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.

I love it when executives drop the whole statesmanlike thing and get down to what really works: Force. The manipulation of fear. The exercise of power. And nothing establishes who’s in charge more than a good display of old-fashioned, fist-in-the-face anger. And what conveys that best? Profanity.

Tim Geithner dropped the F-Bomb repeatedly the other day. And I think it’s safe to say it’s living proof that genuine regulatory reform is now on the way. The Journal writes:

“Mr. Geithner told the regulators Friday that ‘enough is enough,’ said one person familiar with the meeting. Mr. Geithner said regulators had been given a chance to air their concerns, but that it was time to stop, this person said…

Friday’s roughly hour-long meeting was described as unusual, not only because of Mr. Geithner’s repeated use of obscentities, but because of the aggressive posture he took with officials from federal agnecies generally considered independent of the White House.”

In short, there’s a new sheriff in town. And he’s mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Isn’t it about time? Couldn’t these cats he’s trying to wrangle testify until we enter into the next recessionary cycle? The downturn is easing. Bonuses are once again on the scene. The regulators have a million reasons why one aspect of the recovery plan suits them or not. Don’t it make you want to say !@#$? And you can. If you’re the boss.

I can only imagine how shocked all the suits in that room must have been when their fellow suit dropped what were four if not ten-letter expletives. Unemployment? Okay. Inflation. Too bad, so sad. Foreclosures and bailouts? C’est la vie. But cursing?!  Horrors! And in uniform, too! How… louche! One of the poor, offended regulators was obviously grossed-out enough to whimper to the Journal. You gotta love it.

I guess they’d better get used to it, too. According to 60 Minutes, Mr. Bernanke too isn’t above slamming down a phone now and then on people who tick him off, and good thing, I say. When executives start being abusive, things get done.

It could be worse for the recipients of Geithnerian ire. When the young Augustus Caesar was just beginning the career path that ended up making him the best chief executive of all time, he found himself in the presence of a fellow-Roman who had for one reason or another genuinely ticked him off. He didn’t discuss the matter. He didn’t politely reprimand him. He simply reached out and plucked the guy’s eyeball out of head. Then he let him go.

Times have changed since then, but not quite completely, I guess. Which I think is good news for anybody who thinks we need to execute some changes around this place.

The tweetspace was filled this past weekend with the opinionated bloviations of blogger and “j-school prof” Jeff Jarvis, who seems to spend a fair amount of his time twittering. I know. That makes him a hipster. 

One thing that happens on Twitter is that everybody writes about him or herself. That is the subject of Twitter: Yourself. So you read a chain and most of it doesn’t really pursue anything. People read your tweet. They tweet back with something of marginal relevance, rotating the subject so it has something to do with them.  Somewhere in this mass of teeny personal observations, Jarvis went off on a particularly acid chain attacking the profession of public relations, showing the kind of soggy hostility that journalists reserve for the profession upon which they are dependent.

“How can I tell flacks that I don’t open any of their press releases?” the surly pundit wrote on Sunday afternoon. “The press release is dead, folks.”

This really annoyed me. First of all, it’s my experience that journalists who routinely call PR people flacks are themselves hacks. Journalists are individuals who are paid to write. A very small number write about what they choose some of the time. But in essence they are writers for hire. Their sensitivity on this issue displays themselves whenever they are called upon to characterize their counterparts in public relations.

Secondly, I can tell you this: the press release is not dead any more than the newspaper is dead. I’m really tired of people declaring things dead, by the way. But in this case, nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly, inept press releases, flowing out from bad practitioners to bored bloggers, are in trouble. But every time you open a newspaper or boot up a website,  you are reading the result of companies issuing formal paper on what it is they are doing. 

Jarvis may not be interested in what’s actually coming out of corporations because he’s mostly reporting on the landscape of his own mind. But a lot of reporters are, in fact, engaged in matters external to their brainpan. No, they don’t simply reprint the press release. But it may jog something that does require conversation, follow-up and reporting. That’s what a press release does.

A few weeks ago, in fact, I put out a powerful, articulate press release accusing Microsoft of poaching my Bing brand for their ostensible search engine. It was picked up by a host of very reputable news organizations, since it was masterfully done and of intense interest to a marketplace that, that day, was fascinated with anything Bing.

I considered putting out one today on the newswire declaring Journalism (or perhaps Mr. Jarvis) dead, but decided this milder format seemed more appropriate.

That’s not all. Jarvis twitted on a few minutes later: “I’ve long said that papers should have at least one day a week with no PR… just reporting. What a concept.” 

Yeah. Right. You guys know what a day without public relations assistance would look like in the world of journalism? Take a newspaper. Strip out most of the quotes from every article, which were arranged for the hacks with the help of flacks. Take out a fair number of the photos, which were provided by the photo departments of the companies and organizations involved. Just dump out about 40% of the coverage altogether, which was pitched and accepted by editors who need ideas for stories beyond the ones they glean from actual events. You can also dump all the stories on earnings and the comings and goings in corporate capital. You can keep the opinion pieces. They rarely require any professional assistance.

Journalism is in trouble. Its basic brief — the investigation and reporting of real events both important and not-so — is under attack by the medium in which you are reading this. People say stuff. People read it. Then it all evaporates into the ether. True? False? Nobody really cares. It’s just what’s out there for the moment that counts.

That’s why people tweet, and why Twitter is the hula-hoop du jour. But believe it or not, the best journalism, particularly in complex matters like business and government, takes place when honest journalists and their counterparts in public relations work together without lying and without spinning each other to death.

And nobody benefits when the hacks attack the flacks.