lemming to the ocean of objects on sale at that worthy destination? Come to think of it, time will tell.

Those who were enjoying a weekend of high sports drama or familial bliss might have missed another media obituary this past Sunday – David Carr’s persuasive au revoir to business journalism in the New York Times.

Carr cites several “technical reasons underlying the collapse — and that’s what it is — of business journalism.” It’s hard to argue with him, not to mention dangerous. You don’t want a guy like Carr mad at you. Still, you’ve got to hope he’s being a bit pessimistic in order to make his point, and that there’s still some life in the game if somebody can figure out a new way to do it.

Carr suggests that the beat itself has lost its mojo, because its subject — essentially the aggrandizement of Business and its practitioners — has disappeared. We’re not interested in big, glossy spreads of the superpeople who run the economy and its constituent parts.  We don’t want to see one more big piece on how great this or that financial wizard might be… because we’re not in the wizard business anymore.

Yet the need for stories that concern the making and spending of money have never been more important. The collapse of this discipline as a popular art form will spell disaster in the short and long term. Short term — we won’t know what’s really going on even more than usual. Long term — same, only bigger. So what should those who cover Business be writing about, and not? Here are some early suggestions:

NO: The Financial Sector. I’m bored with it. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be coverage. But about 80% of all stuff right now is about Wall Street, banks, financial institutions, rich farts getting bonuses, and so forth. Been there. Done that.  Unless a guy is running around in front of the stock exchange with his or her pants on fire, I’m not as interested as I should be anymore.

YES: People in other areas of enterprise who are making news in one way or another. There must be some other fields of endeavor where people make something other than decisions and big money. I mean… aren’t there?

NO: Prognostications from economists and security analysts. With the winnowing-away of huge swaths of reporters and editors, a lot of newspapers, magazines and websites now confine themselves almost exclusively to reporting on the reports of those whose job it is to issue reports. Sometimes these guys are right. Sometimes they’re wrong. They’re seldom very interesting to read about. But it fills space, particularly the more outlandish and opinionated ones.

YES: Bovine methane emissions and attempts to either reduce or monetize them.

NO: Davos. The Allen Conference. Any other story that features the usual stiffs wearing blue jeans and white water rafting. That includes Bono.

YES: Auto workers who are still employed. How science is making our lives better. Malls that are sinking into the swamps on which they were built. Stem-cell startups in weird locations. Businesses that are actually making money, instead of those that are grooming themselves for a VC run. You know… business.  Remember business?

NO: Global.

YES: Local.

NO: Dead stuff and why it’s dying.

YES: Having fun in Tokyo.

NO: What old guys are thinking.

YES: What young people are doing.

NO: Tech.

YES: Sex.

Business is about life, not death; about freedom, not prison; about struggle, not defeat. Sometimes when the story isn’t going your way, you have to change the story. What was first in importance is now last; what was last is suddenly first.

Maybe it’s time we all started looking at the front end of the elephant for a while. The view is different from up there.

For more than a year — almost two, if you count the gloomy prognostications of my friend Fred, which began in August of 2007 — we’ve had to listen to people telling us that the world was ending. For a while, it sure looked like it was. “You think THIS is bad,” they would say, “just wait until the Barfinger number explodes on the downside of the augmented credit facility situation!” At which point, you know, we would be treated to a horrific scenario in which nobody in the world would have a home anymore, or could get a loan ever again, or go to an office that was not in receivership.

A fair amount of this “wisdom” was promulgated by people who profit on the downfall of others. They were doing well, because they had bet on the collapse of all the hopes and dreams the others had worked for, and were excited that things might get even worse, making them even richer.

Other fustian was provided by the enormous cadre of Glass Half Emptys that populate our financial and corporate cosmos. They’re the guys with the lean and hungry look you see at budget time, and they’re simply constitutionally and emotionally wired to see the worst, always, to anticipate it and sort of enjoy it, in their own way, when it comes. When times are good, they still see the grim reaper lurking around every corner. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.  So their innate pessimism is validated every now and then, which makes them think it’s a rational, not spiritual posture.

And then there was the reality, which was bad enough to scare even the most positive among us. Like, when you read that banks — all banks — are no longer safe repositories of money, what’s a little investor to think? When big bald pufferfish are on cable 24/7/365 scaring the bejeesus out of you with their words as well as their faces, who are we to demur? Even when the economy began showing signs of life, as of course anyone who believes in this nation and its businesses knew it would, there were plenty of people who harshed our glow with talk of dead cats bouncing and false sunrises.

So yeah, we just went through a horrible spasm of End of Worlditis, like Europe did during the plague years, when being a professional bummer was a growth industry.  But now, I think, we can tell these harbingers of doom to get lost. In fact, let’s do it right now. I want you to go to the window and lean out and yell as loud as you can: “Get lost, harbingers of doom! Particularly on CNBC!”

The numbers are there. You read it in the morning papers. Gross Domestic Product expanded in the third quarter by 3.5%.  Housing and consumer spending have hit bottom. We have a government prepared to offer creative incentives and stimuli to keep the ball in the air. Other metrics are in line with a generally upbeat weather report. So let’s start remembering what a growing operating environment feels like again, and stop cringing and trembling and whining and moaning and reacting to every rustle in the bushes. Let’s start thinking, not emoting.  There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

The Case of the Northwest Pilots keeps getting funnier and funnier. Of course, it wouldn’t be one bit amusing if it had happened to me, but as Woody Allen once said, when I get a hangnail, it’s tragedy;  when you fall down the stairs, it’s comedy. Or maybe it wasn’t Woody Allen. Maybe it was Paul Allen. Or Herb. Sorry. Just thinking about those two in the cockpit doing… what was it they were doing?… makes my mind wander.

As you know, original speculation was that the pilots were taking their semi-approved staggered naps simultaneously. This made sense to me. Flying one of those big planes is almost as boring as running a business meeting. Once the thing is up in the air, you set the automatic controls, lean back and wait for it to be over. It’s my estimate that fully 63% of all business people have at one time or another copped a parcel of Z’s when the gears of the machine were grinding. Why shouldn’t pilots? Okay, I can think of a lot of reasons why not and I’m sure you can too. But the idea that these guys slept through their wake up alarm and allowed their enormous vehicle to drift over the landing zone didn’t seem far-fetched.

Yesterday I heard that the somnolence theory has now been supplanted by the story that the two were cruising the web and lost track of the time. This summons up a couple of images to my mind. I’m thinking they weren’t just Googling. I’m willing to bet that if they were online, it was some kind of World of Warcraft thing. As good as YouTube or Wikipedia might be, you don’t lose yourself in it the way you do when a Orc is about to hammer in your brain pan and send you back sixteen levels. There they are, 37,000 feet up, a planeful of people behind them, whacking away at their joysticks in some digital dungeon? I can buy that. In the days I was addicted to DOOM, I used to spend the entire night blasting away at hideous monsters, so in the zone that I didn’t realize that the sun had risen until my wife came in to tell me it was time to go to work. So maybe that’s what they were doing when they were out of touch for 78 minutes. As an explanation, it still seems pretty lame to me. Maybe one was sleeping and the other was earning experience points as a Zarkon warrior or something like that.

Anyway you slice it, though, it points to a breakdown in the system somewhere. Now it turns out it wasn’t just the snoozy (boozy?) gamer/pilot dudes who are in hot water. The air traffic controllers and the FAA, which is supposed to regulate such things, were egregiously late in notifying the military of the wayward Northwest flight to Minneapolis. The information that a flight has essentially gone out of the blue and into the black is supposed to be conveyed in about 10 minutes time. It took at least 40 minutes for the news to be conveyed upward to the guys who monitor our skies. Doesn’t generate a whole lot of confidence, does it?

All of this is capped off by the news that the pilot’s union is unhappy with the fact that the FAA has revoked the licenses of the pilots in question and is now preparing a response. I’ll be interested to see it.

Today is This Is It Day in Los Angeles. All the theaters at the swank new multiplex downtown are devoted to the premiere of Michael Jackson’s new posthumous movie, a lovely, gift-wrapped sausage made up of everything they could find on the floor after the Grade A beef left the factory. A host of the dead man’s stuff is also going to be sold today, including gloves, jackets, psychotically reverent oil paintings of the royal duke himself, gloves, vehicles, and gloves. Sixty percent of all Fandango activity is now said to be dedicated to fans going online for tickets to the picture, which will run in London for almost as long as he was supposed to.

His management company AEG, as you recall, scheduled that never-ending gig in a vain attempt to recoup some of the money they had sunk into the King of Pop. I will always believe that it was the pressure of knowing he had to go out and do that job that drove the sleepless, terrified entertainer to what was, in effect, an assisted suicide. But AEG has to be happy now. You can almost feel the money gushing into their pockets.  And given the state of his debt load, I believe it’s quite possible that his handlers will get to keep it all, with a little left over on the side for the kids, for optical reasons.

Yes, when This Is It and associated projects are through, it’s quite clear that Michael Jackson will take his place as the most successful dead man of all time, leaving aside a number of religious figures who continue to generate significant revenue each year for their associated organizations.

Prior holders of the crown include:

• Elvis, who continues to attain in death the kind of annual financial performance that often eluded him in life;
• Lenin, whose embalmed body was on display in the Kremlin for decades;
• Shakespeare, who died so long ago that, while his plays have produced better ROI than most hedge funds, unfortunately makes nothing for himself and his heirs.

Alive, Michael Jackson was a problem for the guys at AEG. Dead? He’s the best investment in the history of the business. You can almost hear them thinking, “Hey! Why didn’t we think of this sooner?” Who knows? Perhaps they did.

I got a Universal Remote. Have any of you ever had one that worked? This one didn’t. Doesn’t. Won’t.

I’ve had them in the past. But sometimes when you have an object that disappoints you, you try again a few years later. Like, a while back I tried to set up a wireless network in my apartment. It was a PC thing, with routers and PCMCIA cards and stuff like that. Didn’t work at all. Sputtered a lot. Died at inopportune times. I hated it. More recently, I got a Mac with built in Airporter. Got an Airport Extreme to go along with it. Bingo. Wireless up the wazoo. Love it.

Some things, however, never change. I think I’ve already told you about my hate/hate relationship with Bluetooth. From the fact that my ear was not built to take the little dinglething in stride to the obnoxious anti-linking situation with whatever cell phone I seem to possess… my tooth will never be blue. I’ve tried three times. Three strikes is out in any game I care about.

Now there’s this Universal Remote here. It’s supposed to tie together my little sound system with my DVD player and cable box. I am supposed to press B, which will turn on all my components, then press CBL for cable, DVD for DVD (duh) and AMP for the sound system.  Simple? No question. I put my other remotes in a drawer with tremendous satisfaction, put batteries in the Universal Remote and voila. Ready to roll.

Except it wasn’t. I didn’t. Roll, I mean. I pressed B. Everything went on. The TV said “Video 2 NO SIGNAL” and there was no picture. The sound was fine. The cable box was on. But I think a picture is part of the whole deal, don’t you? I pressed some other buttons. Now the sound went out too.

So I went to the cabinet and got out my poor, disrespected TV remote. Cycled through the Inputs. Found the right HD button to restore the picture. Then I took out the remote associated with my sound system and got that up and running again, too. Pretty soon it was all back to normal. Then I put my new Universal Remote into a drawer. I’ll take it out in a couple of months and see if I’m smart enough to get it working then. Perhaps I won’t have a cocktail beforehand, like I did last night.

You want to be sharp when you’re operating heavy machinery.

So it’s finally coming down. The pay czar has studied the situation. Thought about it. And declared his intention to send a message. Pay for the top 175 executives at the financial institutions that took a bailout are to have their base pay cut by as much as 90%, and total comp by 50%.  Seven companies will be affected. Of course, we don’t know precisely which executives are on the hook, but I think we can draw our own conclusions.

America has been waiting for quite some time to see some green blood in the water, and this move only begins to address the underlying rage our nation feels at Wall Street and its minions. Still, you have to feel a twinge of empathy for these 175 individuals who are the first to shoulder the blame for all that our financial institutions have done to screw up our economy. Thousands were involved, of course, but these 175 must stand in the forefront of their cadre, trembling, as their golden parachutes are folded up and put away, their ceremonial swords broken over the knee of the government.

Think of the sacrifices that these few, unlucky individuals will have to bear! Here are just a few:

• Significant and immediate cutbacks in philanthropic activity.
• The new yacht will have to be canceled. Last year’s model will have to do.
• The private jet will have to go. At best a Netjet time share will fill in the gap, but it’s quite possible that from here on in some of these folks will have to fly commercial. That’s huge.
• That third home in East Hampton or Malibu will be put on the block; some executives will even be down to just one primary residence.
• No Easter break in St. Bart’s for the entire extended family, and the compound in Martha’s Vineyard will have to be leased out for the entire month of August.
• Taxicabs instead of car and driver. While the occasional limo may be a possibility, waiting time is out of the question.
• Some club memberships will have to be winnowed out, leaving perhaps only one golf and one beach and tennis club for the foreseeable future.
• Support payments to former spouses will have to be renegotiated.

Obviously, dire times call for dire measures. Whether the radical actions contemplated by the Federal Government are warranted, or are too much, too soon, has yet to be ascertained.

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

Those who wonder why the President took a hectoring tone last night with the guys on Wall Street who run the banks that run the banks that manipulate the markets that shape the economy need look no further, I think, than the story sent in by Laura Cosino in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s an inspiring tale — if you’re an accountant. It demonstrates just how creative and innovative that profession can be, particularly when its practitioners work for a big institution that makes its own rules. Laura writes:

“I actually let my bank know how much I appreciate Over-draft protection! I got a letter in the mail stating that I was $374 over-drawn and they would like me to do something immediately. I was confused by this because I didn’t remember making any purchases. It turned out that I had overdrafted my account by $1.36 through a subtraction error I had made in my checkbook. I called the bank to tell them there was a mistake! I had only overdrafted one time, but yet they had charged me 7 overdraft fees. I told them that I had gone through my check register multiple times and no matter how I did it, I was only short on one transaction. They informed me that they don’t do their accounting the same way as I do, they don’t deduct the transaction the same day that it is made. The bank likes to put everything in “pending” deduct it from my balance, then pick the largest transactions and let them clear first (they thought larger transactions may be more important-paying a credit card bill) and after they do that…they leave all of your other small transactions for the end. They then pay those transactions, and charge you a fee for every single one. I was totally confused by this, I don’t remember my high school accounting class teaching to balance your check book this way. Needless to say, they don’t refund any charges no matter the reason…and according to the rep on the phone, there is no one higher at Fifth Third Bank than him.”

Too bad, Laura! You’re out of luck. We all are, actually, if the audience at that fund-raiser gets its secret druthers. They might have paid $30,000 to attend their public flogging, but I would venture to say that not one person in that room is willing to submit to the lesson that was articulated. And when Finance is allowed to implement its own ideas of regulation and control we can all look forward to being caught in the overdraft.

All it would take would be a little legislation.

How about this. Let’s have a federal bill that states that any bank that took a bailout loan and hasn’t paid it back yet isn’t permitted to foreclose on anybody’s primary residence. In addition, bonuses for senior officers at lending institutions will be reduced by a factor tied to its foreclosure record for that year. High rate of foreclosures would mean low bonuses.  At the same time, institutions that refrain from foreclosing on people’s homes would be granted tax abatements on their profits indexed to the amount they are putting at risk by allowing homeowners to renegotiate their loans and remain in their residences.

Of course, passage of such a law would also involve responsibilities on the part of defaulting borrowers. For instance, no resident would be permitted to simply walk away from a house simply because its market value had fallen 10% below the size of its mortgage. That seems to be happening all over the place right now. That’s not good. Lenders have rights, too.

In short, a  spirit of enlightened responsibility and mutually assured destruction must be re-established on both sides of the equation — lender and borrower alike. They say you can’t legislate these things, but they’re usually wrong. Just about everything can be. They say that short-term, mechanistic fixes aren’t organic to the system and can’t be sustained. Really? Tell that to the guy I just gave five bucks on the way to work. He’s having breakfast on that right now. Not to mention all the banks that just reported record profits, who got their own handouts not long ago.

The situation as it exists is dire. People are out on the street. Banks own a bunch of worthless real estate that is flooding the market, just sitting there. Stupid banks made stupid deals with hopeful people. Together, they made their bed. Now they should be forced to lie in it, side by side, until this long night is over.

Any lawyers out there are invited to improve on the basic structure of this concept.  And any politician who wishes should feel free to appropriate it and take credit for it. Isn’t that what you people do?

1. Say “Happy Boss’s Day” to your boss. Without irony, if possible.
2. If you have a problem on the job, do not bring it to your boss on this day without also carrying with you an appropriate solution. This will be a nice change for some of you.
3. If there is an issue that you know has been bothering him, do not bring it up. In fact, don’t talk to him about anything substantive at all. And if you know he doesn’t really like you very much, don’t talk to him.
4. Drop by and sit in her guest chair for a while without asking her for a single darn thing. Like, for just this one day make believe that there’s nothing you want from her except the pleasure of her company. Tomorrow will be here soon enough.
5. If you and Forbisher are at odds again, do not descend on your boss’s office asking for adjudication. Work it out between you, you big babies.
6. If you are the boss of a boss, do not pick this day to torture him or her about his or her expense report. No boss should do anything to any other boss today that makes them feel less like a boss and more like a piece of phlegm in the lungs of the corporation.
7. If your boss is on the road, call him and wish him many happy returns.
8. Why not ask him out for a drink after work? If you usually do that anyway, have an extra one “For the boss.” You pick it up. Do not put it on your company card, if you have one, or have trouble finding your wallet if you do not.
9. If his or her door is closed, slip a little card saying “I love you” under it, unless that violates local sexual harassment policies. If it does, change it to read, “I like you very much.”
10. Come on! Give him a hug! Doesn’t that feel good? No? Well, it’s not supposed to!

A few months ago, I had dinner with a friend of mine who’s in the magazine business. “Business Week is for sale,” I said. “You guys want to buy it?”

“I don’t think we need any more liabilities,” he replied.

Of course, I knew where he was coming from, and if you saw things the way he saw them, the way most people in that business, like so many others, are/were seeing things these days you’d be in touch with the dark side, too. Everything is dying. Digital media is eating what little lunch we all have left. Woe is us. Books, newspapers, television, magazines, radio, you name it, it’s all doomed, nothing will remain but little screens where we all download our pre-arranged dollop of opinionated pablum every ninety seconds or so.

But hold on a minute. It turns out that fewer magazines folded in 2009 than in the two years prior. While USA Today is way down right now, the Wall Street Journal has crept up to take its place as the most circulated paper in America. And the New York Times has decided that it’s not going to unload The Boston Globe after all. Television networks — save one — have had the best fall launch in quite some time. Radio’s not going anywhere, the hype about satellite notwithstanding. And now here comes Bloomberg with what sure looks like a vote of confidence in little old Business Week, which for a while looked like the guy at the party who nobody wanted to dance with. 

Winners and losers. Losers and winners. The only thing that separates the two may lie in how they see the water level. 

So congratulations, Bloomberg dudes, for seeing the whole half-full thing.

Fall is just busting out all over. You can hardly stand up safely the good news is just flying around so fast.

The Dow, for instance, is about to go over 10,000 again. Won’t that be nice? Sure. It shows that no matter what’s really going on underneath our economic system, investors want to make money and think they can still do so by buying and selling stocks and sometimes even bonds. Yay for those cockeyed optimists! They make the world go ’round!

Oil has hit a high for the year. You might think this is bad, and it is, if you have to buy gasoline every day. But it’s good as a leading indicator of where we might be going. It means that really smart guys in Saudi Arabia and Texas have decided that the spending power of your average American citizen is improving, and so they can gouge us a little bit more every day until we stop buying so much gasoline again or cars that eat it up so fast.  They have confidence that we’re all going to be able to suck it up and get to that magic $5 per gallon price they’re definitely pumping for, so to speak.

And in perhaps the most stunning proof of economic life, Wall Street is set to pay out its biggest payday ever — about $140 billion to the guys who broke the machine and then got the assignment to fix it. What’s that?  Don’t seem fair? Nonsense. JPMorgan profits are up sixfold! A whole bunch of others can’t wait to pay off their TARP money! Reports give several reasons for the big payday — melting credit markets, an improving stock market, lingering positive vibes from the bailouts… but we know it’s not that, don’t we? We know that Wall Street is paying itself $140 billion… because it can! That’s why!

All hope for ridiculous future wealth for each of us resides with the rampant, uncontrolled, irrational exercise of organized greed that drives the markets. It looks like we’re well on the way to total recovery in more ways than one, ladies and gentlemen.

News that Americans Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson have won the Nobel Prize for economics sent the already contentious community of social scientists into a predictable tizzy.

Several factors seem to have catapulted the two, who were separately lauded for their respective work, to the top ranks of a beleageured profession. “We primarily recognized each for the inscrutability of their contribution,” said an unnamed representative of the Nobel committee, who made himself available from a phone booth in Stockholm. ”Of all economists now working in the world, these two are among the least comprehensible to the general public and even their peers, especially in their native English.”

The sheer opaqueness of each to the untutored observer is best conveyed in the news reports announcing their selection. The NY Times, for instance, reported that:

In its announcement, the committee said Ms. Ostrom “has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories.”

Mr. Williamson’s research, the committee said, found that “when market competition is limited, firms are better suited for conflict resolution than markets.”

What? Other reports are not much more illuminating, nor is the Wikipedia entry for Mr. Williamson, which states:

His focus on the costs of transactions has led Williamson to distinguish between repeated case-by-case bargaining on the one hand and relationship-specific contracts on the other. For example, the repeated purchasing of coal from a spot market to meet the daily or weekly needs of an electric utility would represent case by case bargaining. But over time, the utility is likely to form ongoing relationships with a specific supplier, and the economics of the relationship-specific dealings will be importantly different, he has argued.

Eh? One thing is clear: The ability to generate a large body of work on matters whose importance are shrouded in mystery is a key attribute of all world-class economists, and Ostrom and Williamson are clearly in the vanguard here.

Economists, of course, are a testy and opinionated bunch, and the selection of these particular practitioners of the dark art engendered the predictable sniping and grousing among the white-socks-and-Birkenstocks cognoscenti.  “I don’t know why I didn’t win,” said Max Farbush, who lives near Stanford and often visists the neighborhood around Wharton for its cheese steaks. “I’m as incomprehensible as they are.”  When pressed, Mr. Farbush revealed that his work centers on the relationship of markets to their produce. “There’s no rational reason that eggplants should cost as much as they do,” he stated. “It’s clear that subjective perceptual issues enter into such transactions.”

Speculation has already begun as to the 2010 winner, and a short list is now making the e-mail rounds. It’s too early to pick a favorite, of course. But while professionals like Mr. Farbush are clearly being considered, the smart money remains on game changers who are right now shaping the world recovery, which places one name at the top of any prospective list. When called to respond to their rumors, the White House declined to offer a comment.

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

You know, I think it’s kind of nice how my bank is always thinking of new ways to help me. It’s been like that my whole life. When I was a kid, for instance, my dad took me downtown to the First National Bank, which was right next door to the Alceon Theater, where you could watch two movies for a quarter on Saturday afternoons. I had ten weeks’ allowance in my pocket — five dollars, all in Benjamin Franklin fifty-cent pieces. That’s when “all about the Benjamins” meant something! Anyhow, we gave Mr. Roover, who sat at a desk by the door, my life savings at that point, and he gave me a little blue book that had all my information in it. “Every month,” my dad told me, “the bank is going to add a little bit of money to your account as a way of saying thanks for your deposit. It’s called interest. And it will grow and grow until you have a lot more than you put in.” I thought that was pretty keen, let me tell you. And I still do.

The years passed, and I got new banks, but each of them did the same kinds of nice things for me. One time, I got a toaster for opening a new account. I think I still may have it someplace. Another time, they let me pick out my very own theme for my checks. I got really cool NASCARs. The interest on my accounts went up and down, depending on the economy, you know, but I know my bank always did its very best to make sure they were adding as much as possible to my nest egg. I appreciated that then, and I do now. I know that someplace, in some office somewhere, there’s always a banker sitting there thinking of new ways to reward his or her customers. That’s just the way they do things, bankers. They’re the salt of the earth.

Which brings us to this year, when it came to my attention that my bank has been doing something secret to help me for quite some time. See, I have a debit card, mostly because I can’t be trusted with a credit card. Oh, I pay my bills and all, but sometimes it’s tough to remember about that, what with all that’s going on every day, and anyway I have a tendency to whip out my plastic all the time instead of using the perfectly good cash I might have in my pocket. So the bills go up up up, and I’m spending somebody else’s money, basically. So I use debit. I always have enough in my bank account to cover my spending, of course, so there’s no problem with that, but when I use that card I don’t owe anybody anything, and I like that a lot. Whatever smart banker thought that up was really using his noggin.

Anyway, there was obviously some other banker somewhere who was also thinking about new ways to make my life safer and easier, and he thought to himself, I guess, “Hey, what if that Mr. Bing who’s been such a good customer for so long, were to make a mistake and plop down his plastic when he didn’t have enough green in the machine? True, he’s never done that, but what if he did?” And so that banker, from the goodness of his heart, I think, went to his boss, who went to his boss, who went to his boss, and pretty soon they gave me something even better than a toaster! It’s called “overdraft protection,” and I never even knew I had it at all until I started reading the papers the last couple of weeks. What a great concept! I love it! No matter what you spend with your debit card, no matter how absent-minded or confused you might be, even if you have no money at all in your account, the nice bank will make sure that you’re not embarrassed. They’ll pay your tab! I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel all warm and toasty.

And I think it’s mighty nice that they sprung it on me as a surprise, too. I love surprises, especially when it has to do with my money.

Now, you read a lot about how people are upset about this thing, but I just don’t get it. Take my friend Patty. She went to the Starbucks the other day and got a chai latte. Lord knows why she drinks that stuff, it tastes like waste water to me, but she likes it and is willing to pay almost $5 for it. Anyway, it seems like she can’t stand to spend any cash, either, because she puts down her debit card to pay for that little sum and then goes out and enjoys her latte, not knowing that she didn’t have the dough in her poke to cover it.

In the old days, she would have had the terrible experience of having this pimply faced kid behind the counter say to her, “Your card is declined, you deadbeat fool.” But not these days! Why? Because Mr. Banker was on the case and had covered her with this overdraft protection, too! Now, does she say thanks? Is she grateful? No way. It seems that a couple of weeks later she got her bank statement and discovered that the bank had charged her a little processing fee for the protection it had provided to her without her even asking for it. Hey! Everybody’s got a cost of doing business, don’t they? I can see she might have wondered why her latte now cost her $34 once that little fee had been assessed. But really. What price can you put on the nice thing that the bank had done? I’d say it’s priceless.

Even better — Mr. Banker and his friends have now listened to ungrateful people like Patty and are implementing their own new rules. They’re promising not to charge that fee to rampant overspenders more than four times in one day. I think that’s very gracious, too, don’t you? I wonder what new things they’ll think of next to help and protect us. One thing’s for sure. I know they’re thinking of something.

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

You’ve got to hand it to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.  No matter what happens, he brings a thoroughly business mindset to the job of governing Italy. Sex scandals? He eats them for breakfast. Allegations of impropriety? It’s all a Rupert Murdochian plot! Just today, he had something of a reversal. Italy’s Constitutional Court, which is in charge of such things, decided that he and his top officials could be prosecuted for crimes committed while in office.

Now, a normal government official anywhere else in the world might blanche at such information. In Japan, the fellow might commit seppuku. In the United States, he might have to go on Oprah after holding the obligatory press conference. But not Mr. Berlusconi, who honed his public skills in the trenches of media ownership. Nope.

The NY Timesreports: “A defiant Mr. Berlusconi said he would ‘forge on’ and accused the Constitutional Court of ‘left-wing’ bias against him, the ANSA news agency reported. ‘We must govern for five more years with or without the law.’”

Spoken like a true mogul! My money’s on you, man!

Today I’m just going to direct you to two stories. The first is from paidcontent.org, dated July 20th, 2009. It says in part:

Working with McKinsey, Townsend and a Conde Nast team will “develop new perspectives on optimizing our approach to business, growing revenues, and enhancing our brand assets. All areas of Condé Nast will be included in the study.” Conde Naste has more than 30 brands between the consumer magazines, which include The New Yorker, Wired and Vanity Fair, and the Fairchild Fashion Group.

The second clip, presented for your amusement, comes from today’s news bundle. It is entitled, “Conde Nast shutters Gourmet After McKinsey Review.” Here’s a bit:

Conde Nast told shocked staff today it was closing Gourmet magazine, Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride, surpassing expectations of perhaps one or two shutdowns as a result of McKinsey’s analysis.

This is offered simply as a reality check. When desperate companies, at a loss for how to manage change or maintain the standing of their senior management, hire McKinsey, there is often a lot of blather about how this is a positive step, how it will build value, how it has nothing to do with tossing people from the parapets. And then a day very much like today always comes. And we all know what it was always all about. Lest we forget, you know.

During the latter years of the century just past, there were many interesting things going on in the various incarnations of my office, and when I say “office,” I mean a work spaces that stretched through the top floors of a number of imposing towers:

• The vice president of new business development was sleeping with the vice president of Marketing’s assistant;
• The vice president of Marketing was sleeping with the vice president of new business development’s assistant;
• The top guy in our law department was having daily assignations with a junior sales rep in an empty office on the executive floor;
• There were many boondoggles every year at romantic locations where people got hammered and slipped into hot tubs with each other. Nothing happened at most of these occasions except that relatively unattractive people got naked. What happened AFTER they left the hot tubs was never documented;
• Departmental staff meetings would often begin on Monday morning with ribald accounts of everybody’s weekend activities;
• The president of Sales routinely utilized the big table in the Board Room for purposes other than those for which it was intended;
• The senior vice president of Public Affairs had a big telescope in his office through which he observed the showering activities of the residents of the residential apartment building across the airshaft;
• One of the senior officers travelled frequently to locations that enabled him to pursue his alternative sexual preference;
• Many Quality conferences concluded with field trips to strip joints;
• Assorted local hotels had standing accounts for midday sojourns;
• A significant percentage of the female support staff all possessed the exact same pair of earrings, which had been given to them for service in the line of duty by the senior officer of the company.

And that’s just what I remember. On a personal note, I want to assure you that while all this amused and amazed me, I never got any action, even though it occasionally occurred to me, I won’t lie to you. And it never once occurred to me that any of this, as long as it was consensual, was in any way inconsistent with business life.

Now things are much more evolved, of course. We never take a meeting with a member of another gender with a closed door, and I know of no relations of any kind that do not conclude with a pristine trip down the aisle. I’m sure that’s how it is everywhere, right? Everything on the up-and-up where you work?

I’m having kind of a tough day today, so I particularly appreciated the following breaking story, provided by my local paper, The New York Daily News, to wit:

In “Frozen,” Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., writes that Williams’ head, which had been severed and frozen for storage, was abused at the facility. Johnson claims a technician took baseball-like swings at Williams’ frozen head with a monkey wrench. Williams, the last player to hit over .400 in a season, died in 2002 at age 83 and had his remains sent to Alcor for cryogenic storage in the hope that future generations would develop the technology to revive him.

Since I’m interested in the whole concept of cryogenics, I have certain questions:

1. Was the “batting practice” with Ted Williams’ head a subtle homage to the greatest hitter in the history of baseball?
2. I have always thought that cryogenic freezing was a whole-body thing. Why just the head? Why not the feet and, especially in Mr. Williams’ case, the upper arms, which were so wonderfully developed?
3. What method of “revival” were they contemplating? Is future quality of life considered?
4. What would somebody do with just his head? Would he want the rest of his body to at least exist, let alone function to some extent?
5. In the future, will there be a lot of people with just a head? How will they get around? Will they have Bluetooth?
6. Come to think of it, is it even possible to function with just a head? Although it’s been attempted by some academics at the University of Chicago, I have heard that such efforts were relatively unsuccessful, particularly in social situations.
7. How far would a human head travel if it was impacted by a monkey wrench? Was the head in motion, travelling at 90 miles per hour? Who threw it? In what manner? A sinker? A fastball down the middle?
8. Does the Williams family have a case against Alcor for mistreatment of a head that has been dead for seven years? Would the head have to be revived in order to testify?

I’m sure there are other interesting aspects of the situation that will develop. Right now, I’m beginning to make some inquiries on all of these. Enquiring heads want to know, y’know.

Okay, now. Imagine you are Ken Lewis, who yesterday announced his decision to take early retirement from his position at Bank of America. No, go ahead. Take a deep breath and put yourself in his shoes. Nice shoes, huh? Sure. That comes with the job. Hey. Get your mind off your wing-tips and pay attention. You want to understand why Ken walked? Look at it this way:

Choice #1: Everybody is on your butt. They don’t like the merger you arranged with Merrill Lynch. They certainly don’t like the billions of dollars in bonuses you paid to your new colleagues. They don’t like you. That means pretty much everybody, including a bunch of politicians who came to the party very, very late and now are in a professional public swivet that’s honing in on you.

You’ve been at the place since 1969. Ah, those were the days! There was nowhere to go but up. The future looked bright and clear. Now, all you can think about is who and what is going to be on the other end of the line when the phone rings again. You walk around mad all the time. Mad and, yeah, if you had to admit it, scared, too. Conversations with your Board and your legal team are horrendous. Nobody says, “Hi, Ken!” when they see you in the hall.

Worst of all, your friends, the ones who haven’t abandoned you, ask you “How are you doing?” all the time, with a concerned expression. You hate that concerned expression. And as you look forward to the days and years ahead, all you see is incessant labor, never-ending rationalizing of what you’ve done to friends, enemies, lawyers and legislators, endless hours in featureless conference rooms soaking up the acid in your stomach with muffins from the credenza in the corner.

Choice #2: You go home. Sure, you still have to appear in public show-trials for the next few years. You will no longer have the power to make grown men cry, except perhaps waiters. But the hell with all that.

Although you’re not entitled to the massive severance package you might have enjoyed under normal circumstances, you do have all that dough you’ve socked away over the years. In addition, there are pension benefits reportedly worth $53.2 million and about $82 million in stock and other compensation that you’ve received over the course of your career. The government watchdogs can’t touch anything that was legally binding as of last February, although they’ll be sure to try.

Let ‘em. You’ll be long gone. Any way you slice it, you’re not going to be shopping at the local mall for your sans-a-belts. First thing you’ll do, maybe, is get a couple of days away someplace with the family. Paris, maybe. Or Cabo. Except Cabo is so crowded these days. Maybe Kiawah, for some golf. Yeah. And if they want to find you, well, they can call your cell. It’s possible you’ll be going into a tunnel when they do, too.

That’s it. That’s your choice. I don’t think it sounds like a tough one, do you?

Wall Street is nervous this morning. True, there was a positive report on Gross Domestic Product. But the employment and manufacturing has its panties in a twist. It’s like Yogi Berra said. Half the game is all mental.

For a while, we were in a pleasant trough. Not every story was about how the market was reacting to its latest bout of gas. But I can feel the whole big machine rolling back into the comfy groove where it sat before the fall of 2008. There is truly a dearth of interesting business news right now, unless you think the demotion of the G8 in favor of the G20 is big news. If there’s no news, what else is there to do but follow the market. 

Following the market means explaining why it does what it does on any given day. That’s nonsense, of course. Nobody knows why the demented, greedy beast does what it does on any given day. So folks look at some of the numbers and try to sound authoritative. GDP news is positive.  That’s good, right? So why isn’t the market up? Because of unemployment, naturally. But doesn’t the market sort of LIKE unemployment? Sure it does. So why isn’t it up? Could it be … manufacturing? Sure!

It could also be that Sasquatch was rumored to be at a Starbucks in Tacoma.

Take it easy, Street! Feel better fast! You can do it! You don’t even need a reason! And that, my friends, is a proven fact.

1. They have a serious legal or ethical concern about some activity of their company, and feel it can only be redressed with the help of the media. Karen Silkwood comes to mind.

2. They are happy people who want to share their happiness with the world. They think something is funny and want to enjoy it with the rest of the blogosphere, because they believe it will do no harm.

3. They don’t really feel like they belong to the company that issues their paycheck, but are rather members of a larger community they like much better. This is particularly true of journalists who leak to other journalists to demonstrate that they are all part of the same great Big J team.

4. They are about to leave the company and are looking to suck up to the guys who are going to be covering their departure or their arrival at their next career pit stop.

5. They are powerless little weenies who want to appear more important than they are for the five minutes they are at the center of the information transaction.

6. They are has-beens or wannabees who don’t want to admit to the blogger/journalist/aggregator that they don’t know anything about the topic under discussion. Since virtually anything, no matter how blind or unsourced, is now fit for distribution to the Twitterati, this is a glorious new day for such people.

7. They are malevolent sabateurs who hate the company, hate management, hate anybody who is doing better than they are at the corporation. They are always looking to skewer their enemies and make them look bad in the public eye.  They view leakage as a way to undermine everybody who they despise. A day without a leak that hurts somebody is a day without sunshine to them. They sit in their little den afterwards and cackle at the malicious carnage they have wrought.  If you think I exaggerate, come live in my world sometime.

8. They are to be forgiven, for they know not what they do.

9. Who knows? Do you?

Sometimes you just don’t know what to think.

On the one hand, there’s Michael Moore’s new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, which takes an outraged look at the havoc that the financial crisis has caused on your basic, working (or now non-working) American citizen. Yeah, I know, a lot of you folks would drop Mr. Moore off a mountain made of his own money if you had the chance. But the guy can make a case.

His point is that our economic system is controlled by idiots, con-men and selfish, greedy SOBs who don’t give a damn about us and run the system for their own benefit. I don’t think you have to be a flag-waving leftie like Mr. Moore to agree with that one. I think a lot of Glenn Beck people would sign on to that premise.

The fat man in the hat is also righteously peeved that the Government bailed out all those big banks and insurance companies that nearly brought us all down. And again, there’s a fair chunk of right-thinking America that’s hopping mad about that, too. So maybe Moore’s anti-capitalist screed is actually an interesting nexus at the point where right and left converge in hatred of the system that rewards failure and lets the bad guys run the next iteration of the machine. Nobody ever lost money at this point underestimating the anger of the American people.

And of course we all have plenty to be angry about. We could spend the next decade yelling at, prosecuting and punishing the moral morons and stupid geniuses who gave us our recession.

But then there’s James B. Stewart’s exhaustive, exhausting look at the “Eight Days” that shook the world back in September of 2008, in the September 21st, 2009, issue of The New Yorker. It’s a tick-tock about the week that the guys who run global capitalism bumbled their way toward the decision to go socialist for a while and bail out the system that pays for their limos.  

What you see is how close we all came to losing pretty much everything — our collective life savings, our homes, the insurance that protects us from disaster (subject to acts of God and any other consideration they can think of to avoid paying you).  We get a worm’s-eye view of familiar figures like Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, Lehman’s clueless Dick Fuld, pre-bonus John Thain of Merrill, the gang from AIG, thrashing around trying to figure out how to prevent the entire mess from going down the drain it was circling.

If you haven’t looked it up, you should. If it shows nothing else, it demonstrates how in a crisis the false divisions that separate one global behemoth from another, and private enterprise from Government, dissolve, leaving a management team all working for the same big corporation. You know it. You work for it too.

So that’s where I’m stuck, another year older and deeper in debt, as the old song goes. On the one hand, you’ve got to hate the fact that the miscreants wriggled off the hook, and that in many ways — just like after the fall of Communism in eastern Europe — the same creeps who screwed things up are back running the store, the new boss same as the old boss. All those big bailouts make a lot of people want to scream, and truly, there are so many things to despise about Wall Street. On the other hand, where would we be if the so-called free-marketplace had been allowed to go down, to be righteously allowed to fail? Every single person now reading this, and even those losers who aren’t, would be up the creek.

I don’t know where I come out. I’m confused. So I guess I’ll just handle that like everybody else these days. I’ll get mad! Ah, that feels better!

My friend Max is a student of the market, among other things, and is always looking for good investments, so I wasn’t surprised when he sent me an article a day or two ago about the newest thing in swine flu prevention. According to Reuters:

The patents, held by VeriChip partner Receptors LLC, relate to biosensors that can detect the H1N1 and other viruses, and biological threats such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, VeriChip (CHIP.O) said in a statement.

The technology will combine with VeriChip’s implantable radio frequency identification devices to develop virus triage detection systems.

Shares of VeriChip Corp (CHIP.O) tripled after the company said it had been granted an exclusive license to two patents, which will help it to develop implantable virus detection systems in humans.

This fascinated me immediately. As you know, I have for quite some time posited the inevitability that a host of products and services will one day be implanted in human wetware for purposes of convenience and efficiency. Included in this category of human improvement are, naturally, all cell phones, personal digital assistants and video/audio screens. The jawbone, for instance, would make a terrific antenna for any cellular or G3 transmissions if the proper filiment were subtly inserted beneath the skin there, and the mastoid bone behind the ear could hide a multitude of hardware-related objects and is naturally convenient to touch-based control.

In the near future, then, we are already seeing technology designed to detect and alert health care officials to the presence of swine flu in our midst. It’s only a matter of time before every young MBA will be strolling down the street, hands free, chatting with his peers in the ether, reading tweets or screening home-made video on a little, implanted screen designed to pop down out of a fleshy skin above the eyebrow. How much more convenient life will be for those future digital pseudopods! Will the first volunteers for elective surgery please line up?

The New York Times comes out strongly today for limiting the Constitutional rights of corporations. “What constitutional rights should corporations have?” the editors ask, and then, as editors will, they answer their own question: “To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their rights should be quite limited — far less than those of people.”

I think this is kind of unfair. Yes, extending the rights of corporate entities to encompass all that we possess as Americans would probably further engorge the status and coffers of the entities for which we labor. But isn’t your corporation a lot like somebody you know?

When I was younger, I worked for a corporation that was a very old man with liver spots. He was grouchy and, like Chronos, often ate some of his children.

Later on, my corporation was a younger, bullet-headed sales dude from the midwest, obsessed with excellence, with very short hair and a serious drinking problem.

I won’t comment on the personality and appearance of the corporate body I work for now. It might get mad.

The Times makes a lot of good points. And certainly, in the case of Merrill and BOA, the question of whether corporations, like people, have the right to legal privilege is not a trivial one. At the same time, the idea that a corporation is NOT a person seems, well… kind of wrong, doesn’t it?

Isn’t Microsoft (MSFT) a person that looks and acts a lot like Steve Ballmer?

Don’t you know a lot of people who use Macs who sort of look a lot like them?

How about the people you know who work for, say, Bank of America (BAC)? Haven’t most of them incorporated the physical and personal aspects of their corporation?

How about you? What person is your corporation? Don’t you think of him/her/it that way? What’s he/she like? Are his/her feelings hurt that the Supreme Court may decide to limit his/her rights? Or is he/she excited about the possibility that the conservative judges may vote to grant her/him true personhood?

I thought I would let you know that Otto, whose reprehensible hold-up of corporate resources I told you about last week, got pretty much everything he was looking for. As you recall, Otto is a good employee whose job skills and function are not easily replaceable, particularly in Petaluma. He hit his boss up for a massive raise, which produced two reactions: the desire to give the fellow what he wanted, and the desire to kill him. It also made the boss consider something he had never contemplated before — life without Otto. After due consideration, his superiors decided that as galling as it was to grant Otto’s requests, it was even more odious to have to find his replacement. So after a little dickering, Otto achieved just about everything he had been seeking. And life goes on at the corporation, even in Petaluma.

This little lesson shows us several things:

1. When your bosses tell you that there are no raises right now, they are lying. There are raises, if you make them give you one.

2. If you want something bad enough and are willing to piss everybody off in order to get it, you may actually get it.

3. If you do go for it, you’d better have an accurate assessment of your worth.

4. Non-fungible people are worth more than fungible ones.

5. You’d better goddamn well express appropriate gratitude afterwards.

You’d be amazed how many people don’t. I gave a person a raise once that brought them over the $100,000 mark. When I told her, she took it in and then said, “Thanks. I realize that’s probably the best you can do right now.” Can you believe that?

It’s interesting how some people can take chicken spit and turn it into chicken salad, and how others can do just the opposite. Short story:

There’s this guy I know. Call him Otto. He works in one of our satellite offices in Petaluma. He does a very good job and even though he got a substantial raise last year — in a year in which there were supposed to be no raises — he’s perpetually dissatisfied. I won’t bore you with what he does, what his duties are. Suffice it to say that he’s relatively unique and non-fungible, which gives him the right to expect some more money if he can wangle it.

So last week he goes to his boss in Sacramento and pulls up a chair, gives him a full dose of his baby brown eyes, and says, “I’ve been offered a job by Blatt Industries. I don’t want to take it. But if you want me to stay, you have to help me feel okay about doing so.” The boss thinks about it and decides, yeah, Otto is an important player, he should be better compensated, and the fact that he’s holding the company’s feet to the fire is fair enough. So he goes to HR.

“I want to give Otto a 25% raise immediately and put him under a two-year deal,” he tells the HR guy. “Okay,” says the HR guy. “It won’t be easy, but we can do it.”  He then goes into all the malarkey that HR people talk about when they discuss the details of compensation. It’s about as interesting as listening to a lepidopterist discuss the gestation of pupae.

The boss goes back to Otto, and Otto takes in the information. Then he says, “Actually, I was hoping for 50%.” Now, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t really heard of anybody getting a 50% increase, ever, unless, you know, they’re a huge investment banker and have so totally screwed up that they have to be bought out.

“50%!” says the boss, and then, “Well, Otto. I understand you have another offer…”

“I love it here,” says Otto. “I don’t want to leave, you know.”

“… I’ll see what I can do,” the boss replies, but in a slightly different tone.

That’s when he called me, just to kick it around a little. “Otto has succeeded in doing one thing,” he said darkly. “He’s made it necessary for me to think about life without him. Once I started thinking that way, I realized it was possible. Now I’m thinking, what do I need this aggravation for… to pay this much for the job that cost me so much less last year? Sure, it’ll be hard to replace him. But nobody is irreplaceable. Sometimes I have to remember that.”

So look at what Otto has done. By the way he has handled this opportunity, he has done the exact opposite of what he intended. He has moved, in the mind of his boss, from a non-fungible, ambitious player to a greedy, slightly obnoxious employee whose presence might not be as essential as he previously thought. I don’t think that’s what he intended, do you?

The news is full of pundits, analysts, and even a President opining on the state of the finance business one year after the big plotz. Consensus is that we’ve all learned nothing. The big banks are getting bigger. Risky instruments are reappearing. The Street is once again getting on its high horse about over-regulation. Thinking people, quite naturally, are worried. We’re not even out of the woods yet and here come the same old players starting to sing the same crazy tune.

The critics just don’t get it. Wall Street isn’t a rational, thinking creature. Oh sure, it’s got charts and graphs and metrics and fetrics. But if you want to know the way things really operate, you have to look at a creature that isn’t driven by its brain but by its heart… and by any other organ that responds to that beat.

In short, Wall Street has all the sentience, maturity, and emotional self-control of a teenager… or maybe of a 50-year-old guy with a tiny ponytail and a red BMW Z4.

Last year, before the break-up, he was so excited. Love was in the air, and with it lots of money. Love involves risk, of course. But that’s at the core of what’s so exciting! No risk? No passion. Particularly for an entity whose emotions are quite immature, who needs daily stimulation to remain engaged, who requires the tang of danger to feel fully alive. Those were great days! Ah, to be rich and in love!

Then… the unthinkable happened. The big break-up. Poor Street’s heart was broken and what was worse, his belief that the risk was worth taking ever again was smashed to pieces. Poor guy. He languished for months, afraid to grant credit, terrified of incurring debt, sleeping much of the day away, waiting for nighttime when it was permissible to drown his sorrows.

And yet, the heart of the crazy, irrational Street is strong. He can’t live without that rush of endorphins that comes with the high-wire act!  So now he’s coming back, ready to love again, to make the plunge, to take those risks, even the stupid ones he knows will lead to his destruction again.

It this wise? Is this the behavior of a thoughtful, mature person? Certainly not. He’s a mad, impetuous fool! He can’t live without the thrill of the chase, the agony of anticipation, the ache, the yearning, the oasis of glory, and the satisfaction in the dessert of life! He won’t! Step aside, world! Love is in the air! He’s apt to do just about anything!

Can’t anybody keep an eye on him, for his own good?

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

I’m sorry if I’m a little late today. I was in an all-morning meeting talking about how the economy is improving. But I didn’t want to let today go without bringing to your notice, if you haven’t seen them already, two of the most contrasting quotes I have ever seen appear in public on the same issue. One displays the righteous indignation of the public about the depredations of bonus-happy Finance, the other comes from the other side of that great divide.

Quote #1: ““The S.E.C. gets to claim that it is exposing wrongdoing on the part of the Bank of America in a high-profile merger… and the Bank’s management gets to claim that they have been coerced into an onerous settlement by overzealous regulators.” Judge Jed S. Rakoff, rejecting the SEC-BOA settlement on Merrill Lynch bonuses, which he said, “does not comport with the most elementary notions of justice and morality.”

Quote #2: “I’m having a difficult time understanding who was harmed here. Why is this company being put into court over a series of events that benefited the nation, its economy, its financial system, the shareholders of Bank of America and the bank itself.” Richard X. Bove, a banking analyst with Rochdale Securities, as quoted in the New York Times.

So it’s either a moral question that goes to the heart of our justice and financial systems… or it’s nothing at all. What do you think?

A little quiz to brighten your Monday morning. Since we all have the attention span of insects at this point, I’ll make it just one question.

Q: It’s one year after Wall Street teetered on the brink and just about fell off into the abyss. At the time, it was recognized that there were significant, systemic problems in the banking business that had led to the collapse.

Today Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that the U.S. has failed to fix these underlying problems. “In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” he told Bloomberg. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.” President Obama is making a speech calling for new rules to prevent another meltdown in the economy. Will he prevail, with new regulations and rules that limit the size of banks and the exposure of our economy to another, perhaps worse, catastrophic failure? Select one:

a. Of course. We’ve learned a lot and many responsible people in the financial sector will put self-interest behind the welfare of our nation. Ha ha ha.

b. It’s all a bunch of hooey. Free markets that benefit those in charge of them are the way to go.

c. Leave me alone. I’m too busy reading reports from security analysts on how I’m going to invest my money for the next six minutes.

d. I think they should take all gloomy economists and make them go to Pittsburgh. No, wait! They’re doing that already!

e. Badges? We don’t want no stinking badges.

f. All of the above.

There are no right answers. Just tell me what you think. Hurry. And make it inspiring, willya? I tend to believe the last thing I read.

Hello, sir. I know you don’t start until January, and I’m sure there are a lot of people giving you guidance today, but I thought I’d offer a few tips as you prepare to ascend to the top slot at Morgan Stanley.

1. Say hi to people: Many guys suddenly get a big head on them when they become CEO, and forget all the little people who were their colleagues on the way up.  Don’t be one of those. A nice “Hi, Bob!” in the elevator can make an executive vice president’s day.

2. Don’t make any sudden moves: Everybody’s going to be watching you very carefully as you try to steer Morgan Stanley out of whatever incipient mess your predecessor created with all the help of his good advisors, yourself included. Don’t satisfy your urge to shake things up right away.  Listen to people. Then you can chop their ears off.

3. Eat a good breakfast: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Too many busy CEOs gobble a muffin before their 5:30 AM conference call and wash it down with a pot of scalding coffee. That’s no way to set up a successful 16-hour day!

4. Get a new wardrobe: True, you were already a co-President of the operation before this bump to ultimate power. But Presidential suits are not appropriate for a CEO. When you enter a room, the first thing people should say is, “Whoa. Nice suit.” I’m pretty sure they don’t say that now, because you had a boss who probably wanted that distinction for himself. That’s you now, sir!

5. DON’T give any interviews: Too many guys come in and start bloviating about what they intend to do. Then they have to do it. That’s most unfortunate, because people in business seldom do what they think they’re going to do even in the best of circumstances, and we’re not in those. Be quiet. If you must talk, talk to your hometown newspaper about your love of hamsters and go-carts.

6. Be inclusive: At the start of your term, people are going to be wondering who your “inner circle” is going to be. Don’t tip your hand. Of course, you’ll eventually execute a fair chunk of the remora who hung off the pelt of Mr. Mack. But you don’t want people to be too sure of where you stand for a while. This will make the entire executive team perky and nervous, which is a good thing during any transition.

7.  Don’t say anything bad about the prior Administration: This may be difficult, since you’ve probably been seething one level below for two years, waiting for your opportunity to do something different. But people hate to see their leader questioning the actions of the guy who use to be in his chair. It makes them nervous about the whole lines of authority thing, and doubt the solidity of their reporting structure.

8. Don’t say anything GOOD about the prior Administration, either: Beyond everyday lip service. You’ve been put in there because it was time for a change. So stately recognition of the greatness of the past is fine. Enthusiastic embracing of the days of yore (i.e. last week) is not.

9. Be kind to small life forms: They may take a thorn out of your paw one day.

10. Have fun! It will all be over before you know it, you know. Make the most of it while it lasts. And stay away from those risky financial instruments! I mean it!

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog

You know what I’m sick of? People trashing their own businesses. You can’t go out of doors these days without bumping into somebody lying on a grate moaning about how whatever it is they do is doomed.

Talk to anybody in the magazine business. You think they’ll tell you, “Hey, things are bleak right now but when the economy turns magazines are the greatest way for advertisers to reach targeted audiences”?  No, they’re much more likely to tell you that the best days are come and gone and that the entire sector is going to melt away in the face of digital technology that has yet to turn even 10% of the revenue the core business still does.

People in the television business are a little more upbeat because they’re used to people saying their medium is dead. It’s been dead since the mid-1950’s, you know, when it was going to be replaced by one toy or another. But still you find people talking about the imminent demise of their own business model. True, most of them aren’t really doing very well at what they’re supposed to be doing. But there they are, scratching and moaning about death, dying, and the rise of everything that has yet to make a nickel for them.

Maybe the worst are the book publishing people. Wherever they gather with their bottomless glasses of impudent Cabernet, they talk about the death of books, and yeah, how the great days are over, and blah blah blah. Their job is to sell books! Instead, they’re in the forefront of the army of gloom and doomsayers talking about how the heart and soul of their business — the book, which has been around since Gutenberg — is kaput. What’s going to take its place? Words on a screen. When? They don’t know. But they do know one thing. The medium they love, the medium by which they make their living, is dead.

Phooey, I say! Phooey!

Our mental space is filled with people who want to see things dead. I don’t know why they feel that way, but they’re certainly verbose about it. Things that are dead, have been dead and are soon to be dead, all pretty much at the same time, include:

• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Television
• Radio
• Advertising
• Music
• Theater
• Theatrical motion pictures
• Any form of paid content

Have I left anything out?

Businesses die when people have no more ideas on what to do with them, or when something superior in quality and economic potential surfaces. Sure, stuff changes. And there will be losers. But to be the harbingers of doom about your own business? Aren’t there plenty of others around to do that job? Shouldn’t you be up there defending what you do? People are making business decisions based on what you say, you fools! And at this time? With the economy still basically in the tank? Is this the moment you want people thinking you’re about the breathe your last?

You guys are like depressed teenagers sitting around moping because one day you’re going to be dead. I had friends like that in college. They wore black and wrote a lot of poetry and they were boring then, too.

If I ran the world, which I do not, I would assemble all the people in all these industries — and any other that keeps spreading rumors of its own demise — and find out which of them are still excited about the business they are in, who feel there is still life in what they do. I would collect all the nice people who have 100 reasons why they’re doomed… and fire every single one of them. I would then replace them with naive, hopeful young people who couldn’t be more thrilled to be publishing magazines and newspapers, producing television programs and publishing books.

Of course, I would also assemble a nice, slightly crazy cadre of gunslingers to develop the digital realm. By 2020, that stuff could possibly be producing 15% of the bottom line. You certainly don’t want to ignore that kind of incremental action.

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

There are increasing signs that this puny little recovery of ours is gaining strength, sitting up, and looking with interest at the nurses. Most pertinent is the current unfriendly pursuit of sweet little Cadbury by those aggressive cheese movers, Kraft.

Do you know how long it’s been since a rapacious, unfriendly takeover has been mounted? I can’t think of the last one that caught my notice. Its existence signals a certain kind of belligerent confidence that can only take place in a healthy capitalist economy. It shows that the big machine that actually runs this place is feeling its oats.

In order to mount an unfriendly takeover, phalanxes of lawyers, bankers, consultants and executives must line up, confer, and pile up billable hours in pursuit of a goal that almost always ends in one kind of disaster or another. As has been demonstrated by thousands of years of evidence — beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire and extending all the way to the collapse of assorted 20th-century conglomerates, most takeovers don’t work. The only ones that have a shot at success happen when two organizations decide they truly can’t live without each other. Even then, small life forms and most of the underbrush gets trampled.

A hostile takeover is even less fun, except for the upper tier of capital and a small cadre of visionaries inside the conquering army. But let’s not be party poopers. Where there is no M&A activity of this kind, all we have is day to day business grinding along without dreams of glory. Haven’t we had just about enough of that?

So… go Kraft! And bring on the next wave of irrational enthusiasm for deals that make all kinds of strategic sense! If destructive mergers make a comeback, can new investment instruments be far behind?

I’m trying to think about business, but the fact is, the three day weekend yawns before me like a pleasant garden with no bugs in it. Lots of people I know are developing important meetings out of the office for tomorrow. In fact, a suspicious number seem to have stepped away this afternoon already from their New York digs.

So good luck to you all for the next few days. Unless something happens, I’ll be on phone and BlackBerry, as they say. Sometime during the weekend, let’s have a little thought about the fact that this extra day of summer was won for us by the great American Labor movement that so many readers of this website spend so much time detesting. We’ll take the day, though, won’t we.

The bad news is that Tuesday will come soon enough. In fact, I actually have to travel on Monday, which is a bummer, to get where I need to be bright and early on the 8th. See you then, campers. Make sure to show up that morning with pencils sharpened, a new eraser and the kind of calculator specified by Mrs. Kolodny for your level of Math. Attendance will be taken.

I’m in LA today. Uh-huh. That’s right. The air is a quiet, eerie yellow, and our entire office smells like nicely roasted marshmallows. Plumes of creepy smoke tower into the sky just a few miles from where I’m writing this right now. I have a meeting in about an hour. I plan to make it.

That’s how we function in this particular cornice of the world we call Business. On 9/11, I was with thousands of people in the streets as the world rearranged itself, and I watched the Twin Towers fall on the television in my office, surrounded by colleagues. Then we all went home for the day. And were back on 9/12, because, you know, we had meetings.

I was here for the riots, too. We were sitting in a ground-floor conference room at the Four Seasons Hotel on Doheny. A guy came in and whispered in our CEO’s ear. “We’ve got to clear out of here,” he announced shortly thereafter. “There are riots downtown, and they’re getting close.” We could already smell the burning rubber. “Hey,” said the President of Sales to me as I was collecting my stuff and preparing to head upstairs to relative safety. “A couple of us figure we can get nine holes in at Belair if we really hoof it. Wanna join us?” I declined, with thanks. I don’t play much golf even in the best of conditions. I went up to the roof instead and watched the city burn alongside Harvey Keitel. We didn’t speak. There was nothing much to say. The next day I flew out pretty much on schedule. There were citizens firing guns at departing aircraft, but I had to risk it. I had meetings in New York the following day.

Today kind of feels like that. I could get out of town, I suppose, but I have things to do here and there are no explicit instructions to abandon this area of Los Angeles. True, I’m having a little trouble breathing, and my eyes are smarting. But sometimes you have to suck it up to get the job done. And if I take off now, what next? Am I going to get out of Dodge every time there’s an earthquake, mudslide, flood, fire or man-made disaster?

Follow Stanley Bing on Twitter at twitter.com/thebingblog.

On this last Monday before Labor Day, as the summer lies dying and the new school year begins for us all, a question has bubbled up in my mind: Do you like your job?

In my work I meet a lot of people. Some are young. Some are older than they look. Most of them do not like their jobs. Some do, though. And it’s possible that it has nothing to do with the job itself.

I had a drink with the marketing director of a very large advertising agency the other day. She’s in her mid-twenties. That would seem to be a very good gig, right? She doesn’t like it. “It’s a good job, I guess,” she said. “It just turns out that it’s not what I want to be doing.”  She wants to be painting, it turns out. Which I suppose is about as far from marketing as you can get.

A young man I know has a very good job working for a movie company. He loves movies. He wants to make them, in fact. But he doesn’t like his job, either, because he “doesn’t like to work inside.” That’s going to be a problem going forward, I think, unless he wants to be a farmer.

I heard some news last week about a young woman who used to work here. Since leaving, she’s had about four different jobs in different businesses. She didn’t like any of them. So she’s going to business school this fall. I think that’s tragic.

A guy sent a resume to me the other week. Actually pushed so hard to speak with me that I figured that to resist on the matter was worse than submission, so we scheduled a call. He’s an attorney. Been working at it for 15 years. He’s now in his early 40s. You know what that means. If you’re not where you want to be when you’re 40, a certain kind of depression/panic sometimes sets in. He’s got it. What does he want to do? Anything but being an attorney.

That seems to be a common attribute of many who don’t like their jobs. When you ask them what they’d rather be doing, they get kind of glazed over and thoughtful, and then they tell you some variation of the theme, “anything but what I’m doing right now.” When asked what they are good at, they often reply, “I can do a lot of things.” If you had a product you were trying to sell to people, would you put on its label, “It can do anything!” I don’t think so. What is it? A breakfast cereal? A floor wax?

There are, of course, many people who DO like their jobs. They may not tell you so, but they do. Some are even attorneys, although not very many. The thing is, it’s tough to say, “I love my job,” because on most days even if you love your job the details of it worry, aggravate and oppress you. Especially Mondays.

How about you? As we prepare to celebrate our national holiday honoring labor (as well as Labor), how do you feel about yours?

Follow Stanley Bing on Twitter at twitter.com/thebingblog.

The massive machinery of the tech business is mobilizing against a common adversary. That’s right, in spite of all it’s done to transform our world and define free, open digital space, nobody in the business seems to like the Goog (GOOG). In fact, the operators of the Death Star in Redmond (MSFT) have reportedly taken the point on a new “screw Google” strategy that they are rolling out in Washington.

It’s always amazing to me how the most rapacious monopolistic capitalists — opponents of even the most rational regulation that might affect their revenue picture — hump it to Washington for highly targeted relief when they think a certain form of regulatory action would hurt their adversaries. The bottom line here seems to be that nobody is against ALL regulation. They’re just against the unfair government intervention that has something to do with THEM.

I’ve heard it in confabs, gatherings and business meetings, and you read about it in the reports of those sagacious analysts who have done us so little good over the years, particularly recently. Goog has jumped the shark. Goog is going to invade your backyard and drain your above-ground pool. Goog this. Goog that. Boo!

Now here comes Microsoft to lead a band of other fiercely independent competitors who are seeking to make Washington do what they can’t — squash the Goog before, like a wild beast acquired as a baby, it grows to adult size and eats every living thing in sight. Dailyfinance.com reports that “one source familiar with the meetings says, ‘Law Media Group has several people who work full-time on Google-bashing. Everybody knows Microsoft is trying to throw roadblocks at Google and knock them off their game. Microsoft is trying to harm Google in the regulatory, legal, and litigation arenas because they’re having problems with Google in the competitive marketplace.’”

No question that the Goog has pushed the envelope and continues to do so. Scanning books before they asked for permission to do so, for instance. Or doing creepy things with your gmail. Like, a few months ago I wrote a friend of mine on my gmail account, beginning the note with my usual inane salutation: “Dude!” As I continued to type my message, I noticed that a number of ads were scrolling down the righthand side of my screen. “Wax your surfboard!” one of them said. “Surfing vacations!” said another. That gave me the hiccups for a minute. They tell me that whole process is automated and they’re NOT reading my mail. And of course I believe them.

At the same time, you’ve got to wonder about the whole strategy of the anti-Googlers. First, because in my view Google is smart. Second, because if you bring down the biggest, snazziest ship in the armada the rest of your fleet may be sucked into the downdraft. Third, perhaps most importantly, has Washington, once engaged, ever produced a little bit of regulation? And would we all truly benefit from the closing of that frontier?

Follow Stanley Bing on Twitter at twitter.com/thebingblog

Okay, spare me the reminders of how much fun I’ve made of this annoying new medium. When everybody is having fun in the pool, it makes no sense to sit on the tarmac sweltering in the heat because you look funny in a bathing suit.

As of yesterday, the Bing Blog is on Twitter. I’ll be honest with you. I have no idea how you follow me, because I don’t yet follow anybody. I did for a little while. Like, I signed up to follow a few journalists I know, and a couple of friends, and Ashton Kutcher. And every ten seconds, it seemed, my BlackBerry would buzz with an interesting tidbit about something that one of those people was doing. There was only one problem with that. I’m not really interested in what anybody else is doing. I’m barely interested in what I’m doing. And if I was interested in what somebody else was doing, I’d give them a call or send them a text message. So I stopped following anybody and my life has been 12% less crowded with effluvia ever since.

Please don’t let that dissuade you, however. I think thebingblog is the name of the twitter feed. If there’s any further information required, I will update you. It’s just another way to make sure you are plugged in to what’s really going on in this fast-moving media space, and that you under no circumstances ever have more than two minutes of uninterrupted thought. I’m happy to do my part. So follow me at twitter.com/thebingblog!

What a summer it’s been, deathwise, I mean. Cronkite. Michael Jackson. Farrah Fawcett. Don Hewitt. The famous, the infamous. Many elderly parents of my friends, one by one, went to a land where the corned beef is always lean. Some losses were surprising, as if a small but important rug had been yanked from beneath our collective feet. Others we had prepared for, but still reminded us of the implacable clock that, for the most part, silently attends our lives.

This morning I awoke to hear that Ted Kennedy had finally fought his last campaign. Of course, he hadn’t been well for quite some time. And as a national figure, he has always been shrouded in controversy of one sort or another, some of which had faded over the years as he gained in decades of service and his adversaries found other oxen to gore. He leaves us as the nation is still immersed in the effort to protect all its citizens from illness and the existing health care system that profits by it. It was his big issue. And it remains unresolved. But Ted did get a lot done in his long and bumpy life. And he won the admiration of many people, one group, I think, in particular, that is notoriously hard to win over.

A little personal story will show you what I mean.

In 1996, the Democratic Party held its convention in the great city of Chicago. Several things of note happened at that convention. Bill Clinton was nominated for his second term. Dick Morris, then a political strategist for Clinton and now a right-wing scold, was found sucking the toes of a local working girl. And a few people I know hosted a short boat ride on the Chicago river for a variety of dignitaries who were attending the festivities. It was the usual thing. Indifferent white wine. Soggy little canapes. And some famous people. The city is very beautiful and imposing when seen from the river. The weather was nice. It was better than a sharp stick in the eye.

It was apparent from the moment he arrived on board that the rock star in our midst was Mr. Kennedy. As I recall, his nose was at its plumpest and shiniest back then and he was not slender. His Senatorial helmet of white hair was in full flower. They must issue those things at the door of the Capitol for legislators of long standing. He stood with a small gaggle around him as the boat plied through the water. I became aware, after a short time, of a great excitement on the banks of the waterway. Crowds of men who were at work there were watching the progress of our vessel. These were guys in hard hats, with big belts holding their array of tools, working on a riverside construction project. “Hey!” I heard a distant voice shout. “It’s Teddy!” And dozens and dozens of these working men ran to the edge of the water. “Hey, Teddy!” they shouted as loud as they could. “Way to go, Teddy!”

Ted Kennedy heard them, and his face broke into a huge grin known only to politicians who, unlike pop stars and celebrities, seek the adulation of actual people, not just the public. He walked to the front of the boat, launched a very professional and lusty wave of his own and yelled, “Hi!” And big, grown construction workers who ate rivets for breakfast cheered like little girls. And love flowed like the bright and sparkling waters of the river for a little while.

Some politicians are admired by pundits. Others feast on the support of the quiet, suburban bourgeoisie. Some wave one banner or other and attract a crowd for a time. What I saw on that little cruise in 1992 cannot be bought by advertising, or spun into life by pollsters or consultants. It’s the enthusiasm regular, working people feel for someone they know has their interests at heart, and has for a long time, someone who has had his own troubles, overcome some if not all of them, and can still hold a drink when he has to.

He may have been born with a silver lobster fork in his mouth, but Ted Kennedy was a man of the people, if that still means anything. And I, for one, will miss him.

Has it ever occurred to you that everything you read on the Internet about the future of the media is written by people who are writing on the internet about the future of the media? They say that history is written by the winners. Sometimes it’s rewritten by the winners. And at this point it’s quite possible it’s being prewritten by guys who have way too much skin in the game.

Likewise, has it ever occurred to you that a lot of what you read about the death of newspapers is written by people who were recently fired from their jobs at newspapers? Does this seem fair to you?

I flew with this friend of mine the other day. He’s a big Internet nabob. He certainly knows what’s going on in that space, and I bow to his wisdom on just about any related subject. But without too much prompting he declared that magazines were dead. That caught me up short. Then I thought, hold on a minute. I’m sure he believes what he’s saying… but he’s in direct competition with a bunch of magazines that are trying to hold up their own piece of their sector… and most of his staff used to work in magazines and now, you know, didn’t anymore.

So I thought, okay, magazines are in pretty tough shape all right. But dead? You go to an airport and all you see is magazines. Even the books look like magazines. There are at least seven separate magazines still interested in Jon and Kate. A bunch more seem to be about boats and cameras and computers and sex. I generally buy one about cars. Dead? Magazines? Who says so? The Internet.

I’m going to keep on believing in most of what I read, of course. Except for one specific area: I’m not interested in anybody who says anything that I like is dead. Liquor. Meat. Books, magazines and newspapers. Personal computers that do not depend upon the cloud. I’m not going to consider anything dead until I’m no longer interested in it, and I’m going to watch out for emotional conflicts of interest on the whole subject.

The world is filled with mealy-mouthed, hedge-happy, carping, waffling economists, but praise the Lord, Ben Bernanke isn’t one of them. I grew up in a world where, if you were the head of the Fed and you were asked whether you would like some peas with your mashed potatoes, you were to reply, “Perhaps. Time will tell.”

That’s not our Ben’s style, not one bit. This morning the internet is buzzing with his clear, concise statement that we’re on our way to a nice, measured recovery. Speaking at a boondoggle of some kind in Jackson Hole, Wyoming (which was created for that purpose), the head Fed said that “economic activity appears to be leveling out, both in the United States and abroad.” For a guy in his position, that is the equivalent of jumping up and down with a propeller beanie on your head, painting your face red and blue and screaming, “We’re Number One!”

In completely, utterly and thoroughly related news, the stock market immediately swung to yearly highs. Pavlov was right! If you show a dog a piece of meat — it WILL drool! And a good thing, too!

I have a question for anybody out there who might know. Who do you think is responsible for the following scenario:

You arrive at Kennedy Airport from Los Angeles at 11:42 PM after a 6-hour flight, only a few minutes later than your posted arrival time. You would have been earlier than that, but the usual nonsense over New York City required the usual half hour of circling before your plane was permitted to land.

You then sit on the tarmac for fifteen minutes in the middle of Queens somewhere while somebody someplace figures out where to stash your plane. The aircraft then taxis to the gate at the gigantic, sprawling new American Airlines terminal… and taxis and taxis and taxis. You are in effect driving across half of Queens. You stop several times and the plane just sits there, thinking. It is now nearly midnight.

Finally, almost half an hour after you have landed, you arrive near the gate. The Captain makes an announcement to the effect that you have stopped short of your destination by the length of a football field because there are a lot of aircraft in the way of your gate. He seems befuddled by this, but the reasons why are unclear because this is not the first nor even the second time this has happened, at least the stopping short part. After another ten or fifteen minutes, the plane rolls to the gangway… and just sits there. The doors do not open. Nobody is there to let you off the plane.

Finally, more than 30 minutes since touch-down, the door opens and lets you off… at the farthest end of the massive terminal. Anyone who has been there knows the length of the walk to the exit. There are many gates closer to the front doors, but we’re not there. We’re about half a mile away, literally. It’s particularly hard on the old people and the drunks in Business Class.

So I have some questions. As one of the great cities of the world, why does New York have such a lousy airport? Or am I annoyed at the wrong people? It is American Airlines? The Port Authority? Some independent outsourced contractor? Doesn’t somebody at the airport know that a six-hour flight full of tired people is arriving? Are they surprised when it appears? In a tizzy? At a loss for what to do? Why does it take 30 minutes to berth an airplane? Why does it have to be at the far end of the terminal when there are dozens of closer gates? Is New York Kennedy the only airport where nobody is around to let you off the airplane? Anybody out there know?

Okay, so you won’t pay for web content. Or so you say. For the most part. Like, some of you will apparently pay for very special financial information, as if there was such a thing. And others, apparently, will pay for the right to chat with fellow model train enthusiasts around your digital coffee table.  And we know that a lot of you will pay for specific entertainment content you can download and watch at your pleasure. But clearly, as we can tell from the retail sales numbers, we have also reached a point where you just aren’t willing to pay for a lot of things that are less fundamental.

I notice, for instance, that big, crazy-sized gas guzzler monster trucks are ridiculously cheap right now. People silly enough to require a vehicle that towers over the universe and gets 8 miles per gallon may essentially have their instrument of global doom for essentially half of what it used to cost. Obviously, that’s because the stupid things can’t sell at the old prices.

Back-to-school equipment is also moving at a very slow rate, reportedly. One can only speculate that last year’s pencils, newly sharpened, are considered a better investment than the brand spanking new ones at their current cost.

Houses are also a good deal right now, if you can get a loan, to which I say good luck to you, chum. Those are pretty cheap, too, but you have to donate a gonad to shake a nickel out of your friendly local bank.

Those who aren’t re-pricing themselves aren’t thinking with both lobes. The other day, I went out to get a cup of coffee and a newspaper. I forget what the cup of coffee set me back, it doesn’t really matter, coffee is not optional when you want it and it was still under five dollars, which is perceptually a proper value at this point in history. It was a big enough cup, anyway, and strong enough to eat through your spleen. Thanks, Pete.

It was the newspaper that interested me. You know, of course, that nobody reads newspapers anymore, a fact that the idiotic newspapers are only too happy to keep telling us. Occasionally, however, some ancient, creaking loser like myself likes to sit with an actual physical object that doesn’t require charging or clicking and see what somebody thought was important yesterday. I brought my San Francisco Chronicle to the counter and fished in my pocket. “A dollar nine,” said the proprietor.

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“A dollar nine,” he replied. Something snapped inside me. I’ll pay $25,000 for a decent car. I’ll pay a lot for a business suit, because at least half my credibility as an executive resides in how I look. But I’m not going to pay $1.09 for a newspaper. I guess there are two reasons. The idea of going over a buck for something that recently cost a quarter offends me. And two, what am I going to do with all that change? At most major cities, even panhandlers won’t take it. So I didn’t buy the newspaper. Didn’t buy the gum, either, because that was over two dollars — another offense against nature as far as I’m concerned.

On the way home with my coffee, I passed by my local liquor store. They didn’t seem to be having any trouble, and nothing seemed to be on sale there, either. Some things, I suppose, are still priceless.

Rupert Murdoch says that he plans to put his content, which covers the known world and some others as well, behind a firewall so that people will have to pay for it. He thinks the future of web content will be pay-as-you-go. Today’s New York Times has a nice puff piece today about the Financial Times, which also charges people for access to its content on the internet. So on the one hand, there seems to be a groundswell moving to make charging for content the hipster move on the web.

On the other hand, the only really hot spots in the cloud are free. Would anybody pay for YouTube? If it cost 5-cents per tweet, would there be so many tweeters? How about Facebook? Would millions of lonely, homebound losers be encapsulating their lives in all their digital splendor if they had to whip out a credit card to do so? Or Google? Would we thoughtlessly search a billion times a year if at the end of every month we were awarded a bill that tabulated the cost of every click?

My opinion is that media has always been driven by advertising that users can choose to entertain or ignore. Even newspapers — which would seem to break that mold by charging a pittance for their content — have been subsidized by their advertising for centuries. The moment I hit a site that asks me for money, I simply navigate to calmer waters.

How about you? The big media outlets are all abuzz with the financial plans of online entities to move to a new business model based on subscriptions. Would you pay for the stuff you do online? I mean, the clean stuff?

On the one hand, the Fed, which is usually quite reserved in its utterances, yesterday declared the recession was over. Okay, maybe they didn’t say it was over over, but it was coming to an end, we’ve seen the worst of it, and interest rates were likely to stay pretty low. This comes on the heels of an earnings season that was both horrendous and encouraging. Numbers were down across just about every board imaginable, down worse than anybody can remember. But Wall Street was expecting worse. And everybody kind of talked the good talk on their earnings calls, too. So there’s that.

Then we see this morning that retail sales fell a bit in July. Cars were bad, of course, but housing-related retailers and electronics were also quite pukey. Economists, who are always cited but never quite right, it seems, expected a 0.1% gain in retail, excluding auto. Instead, the sector fell 6%.  That qualifies as a surprise in any book. The cash-for-clunkers thing didn’t start until the middle of July, though. Maybe August will be better.

Know what? I’m going to let the whole retail sales thing slide. July was very hot where I was. Nobody felt like going out and buying a toaster. The Fed is a very sober and thoughtful place. They wouldn’t say the recession was over if it wasn’t. I’m going to believe the Fed.

Hey – I’ve got an idea. Let’s all close our eyes right now, whatever it is we’re doing. Now let’s put our hands together and say, together now, “I do believe the Fed! I do believe the Fed!” If we do, I think it’s just possible that — just like that! — all our Fed dreams will come true.

Well, it can’t hurt to try! Right, Tinkerbell?

Yesterday Frank DiPascali, Jr. pleaded guiltyto ten counts of fraud and other miscreancies in federal court. You remember Frank.  He was the CFO of the Madoff gang. Didn’t go to college. Started out pretty straight, probably. About 1980, maybe a little later, he began to get what the real picture was with the whole operation, since obviously no trading was going on anyplace. As the years went by, he worked closely with Bernie and the rest of the gang, many of whom are still at large, to fool and fleece a huge flock of sheep.

Some of the ruses they worked out would be funny, if you’re the kind of person who finds rubber crutches amusing. In one case, show trades were displayed for visitors, with one side of the transaction taking place for the benefit of onlookers and the guy on the other end, supposedly in Europe or the Far East, playing his part in a room down the hall. If these geniuses had put as much effort into running an actual business as they did running their Ponzi, they might have made some honest money. Or maybe not.  The markets are so notoriously unpredictable, unless you’re a banker with a guaranteed bonus.

We sort of have the outlines of the whole sorry story at this point, with a few gaps still remaining for names that have yet to be filled in on the prison roster. One big question still remains, though.  Here it is:

If I were Frank DiPascale, Jr., and I saw what was happening in the summer of 2008, I would have put aside perhaps ten or twenty million dollars very quietly and gotten the hell out of dodge. Same goes for Madoff, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, look at it this way: you’ve been a dirtbag for more than 25 years, a total, stone-cold crook taking the life savings from the wallets of the elderly, the charitable, your best friends and their families. Suddenly you don’t have the moxie to make a clean getaway? What gives?

Why didn’t these guys run away? I sure would have. If I were Frank DiPascale, Jr., I’d be sunning myself someplace where the extradition laws were modulated by the friendly local constabulary, and all my new friends were calling me Pablo or Francois or Mr. Wemberly. But they all stuck around to face their victims and the wrath of a righteous public that now hates anybody that has money, even if it was legally obtained.

Sentencing of Frank DiPascale, Jr. will await his cooperation with the Feds.  He probably won’t get the 125 years he’s up for, particularly if he keeps on wearing the fancy suit and tie he did at his hearing, rather than the sweatshirt and jeans he affected during his years as an accomplished white-collar criminal. Everybody’s crazy about a sharp dressed man, particularly if he’s singing like a bird.

1. Watch a cat dancing with a hamster.

2. Find that recipe for whole wheat pancakes that doesn’t taste like shirt cardboard.

3. Check how many times Elizabeth Taylor has been married.

4. Peruse the contents of the memo to all staff that Armbruster sent as an attachment to a cover note, because the zoom feature on my new BlackBerry doesn’t really zoom, it sort of peers into things at a very great distance.

5. Download the director’s cut of Watchmen.  

6. Purchase the Camden 69″ sofa from Crate and Barrel for Tuesday delivery.

7. Play Warhammer online.

8. Cruise for fascinating and informative updates on CNNMONEY.com or lesser financial websites.

9.  Investigate unsourced quasi-news on a variety of highly opinionated aggregators.

10. Publish and reply to my comments to this blog.  

Sorry. I was moving from one apartment to another yesterday and the cable guy didn’t show up. I don’t really care about the TV part, or the phone, either. But to live without internet is like being on Devil’s Island in the 19th Century, the only difference being that the bugs you have to eat are in your shareware, not your underwear.

There’s a big brouhaha this morning over the new planes the House just voted for “senior lawmakers.” The Obama Administration requested an upgrade on four new aircraft to replace those that are no longer up-to-date. The House tacked on four more at a cost of $550 million. Now serious legislators and publicity hounds on both sides of the Senate aisle are clawing to get to the front of the line opposing new additional planes as an obvious example of clueless and intemperate waste.

Personally, I understand why the President needs a brand-new plane every couple of years. I saw Air Force One with Harrison Ford. The fate of the free world hung in the balance and I can only imagine what would have happened if the plane in question was a clunker. But you have to really ask, why do Congressmen need private conveyance from one place to another?

The Journal gives some of the rationale, about how they go everywhere, how their trips, particularly during the month of August, when they would otherwise be taking up vast expanses of sand somewhere, help to inform them and shape subsequent opinion and so on and so forth. And I agree with that, too. Our representatives should be all over the globe, fact-finding, making things happen, representing our nation in the hot spots of the world. But why can’t they fly commercial?

I’m not saying they should fly Coach. And probably it would make sense for them to get some kind of priority in the whole reservation mess. You don’t want a big politico having to wait six weeks to get a Business Class seat on his way to Bosnia or Sri Lanka or someplace. We the People would probably have to make some concessions. But why shouldn’t our elected representatives have to get themselves around in pretty much the same fashion as we do?

If they did, you can bet your bottom dollar, if you have one, that our entire transportation system would get a big upgrade, and not with all deliberate speed, either.

I was kind of shocked by the reaction to my support of Tim Geithner’s bad temper, not so much by the anti-Administration people whose mood is almost as bad as Timmy’s, but by the number of you who never swear and never yell at people when they frustrate you, even on the job.

I’ll go on the record and say this: I don’t approve of yelling philosophically and I certainly don’t like bullies one bit. But I have never spent time around anybody in a position of Authority that didn’t yell at some time, and that includes my first boss, my father and many, many bosses thereafter. I’m not saying I always enjoyed being on the receiving end, and as a boss I myself try to avoid it as much as possible, but the truth is, it’s not always possible. Like, a few years ago I had an assistant who shoved all my business expenses in a drawer and forgot about them. By the time I found out about it, my phone, BlackBerry and corporate plastic had been shut off. I’m sorry. I found yelling at her to be the only rational solution to the problem. I didn’t fire her, mind you. I just yelled my head off. And I’m glad I did. She deserved it. It took months to straighten things out. She left well before that time, by the way. I gave her a good recommendation, too, but stipulated that any new position she obtained should probably not involve math.

The fact is, I don’t trust bosses who don’t express some form of anger now and then. In my experience, they’re weasels. I believe Gandhi was grouchy a good amount of the time, and I’m not too sure that Mother Theresa was a bag of sunshine every morning, either.  A leader who excises temper from his game isn’t really playing with a full deck.

As for cursing, I agree that the general linguistic state of play is very low these days. You can’t walk down a street without hearing bad things about somebody’s mother. It would be great if everybody cleaned up their act in this regard. But overuse of a tool doesn’t invalidate its use altogether. People drive too much but we still need cars. People eat too much but we still require food. People drink too much but life would be dingy indeed without the occasional pop from Mr. Walker or his patriotic friend Mr. Sam Adams. Proper use of profanity very often adds a certain spice to interpersonal communications without which our culture would be flatter, smoother and more boring. Chaucer used it. So did Churchill and Harold Geneen. I’m not even invoking George Carlin, Lenny Bruce or Joan Rivers.

Finally, in the context of business, I simply don’t know where a lot of you have been living. I have been with a big corporation since before many of you knew half the words to which you righteously object. I have attended meetings in every major city in the United States. And in every one of them, when the spirit moves them, people yell, people wag their fingers and, yes, people occasionally curse. It’s the ones who don’t who have scared me the most.

I’d like to thank Mr. Tim Geithner for providing much food for thought. And I’d like to wish him and his colleagues well in their attempts to remake our financial regulatory system. There’s a lot at stake, so I understand why he and Bernanke and the others who are charged with this massive responsibility might lose their patience now and then. I would advise them to try to keep it together for the most part, however. Nobody will benefit if the guys in charge pop a collective aneurism, and the benefits of ill temper diminish over time.