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?