I tried to do the impossible last week. I tried to get away. And I did it, too. For about three hours. And then… Then I paid for it.

Last Thursday morning, I woke up in Santa Barbara. It’s a beautiful town, a little chilly in the morning, but it warms up nicely after the sun burns off the haze. I had left strict instructions to my department not to bother me unless the world was exploding. The world rarely does that, actually, so I thought it might be possible for me to leave my cell phone and Blackberry in our room when we went downtown for a little walk in the California light.

By way of background, let me articulate my long-held Law on the subject of vacation: Every minute of interruption for a business reason requires an hour of time to re-establish equanimity. I refer to this, modestly, as Bing’s Law. It means, for instance, that a one-minute phone call produces  anxiety, aggravation and thought that demands a full hour to burn off. A ten minute call eats up 10 hours of head space. And a full conference call can wreck a whole weekend.

For this reason, I try to make sure, on the few days I escape from the crushing, omnipresent, omnivorous business bubble, that my electronics are near for only one very early morning interchange and a similar shot of reality near bedtime. Anything more and I might as well be working.

Fine. I took a walk analog. Sue me.

At about 2 PM, my wife looked at her cell phone, probably to check for the time, and saw that she had six messages. That’s not good. She checked in. It was my office. In the two or so hours I had been out of touch, Atlantis had cracked open and fallen into the sea. I’m not going to tell you what it was. Some butthead did his butthead thing, that’s all. Suffice it to say my presence was required, if only digitally.

So I sat on a bench next to a bum with a smelly sleeping bag and a foot-long beard. I envied him.

I dealt with the situation until it was resolved as much as possible. Then I got up and tried to re-enter the world where people have uninterrupted thoughts and feelings for a few hours now and then.

In the end, it’s the illusion that gets you, the hope that truly destroys your peace of mind. Or maybe it’s just the hubris to believe that escape is possible. Hubris is always punished. We must appease the gods.

For the rest of the weekend, I carried my cell phone the whole time. It didn’t ring once.

I’ve read a bunch this morning about how we’re all losing our consumer confidence. It’s no wonder. I don’t have to tell you the reasons. People have confidence when they have a feeling of stability. When the bedrock under your feet starts to shift, you lose that confidence. Between the price of fuel, the value of our homes declining, and the raft of daily bad news we are now addicted to shoving into our faces every day, it’s almost inevitable. 

Just think back the days when we didn’t have cable news, didn’t have online updates, didn’t have BlackBerrys or cell phone alerts. We woke up. We had breakfast. We went to work. We came home. Maybe we checked in with the news now and then, either on all-news radio or on the nightly network news program, delivered to us by some gray avuncular presence who always played it pretty much down the middle and seldom, we believed, reported total hooey. 

Flip forward. Addicted to the CNBC crawl. Glued to stations that blare BREAKING NEWS about stuff that isn’t breaking one bit. Trends played like forest fires. Buttheads opining like giant flaming gasbags 24/7. Newspapers competing with bloggers to see who can catch the common attention for the next five minutes. Is it any wonder we’re freaked out? 

Sure, there is a reality that we’re all aware of, and it does certainly bite. But doesn’t reality always kind of suck? If you lived during the Crusades and were forced to march to the Middle East to kill total strangers because they were not Christian, would that have been a better time in which to live? If you were kicking around in the 1950s and had to offer loyalty pledges every day at your job, wondering all the time when the big mushroom cloud would blossom over the city around you, would that be better? How about the 60s? Was that better? Or the 90s, where a fine mist of greed suffused the air and working people had to watch as their companies were gobbled up by guys who are now widely perceived as philanthropists? 

Look. Throughout the course of human history, life on earth has been a struggle, a disappointment to most, a tragedy to some, a triumph to a few. But for most of us, the small things in life make it worthwhile, not the megatrends that make us nuts and take place around us. People managed to live through the plague years in Europe 500 years ago. Aren’t things better than that now? We have IPods. 

After all the windbaggery, all the “news” offered by the depressed and desperate people who work in the media business, all the grotesque ploys being foisted upon us by oil barons, hedge hogs and other forces of chaos, there is still every reason to have confidence, if we want it. 

Here’s my recipe: 

• Drive less
• Keep your home until it regains its value. You know it will. 
• Stay in your job and try to be as happy as possible. 
• If you don’t have a house, now is a good time to buy one. 
• Don’t buy stocks. Only people who run the stock market profit by it. 
• Invest in only safe, insured vehicles that you don’t need to watch every day. 
• Get out there every goddamn weekend and pump as much money as you can back into the economy. 
• Stop watching cable news, financial news outlets, and get off the frickin’ blogs, except for this one.
• Use the Internet to buy things. That’s what it’s for. 
• Wait until things get better. 

They will. They always do. We can, in fact, hurry that process up. Three-quarters of our economy is built upon our willingness to part with our money in exchange for goods and services. We can affect that metric. But only if we have the confidence to do so. 

I’m in the LA office today, a lot earlier than usual. Know why? I mean, not why I’m in LA because that’s none of your business, but why I’m in early? Because there was no traffic.

Let me say that again. There was no traffic. This is LA, and there was no traffic.

Those unfamiliar with LA may fail to appreciate the magnitude of that statement. Let me give you a few others that may equate:

• I went to the supermarket and there was no pensioner in front of me on line with 10,000 coupons;
• I sat in Coach the other day, and there was no crying baby spitting up right next to me;
• I took a rush-hour subway in New York yesterday and a group of thugs got up to give an old lady a seat;
• I went to a Paris boutique last week and they were very friendly in spite of the fact that I didn’t buy anything;
• I had lunch at a midtown restaurant last Tuesday, and they didn’t offer me $16-per-bottle water five times until I finally relented and bought some;
• I went to Las Vegas recently, and nobody commented on how the 115-degree heat didn’t matter because “it’s dry heat”;
• On my last visit to Japan, nobody offered me their business card.

I rented a car at LAX and took the 10 into town. It was clear sailing the whole way. Yesterday, I went to the office and it took me ten minutes. There was a minor hangup at one traffic light. And then, this morning, I made a trip that used to take me an hour… in eight minutes. It was creepy. It was like the early scenes in an apocalyptic movie. The fluid road stretched out before me, and my rented Avalon cut through it like a hot shark through the overly warm Pacific. And now I’m here, with time to kill.

No traffic in LA. More people car pooling? Summer, and people working from home?

Thousands of cars owned by people who can no longer fuel them up?

Anyway you look at it, it’s good news. Unless, you know, it’s not. 

I took a look around the blogosphere this morning, and it’s clear we’re in need of some kind of assistance. 

Half the places offer guides for how to deal with recession. The other half give us how-to’s on what to do about inflation. The third half give us both. Do the math. Something’s not right. 

The recession guides offer a bewildering array of interesting facts, approaches and common sense bromides. The take-away, pretty much, is that we’re supposed to spend wisely, save with sagacity, hunker down and don’t lose heart. 

The inflation guides often involve purchasing the right stuff in the right places, save what we can, and also do some hunkering of some kind. 

Frankly, the whole thing confuses me a lot. I’ve read a bunch of them, on both sides, and it’s hard to differentiate between what to do in a recession and what to do in an inflation. Both situations seem to involve: 

• Some balance of saving and spending
• Some form of hunkering
• Patience
• Keeping your job if you have one and/or getting one if you don’t
• Eating a diet low in saturated fat and salt

I’m kind of doing all those things, but I don’t feel prepared for a sustained inflation, for example. In an inflationary environment, the idea of responsibly saving seems counter-intuitive to me. If my money is dwindling in value, shouldn’t I spend all of it while it’s worth more? 

If we’re in an recession, why should I put my money in a bank the way so many pundits, economists and assorted wisenheimers suggest? Shouldn’t I be stimulating the economy? Isn’t that my duty as a citizen? 

On the other other hand, why are we now required to read up on strategies for both recession and inflation. This seems unfair to me. I would like to be worried about only one economic Armageddon at a time. I realize these things come in threes, though. Recession. Inflation. What’s next? 

Let me know what you think, if you have the time. What would you find more helpful in this space: 

• More thoughts on what to do during a recession, from one every bit as capable as the next idiot; 
• Additional wisdom on strategies during inflationary times, offered by an individual whose level of expertise is never in doubt;
• A guide to the third alternative (please tell me what it is and I’ll do the guide). 

In the meantime, why don’t we all take the rest of the day off? Sure, it’s summer. But that’s a strategy that’s never out of place at any time of the year. 

Another batch of alleged miscreants was arrested yesterday, swept up in the subprime hedge fund situation, which is the worst financial scandal of the decade, unless you can think of another, which I would be happy to hear.

The thing that struck me was the whole perp walk thing. Yesterday it was the two dudes from Bear Stearns, Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi. I’m sure you saw it all on CNBC already. Two well-dressed guys trying with as much dignity as possible to look nonchalant as they are marched, handcuffed, into a hoosegow. If this was the 1950s, they would have had their fedoras neatly draped over the shackles. But men don’t wear hats anymore, unless you count baseball caps and that wouldn’t have really done the trick anyhow.

In passing let me just mention that I think Mr. Tannin and Mr. Cioffi handled their perp walks very well. I have often considered what I would do if I were accused of a crime and paraded like a prize sow down a walk of shame, and I’m just not sure. Crying is bad. Makes you look guilty. Smiling is bad. Makes you look guilty. A thoughtful expression, without a tie, is perhaps best, even though that also makes you look guilty.

Wait a minute. How is it possible NOT to look guilty on a perp walk? The answer is… it’s not.

So isn’t the perp walk essentially punishment BEFORE the benefit of a trial?

So I guess my question is… why the perp walk? Did the several hundred other alleged wrongdoers who were arrested yesterday have to endure it? Were the two going anyplace? Weren’t they in fact surrendering to authorities? Did somebody expect one or both to escape, running like mad through the streets, taking the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building to lob themselves onto the heads of passing pedestrians? Were the media alerted to the time and place of the perp walk, to get the maximum publicity value for prosecutors from the event? Of course they were.

Who else should get one, if these two alleged sleazoids meritied the full treatment? Can’t you think of some? Sure you can. If you’re having a problem, go back and Google “subprime mortgage,” pick out a few of the more dramatic examples of lousy financial management bordering on fiscal irresponsibility… many of those guys are exiting with exit bundles the size of a goiter. Inside traders are routinely harvested. Many have gone on to highly successful afterlives and are quoted with respect in the Wall Street Journal every week or hailed as great philanthropists. Why no perp walk for them?

How about the individuals responsible for the ethnic cleansing of middle Europe? Did you see any of them in a perp walk? Or the former Nazis who have, over the years, been quietly deported back to some jolly fatherland? Or the latest multi-millionaire musician indicted in some violent act on their spouse or artistic competitor?

If he is indicted, will Eliot Spitzer get one when he surrenders to the forces of moral rectitude? 

The only full-fledged perp walks I can recall in the recent past are for 1) madams of high-priced call girl services, 2) Paris Hilton and 3) white collar doofuses who were caught after decades of Federal, State and Local inattention allowed many of the crimes they are alleged to have committed.

So what’s the story? Whyfore? Whereas?

The Brooklyn prosecutor who held the press conference after the perp walk was very stern. He outlined all the crimes of which Tannin and Cioffi (among many, many others) are accused. He then virtually scolded his audience, making sure we, the public, kept in mind that people in this matter were innocent until proven guilty and should have every right to establish their innocence in a court of law.

So then… why the perp walk, huh?

The award goes to the communications executives for the oil industry both here and abroad, reeling from the common perception that their rapacious greed is destroying our way of life.

Nevertheless, there is a brilliant graphic in today’s USA TODAY Snapshots, which outlines the fact that oil is “cheaper than other liquids.”

Pictured in this marvel of positioning spin are milk, trading at just a bit above the cost of a barrel of light, sweet crude, Tropicana orange juice, even sweeter and lighter at $226 per barrel, and Jack Daniel’s whiskey, which would cost you nearly $75,000 if you filled up your SUV with it.

What a bargain, then, is our current barrel of oil! Let’s bid it up a couple dollars more where it belongs! And how fortunate are we to get it at its current price! Oh benevolent oil companies who still charge so little for it!

Good work, PR guys. Seriously. Nice to see some clean spin punch through the journalistic veil for a change.

Come to think of it, doesn’t it always?

News comes that the Associated Press, in one attempt to define the nature of content in the new media, is looking to charge online writers for use of their material — as little as five words, which would cost $12.50. That would mean that the link I just provided would cost me more than it would run me for a lawyer to represent me if I were sued.

Other things that cost $12.50:

• A cab ride from my home to my office;
• A cup of coffee and one slice of buttered toast from Michael’s Restaurant (including tax and tip);
• Two magazines and a newspaper at the airport;
• 1/2 a pound of organic salmon at a store near you;
• One color cartridge for my Epson 2400 color printer. It takes eight, by the way;
• Three movies on my Apple TV (purchased, rental is slightly cheaper).

These are just a few examples. I think you can see that each of these things is of greater intrinsic value than five words from the Associated Press. Of course, you could argue that if they were five very good words, that might make a difference.

Following are several phrases that are five words or under that might be worth at least $12.50:

• “We the people”
• “Call me Ishmael”
• “IN THE BEGINNING…” 
• “My country, ’tis of thee”
• “The buck stops here”
• “In God We Trust”
• “Booyah”

I’d buy any of those for $12.50 for use in my blog. Most of the stuff you see on the Associate Press, however, doesn’t quite measure up to that standard, so in this case I’m not quite sure.

I also am somewhat unclear as to whether the AP seeks remuneration for:

• any words at all;
• words in consecutive order;
• punctuation.

For instance, in the phrase, “Six people were killed in the bombing, which was carried out by an unknown militia,” is the comma a word? If so, does that explain the $.50 cent addition to the base $12 charge? And is the fee for usage of content between 5 and 25 words (the entry point) shared with the source of the report? Suppose it was the usual unnamed government official. Should he or she receive remuneration if the story goes viral? How about a named source? Worth more?

The Internet is a new playground, of course. These rules are being written as we speak. In that transition phase, I would like to make one thing clear here and now:

If you are reading this post, please feel free to link to it, quote it, massage it, spindle it and mutilate it at will. Please, if you would, make sure to tell people where you got it, of course. I don’t mind being ubiquitous, really I don’t, but giving credit where credit is due is just plain good manners, even in this undefined and predatory space.

As any reader of this site is well aware, I have a new book out, Executricks, or How To Retire While You’re Still Working (Collins).

Part of having a new book is having the opportunity to go out and about, talking about it, acquainting potential readers with its existence, and, not to put too fine a point on it, pumping the hell out of it. I have done this for all my past books. Gluttons for punishment, or those simply in love with my face, can actually go to my YouTube channel to see any number of them.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be on a variety of fabulous outlets. I’m quite excited about it. For now, however, I thought I would share with you a recent talk I had with ABC News, which is posted on their website. It’s by no means as profound, amusing or trenchant as the book itself, of course. But it beats a sharp stick in the eye. Take a peek.

I was talking to my broker this morning and she said something interesting, once I could make it out. “I can’t hear you with all that background noise,” I said to her.

“It’s very windy out here on this ledge,” she replied.

I asked her to postpone her current operating plan for a few moments, at least, and there was a short silence while she climbed back inside and settled herself behind her desk. “So,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said, after her initial shriek of insane laughter subsided. “I’ve been in this business for 25 years. I’ve seen ups and downs but I’ve never seen anything quite so volatile as this. It’s crazy.”

This made me nervous and I told her so. She then spent a few minutes reassuring me that my investment in spelt futures looked rock solid. “The State of New York, the City of New York and the Federal Government would have to fail in order to put you in jeopardy,” she said. What’s interesting is that this only made me feel marginally more secure. In the back of my mind, the collapse of our entire financial and sociological system, at this time, does not seem beyond the capacity to imagine. Still. It’s not happening today, I don’t think.

“In the end,” she concluded, “I think the stock market is going to come out just fine.” I listened for the sound of bubbling water in her hookah, but heard none. I voiced some doubt about her assessment. Her reply was somewhat unexpected to me, and I thought I would pass it along. True, she’s a broker. True, she works for a financial institution that wrote down the GNP of Australia this year so far. But she’s a smart person and doesn’t make any money if she misjudges the situation over a long period of time.

“We’re not going into a depression,” she said. “Yes, we’re in a very powerful recessionary cycle, but it will come to an end. And look at the bright side.”

“The bright side?” I haven’t really heard anybody mention that realm for quite some time.

“With fuel costs going through the roof, the cost of transportation of goods and people is becoming prohibitive. Instead of sending jobs to China, we’re going to be seeing a lot more jobs coming back here to the United States. The benefits from outsourcing to all corners of the world are disappearing. And that’s going to be good for our employment picture.”

I get that. When the world becomes a too-expensive place for corporations to operate, patriotism suddenly becomes good strategy again. And that’s good news for American workers. All we have to do is wait. We’re not too good at that as a nation, but I have a feeling it might not take too long. Which is reason for some optimism if, you know, we look on the bright side.

Today’s paper reports that Lehman Brothers has rejiggered its ultra-upper-senior management structure, as CEO Richard Fuld, presiding over a projected $2.8 billion loss in the second quarter, seeks to communicate a message of change while stopping just short of taking the hose himself.

You can’t blame him. The quality that characterizes all leaders is the belief that, no matter how bad things get, they can fix it. And while it is painful to off your high-profile protege, it’s much worse to contemplate a corporation that exists without you at the top of it.

That’s because the executive personality believes several key precepts that make it possible for an individual to function under the extraordinary mix of pressure and pleasure that characterizes life at that altitude. Here they are:

• I am not fungible: While believing profoundly in the expendability of others, this type of person does not apply those qualities to him or herself. He or she is the only irreplaceable entity in what is otherwise a machine with interchangeable moving parts. When a CEO loses that idee fixe, the ability to function at an executive level goes with it.
• Things can be repaired if I am just given time to do it. There is no moment, at least in public, when this person thinks, “Gee, you know what? I’m out of ideas. I should just hang it up and go.” The one possible exception to this, in our lifetimes, I believe, was Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jerry Levin, who developed a demented idea that his huge, powerful corporation should be acquired by a small Internet company and effected that transaction, to the vast and possibly permanent woe of everybody involved. In my opinion, Levin simply lost belief in his businesses and felt they should be taken over by a firm that “got” the future. The inevitable conclusion is that it’s better to have a deluded, stubborn oligarch who refuses to give up on your decrepit business than a Zen master with ineffable detachment enough to royally screw things up.
• Business comes first. Fuld had to do the most difficult thing in the world: hurt his close friend and lifelong associate, Joseph Gregory, and demote his high-profile finance chief Erin Callan. I’m sure he would rather have cut off his right arm — metaphorically, of course. But as Michael Corleone said to his brother, Sonny, “It’s business. It’s not personal.” Yeah. Like fun. But it helps to think so.
• The gods must be assuaged. CEOs of public companies live in a constant, inescapable pressure bubble inhabited by uncomprehending analysts reports, the cries of investors and the drip drip drip of the stock price as reported on Thompson. All these come together as one angry god known as Wall Street. And the god of that particular mountain must be fed before the weather returns in which crops may once again grow. Anything done in that regard is not only right, but mandated, down to ritual sacrifice.

In that regard, The Journalreports, citing the famous and popular “person familiar with the exchange”: “In an emotional meeting Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Gregory – who started out with Mr. Fuld in the firm’s powerful fixed-income department more than 30 years ago – told his boss: “We have lost credibility, [and] Wall Street wants a head.”   

There it is. When the drums beat and the sky grows dark, the Mayans and the Aztecs knew what to do, and we do too. For the sake of Lehman (LEH), for all our sakes, come to think of it, let’s just hope the old ways are still the best. 

1. Manage by walking around. This is a concept, minted in the 1980s, in which people walk around and call it managing. The good thing about it is that 1) it’s perceived as managing by many people who are old enough to have been around in the 1980s and 2) it gets you out of your office.

2. Hose out your inbox. I read an article of some 3000 words in a Mac publication recently that was wholly devoted to this issue. It seems there’s a concept in which, with proper use of archiving and deletion of useless crud, the content of your inbox actually hits zero. Think of that. An empty inbox. It’s like a digital high colonic.

3. Take an accountant to lunch. Not that you wouldn’t do so at any other time of the year, but there are some days over the summer where quite a few people are, for some reason, “working at home.” Those are the perfect times to allocate time and any available affection to those who receive so very little. In this group, I would include non-management lawyers and the kind of financial people who slave over the numbers but get very little day-to-day recognition. A few years from now, those are the guys who could be approving your expense report. Make sure they pay, by the way.

4. Have a think-tank. Make sure to pick a day when the Board Room is empty, then get permission to use that or some other august space to gather a group of congenial people and talk about nothing in particular. Make sure it’s catered, but not opulently. Sandwiches are fine. Essential also to invite either a Research person to do a short presentation, or invite a Business Development or New Media dude to kick around a few tether balls and run them up the proverbial flagpole. There! You’re strategizing!

5. Clean out your credenza. If you don’t have a credenza, clean out your desk. If you don’t have a desk with drawers, straighten up your pile. If you don’t have a pile… what the hell are you doing, anyhow?

6. Establish your LinkedIn network of friends, made up only of people that you would under no circumstances see in real life.

7. Start an e-mail chain, trying to set up a meeting of great importance with senior management. It will very quickly become apparent that senior management is all over the place, literally. Bob is in Denver. Ned is in Skokie. Maggie is in Petaluma. Everybody can try for weeks to get it together and nothing will transpire except for the common perception that you’re the only one pursuing an aggressive agenda. This is very good for you at no personal cost.

8. Program your ring tones. Right now I just added “Big Pimpin’” as the signature ring for our head of Sales. She’d really like it. In a few minutes I’m going to download a couple of games. I hear the new Incredible Hulk mobile game is terrific. This would be a departure from most that are associated with films, which are totally bogus.

9. I don’t know… This is the longest time I’ve devoted brainspace to an issue all week. It’s very hot outside, did you know? So I was going to say go have a picnic, but the idea of being out in the heat with some lousy tunafish and chips in the park, which is filled with tourists and mosquitos? Maybe not. Beyond that, it’s hard to say. Nobody really wants to do any work right now, do they? Do you?

10. Go online and book your vacation. Go ahead. I’m serious. Do it. I hear the dollar is still strong in Sri Lanka, although the air fare is through the roof. Take your time. Look at what’s out there. Isn’t that nice? Wherever you virtually go, there you virtually are, you know.

I go to a lot of meetings with a lot of bullsh**ters. One of the main topics of such people in a host of different businesses is a twofold argument with which they amuse themselves and each other. Here are its two prongs:

• My business is coming up the ramp;
• Some other business is dead.

The other business that is dead is, unless you are speaking to a very depressed person, not the one he or she is in.

So it depends on who you are speaking to, or to whom you are speaking, depending on whether that grammar stuff matters to you.

Following are the businesses that are dead, if you hang around with enough bullsh**ters in a wide enough range of fields:

• The theater
• Movies in movie houses
• Public schools
• Radio, because of satellite radio,
• Satellite radio, because of Internet radio and ITunes
• Broadcast television, because of cable and Internet video
• Cable television, because of satellite TV and Internet video
• Satellite television, because of digital television conversion and Internet video
• Internet video, because of digital television conversion and downloading
• DVDs, because of downloading
• Downloading, because of the ubiquity of broadband streaming
• Personal computers with hard drive capacity, due to cloud computing
• Land-line telephones, because they’re so 20th Century
• Any internet company that is not Google (GOOG), for obvious reasons
• Google, because, well, how long can they keep THIS up?
• Books, of course
• Magazines, except the ones that we’re on the cover of, and…
• Newspapers

The only one that everybody agrees about right now, among the b.s.-ing class, is newspapers. Newspapers are dead. Dead dead dead. Yes, Rupert Murdoch doesn’t seem to believe so, but he is incorrect in this, or doesn’t see the truth right now, or whatever. Because you know newspapers? They’re dead.

This is not helped at all by the appearance of Sam Zell, who bought Tribune (TXA), and whose chief operating officer recently announced they would begin to judge the value of journalists by the column inches they produced in a year. This is sort of like saying that Chichi’s is the best restaurant in America because it serves the greatest weight in nachos.

That aside, however, everybody does agree: they’re dead. One day there will be no newspapers, because No Young People Read Newspapers. Is this true? My kids are of sentient age. They read newspapers. In fact, they’re both knee deep in Obamamania right now, and read everything they can get their hands on. I see people reading newspapers on the street, in parks, on subways and buses… when you get a bad story in the newspaper it still ruins your day…

But no. They’re dead. Know why? Because Advertising is Down in newspapers. Now of course, advertising is sort of down across the board, and actually MUCH more disappointing on all those social networks everybody loves so much… and newspapers still attract a HUGE proportion of total advertising…

But no. Newspapers are dead. And advertisers read that and, timid little lambkins that they are, cut their budgets even more, because after all who wants to advertise in a dead medium?

Finally, newspapers are, you know, dead because they Haven’t Changed With The Times and News Is A Commodity That You Can Get Just As Well Online.

Except guess what. It’s not. I’ll just say what I think and get out of here. As always, if you agree, lob something in.

• I like newspapers. I look at a few every day and even read some of each;
• I don’t believe everything I read in the paper, but I’m interested in what they think is interesting;
• Newspapers have been around a long time, from medieval days through the time of Horace Greeley (above) and beyond. Radio didn’t kill them. TV didn’t kill them. The internet will not kill them;
• If there were no newspapers, all we’d have is the Internet, whose capacity for the promulgating and dispensation of bulls**t is unparalleled;
• I am NOT interested in a PERSONAL, daily e-mail informing me only of the stuff I pre-select as of interest to me. What’s the pleasure in that?
• If we all had a euro for every article in some medium that declared another medium dead, we’d all be Europeans;
• Aggregators can only aggregate content if there is content to aggregate. No content, no aggregators;
• Contrary to popular belief, journalism is an actual profession that takes training, talent and skill, and one of the most rigorous and necessary places in which it’s pursued is in newspapers;
• 89% of all citizen-journalists are just full of it.

So let’s take a breath and just agree: newspapers aren’t any deader right now than any other coughing, wheezing business in this lousy environment. Lehman (LEH) is losing nearly $3 billion dollars this quarter. Nobody talks about investment banking being dead. Broadcast television just racked up more than $9.2 billion in its upfront sales season, in spite of analysts’ predictions that this year would be its last. And not one social network is really making a go of it yet.

Now you guys in newspapers could probably help a little, going forward. Why not stop writing pieces every day about how dead every other industry is? Just a thought, tough guys.

I’m going to invoke my standing as a bloviating faux pundit, along with the rest of the gang, and offer a vision of what might happen going forward on the price of gas.

In so doing, I am probably contradicting not only myself but also every other wheezebag who is now opining on a situation nobody but a few sheiks and corporate oil executives really understands. But what the hell. I can’t afford to do much but sit here and think, anyway. So here’s what I come up with.

First of all, it’s clear to me that the price of oil is irrational and opportunistic, based on what the producing countries and their running dog global distributors think they can get away with. As evidence of this, I will offer the fact that gas is now significantly more expensive in neighborhoods where the companies think they can get away with it; affluent towns and portions of cities where people have more money. In poorer places, prices are lower.

I don’t care what the rationale is, or what lies we are offered. This indicates to me that somebody with an eye on demographics and property values is calling the tune.

On a more cosmic scale, the price is also going up because there are semi-logical “reasons” that the bad guys can invoke via the analysts, media, and other clueless mouthpieces, to “explain” and “justify” the ongoing, heedless gouging.

After Katrina, a Chevron station I used to go to went from $1.89 a gallon to more than six bucks a gallon in one day, two dollars more than the then-prevailing price. Because they could, I think. After that crisis eased, they brought it down to $4 or so, and it’s never been less than $3 since. In this way, a specific incident was used to jack up the deal and make the most of it in perpetuity. That’s how they roll.

That is actually a microcosm of the entire situation. Katrina taught them they can get away with just about anything, at least for a while. It was a lesson they have not ignored since. This has nothing to do with supply and demand. Has supply diminished by 300 percent? Has demand increased exponentially?

No. They’re doing it because they have seen they can. And they’ll keep on doing it until a very powerful whistle blows, one, perhaps, that only they can hear.

And that, my friends, is what I believe is going to happen, possibly as early as right after Labor Day.

Todays paper says that rural America is feeling the pain of $4 gas now. The cities have been there even longer. Red and Blue will merge. The American people will do what they do, and begin hitting the people who will truly feel the hurt: politicians, corporations.

Business deals with producing nations will dry up. The ability of American companies to share in the windfall will be looked at. Arms deals will be scrutinized. Whatever can be done in the invisible corridors of intercourse between big oil and international affairs will be effected. The inaudible dog whistle will sound.

And suddenly – like magic! – prices will ease. My guess is that we will settle at around $3.25 a gallon for a while. There will, of course, be a lot of reasons given why this was rational, a product of market forces and blah blah blooey.

But we’ll know why it happened. Because they had to.

Then next summer will come and the whole thing will mysteriously begin again.

Whatever they can get away with, they will. Unless, of course, somebody’s got a better idea.

Today we offer for your delectation a vast galaxy of individuals who best embody the skills and crafts described in my newest work, Executricks, or How To Retire While You’re Still Working.

This gallery of luminaries celebrates those whose powers of delegation, virtual absence, abuse of status and hasty decision-making prowess has enabled them to enjoy the fruits of a complacent retirement while still on the job, collecting big perks and bucks.

Elsewhere in this neighborhood, of course, you may also take our quiz and report to me on any executricks you yourself have discovered in your daily travails.

Me, I’m going to take the rest of the week off, right after a hard-working business lunch.

Have a good one, ladies and germs.

Like cans of fruit in the great supermarket of Business, we all have a shelf life… a sell-by date that is stamped somewhere, possibly on the tops of our cans, I don’t know. When that date arrives, it’s time for us to go.

It’s business. It’s not personal.

Still, when they come to get me, I hope that certain forms are honored.

I hope they let me know well in advance that my number is up. This will give me time to think about my departure, to plan for it a little bit, to position the thing with my friends and colleagues. To go is bad enough. To be dragged kicking and screaming out of bed in the middle of the night and thrown off a cliff is much worse. I would hope that my tenure would grant me certain dignity in the means and circumstances of my departure. 

You’d be surprised how often this doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t know why. One guy I know, he worked for his company for 15 years. One day he was called to the corner office. “You’re out,” he was told. He got his stuff and went home. No memo. No nothing. That was that.

So I hope that when the big hand hits midnight there will be just a bit of pomp and circumstance. A lunch, perhaps. Of course there are no gold watches anymore. Why needs them? We all use cell phones to tell the time anyhow. But a gathering of people who are sorry to see me go would not be out of order, I think.

Some sense of decorum, I guess, would be nice. A feeling that sure, my race is run, but it was a good one, and worthy of notice in some way. A stately process, with a beginning, middle and end, not a short, sharp shock.

In that vein, I hope that the number of people who are told of my status beforehand would be very small, and that they be trustworthy people, and not prone to leaking invidious things into the blogosphere, which is often a mean and cruddy place, filled with people who rejoice at other people’s discomforts.

I hope the corporation lies about me a little bit, saying that I am leaving of my own accord, that it was my decision, that perhaps I am suddenly infused with a desire to spend more time with my pet llamas or something like that.

I hope, in the end, I will retain at least some of the friends that I have made along the way. It’s a sorry thing, but most of the relationships we have in this world we work in are contextual. The context removed, suddenly old pals have very little to talk about. Even golf and booze, after a while, are not enough. The good news is that some friendships, improbably and against the odds, do endure.

And of course I hope that I will come through the experience and emerge on the other side with new packaging, in a new supermarket of ideas, with a brand new time stamp on my forehead. Dylan Thomas said that after the first death there is no other. He was wrong, at least where our careers are concerned. You wouldn’t believe the former zombies I see walking around, pumping with new life in a new venue. I always greet them with a smile and word of congratulations.

I hope I receive the same kind of thing down the road sometime, when I need it.

Two events in the media happened recently that gave me, as a manager of other people, a cold shudder down the back of what’s left of my spine.

The first was the publication of Scott McClellan’s book What Happened. You can argue all day about whether Mr. McClellan was a) a bad guy for having lied to the American people, as he was instructed to do by his boss, about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or b) a bad guy for ratting on his boss now or c) a good guy for telling the truth to the American people now, when it’s extremely important, it being an election year and all and the truth never really being inappropriate or finally d) a good guy for ratting on his boss, because there is no statute of limitations on the kind of executive abuse we’re talking about here.

All I know is that as a boss, Mr. McClellan makes me nervous. Okay, perhaps the things I have done while in this comfy recliner don’t hold a candle to the depredations visited on the American public and the world by Mr. McClellan’s former boss. But certainly, not everything I do every day is perfect. Some of what I do, what I have done over the years, might make me seem, to the casual or unkind eye, ridiculous, stupid, ill-tempered, or a sloppy eater.

Then there’s the publication this month of a piece in Vanity Fairby the writer Todd Purdham. It’s about Bill Clinton and it isn’t very kind. Mr. Clinton has already had a major, obscene freak-out about it, and it’s sort of easy to see why. In a very astute blog on Slate, writer Jack Shafer cites the number of unnamed sources Todd Purdham used in his thorough take-down of Mr. Clinton’s financial, personal and sexual ethics. Here they are: 

• one former aide to Clinton who is still in occasional affectionate touch with him
• Another former aide, trusted by Clinton for his good judgment
• A longtime Clinton-watcher, who has had ties to the former president since his first campaign for governor of Arkansas
• Yet another long-serving Clinton aide
• friends who worry that Clinton has never been the same since his quadruple-bypass surgery
• one senior aide, who has known and served both Clintons for years
• a participant [in a 1992 condom presentation to Clinton]
• one former longtime aide
• A former Clinton aide
• one of [Maggie] Williams’ former colleagues and friends
• A range of Clinton loyalists
• one former aide
• someone who knows [current Clinton aide Doug Band] well
• a former Clinton aide
• four former Clinton aides
• the aide
• another aide
• several Clinton aides and friends
• A former Burkle associate
• One person, who has worked at the highest levels for both Clintons
• A Clinton aide
• A Clinton adviser
• one Clinton aide
• Many of those who know [Clinton] well
• one former aide
• One senior aides
• one of [Clinton's] closest former aides
• Aides to both Clintons
• the aide
• Aides
• this aide
• a person close to [Edward] Kennedy
• a Clinton campaign official
• aides
• Some aides
• Clinton aides
• one senior Clinton adviser
• [Clinton] associates
• friends

Now, the thing you need to know about this, if you don’t already, is that Mr. Purdham is married to Dee Dee Myers, and she, like Mr. McClellan, was the White House Press Secretary, serving Mr. Clinton as Mr. McClellan subsequently served Bush Part Deux.  

So to reiterate: Mr. McClellan served Mr. Bush as his spokesman, and in that role was privy to a great amount of unfiltered veracity to which he was only inconstantly constant. Ms. Myers, too, served as the President’s spokesperson, and in that role came to know many, many people within Mr. Clinton’s inner circle. She is now married to a gentlemen who is making full use of that inner circle to pillory the former President, who may or may not deserve it, depending on your point of view.

Once again? Whatever you may think of the role of a free press, and the value of whistle blowers, and the nature of the truth in world affairs and all that? If you have anybody working for you, anybody close to you who, in the setting of your workplace, knows where all the bodies are buried… well… you’ve got to be a little nervous by these developments, I think. Sure, maybe the two Presidents are each receiving exactly what they deserve. But as Hamlet asked, if each of us were to get what we deserve, which of us would escape whipping?

And does any boss have the right to an expectation of ongoing discretion and loyalty after the last paycheck is cashed?

Today marks the publication of my new book, Executricks, or How To Retire While You’re Still Working. Over the course of the next weeks we’ll be adding quizzes, contests and galleries of famous tricksters who have made world and corporate history. I hope you enjoy each and every one. 

The plethora of entertaining material on the subject, does not exhaust the subject, of course. It is merely an appetizer, an amuse bouche, a canape on the big platter that is the book itself. 

The good news is that we provide a link to some of the fine establishments at which you can purchase this mandatory handbook, which will help you establish peace of mind and relaxation while you are on the job, “working” every day and bringing in the kind of money we all require to live in this crazy world. 

Go ahead. Click on the link. It’s so easy that even a retired person can do it!

You don’t have to be a pinstriped master of the boardroom or a slick Wall Street infighting insider to have a few tricks of your own up your sleeve. Every intelligent working person has found a few ways to retire while on the job. What are yours? 

Do you linger over breakfast with a tolerable client now and then? 

Have drinks with a random business associate while lesser mortals are slaving away at the office? 

Enjoy a languid boondoggle with the sales reps every winter in Hawaii? 

Head downtown on Friday night to the cool box at the local sports arena, where your company has a couple of season tickets? 

Delegate a whole bunch of stuff to Lazenby, the guy down the hall who isn’t happy unless he’s got his nose to the grindstone? 

Come on. Cough it up. If you occasionally retire while you are still working, we’d like to know how. Our goal is to find the very best Executricks and share them with our readers, thereby making the world a better place.

The enterprising contestant who comes up with the best Executrick will will a valuable prize. We don’t know what it is yet. Right now, in fact, we’re hard at work behind closed doors, our feet up on our desks, thinking about it! 

Hi. I’m back from one of the longest trips I’ve made in a while. I started in New York last week, went to L.A., from L.A. to San Francisco, then back to L.A., then home to New York again last night. I’m whipped. And I had to be in at 8:30 this morning for two hours of legal work on a matter I can’t tell you about. It’s not pleasant. But it has to be done, even though it’s right after Memorial Day and traditionally the time when we’re all meant to be thinking about other things. Like Summer.

It reminds me of last Holiday season, mid-December, when everybody was supposed to be out partying with great heartiness, but instead we were all thinking about economic woes and pending strikes and that kind of nonsense. Wasn’t much of a Christmas. I don’t even remember getting any figgy pudding.

The trend, it is now obvious, is that we’re all heading for the 52-week year. Numbers must be reported each quarter. Deals are often done right around vacation times, like Labor Day and New Years. There is, quite literally, no down time, no slow season, no time to decompress and ponder.

Other factors:

• Dementia caused by constant digital communications, in which portions of the human personality are quietly being expunged over time, leaving nothing but constant communicators hooked neurologically into the System;
• Younger business people who see great wealth around them they haven’t yet tapped into, with the energy and lack of personal life to dedicate themselves to doing nothing but making money all the time, every day, every minute of every day;
• Too many MBAs and investment bankers who only make money when deals are done, so deals need to be done all the time, even if no deals are around that make sense; the perfect time to cook up weird deals is during times when other people are trying to relax;
• Older executives who have jettisoned all human relationships, have too much time on their hands, their kids are grown, nobody really wants to hang with them unless there’s some business reasons to do so, so they keep business going all the time to stave off the crushing loneliness of existence;
• Other.

The outcome of all this is obvious. The month of April was hell, because we were all preparing for May. May was as bad as we feared, only worse. We lived for June. Now June is shaping up to be a killer as well.

Will July and August follow? When September arrives, will we all return somewhat refreshed from a slightly slower pace of those long, hot summer days? Or will it just be more and more and more and more of the same, only more so?

The Japanese have a word for it: Karoshi. It means death from overwork. So far, the word has only been a necessity in Japan. It looks like here, as in so much else, we’re adopting their best practices.