I figure I’ll have a better shot at living up to my resolutions if I made them achievable:

• Go to work every day I’m expected to and none that I am not.

• Drink no more than three drinks a day, and never before 6 PM, and never alone unless I don’t have anybody with me.

• Eat no more than 3000 calories a day. Anything over that should be very well prepared.

• Have dinner in no restaurant whose entrees do not cover at least 45 percent of the plate.

• Pick up all checks I absolutely have to.

• Invest in nothing that is not insured by some reputable underwriter, if any still exist.

• Never use “impact” as a verb or “impactful” as an adjective, and refrain as much as possible from utilizing military or sports metaphors in business conversation, unless we’re field stripping the ordnance and pushing through the red zone.

• Fall asleep in as few meetings as possible, and only in those that deserve it.

• Never get a bluetooth earpiece unless its surgical implantation becomes mandatory by the corporation.

• Retain my Executive Platinum status.

• Get at least three hours of sleep a night.

• Not answer my cell phone or work my BlackBerry while dining, even if my companion is doing so.

• Never apologize in public for any private gaffes.

• Accept all bonuses that are offered to me.

• Only yell at people who truly deserve it.

• Keep my electronics charged.

• Shave.

Let’s have a good year, everybody.

Dear Santa,

I know you’re busy with everybody else in the world, but here’s my list. I’ve been good, by the way. In fact, compared with prior years, my goodness quotient is up triple digits. So cough it up, please.

• Ford Flex
• Apple 13″ Powerbook
• Small, vintage Marshall amplifier
• Continuing amusement from AIG bonus situation
• Coal in the stockings of security analysts who undervalued our stock, hedge fund managers who shorted it, and everybody else who pissed me off on Wall Street this year. Actually, forget the coal. Have you got any dead fish around?
• Cheese/Beef log (for discussion purposes only)
• Nikon D3x digital camera
• A new husband for my ex-wife
• Peace on earth
• Goodwill toward everybody
• Everybody off Tiger Woods’ back for a while.

Merry non-denominational, deracinated holiday of your choice, everybody.

“DEAR BLOGGER: I am very old and live at the North Pole. All of my little friends up here say that there is no Virginia any more. Mrs. Claus says that if I see it on the your website, it’s so. Please tell me the truth: Is there a Virginia? Signed, Chris (Santa) Claus, 115 Workshop Way, North Pole.

CHRIS, your little friends are wrong. They have been consuming too much media, and have been infected by the material that gains the most attention there. They do not believe that which doesn’t rise to the top of the search stack or get the highest ratings 18-49. They think that nothing exists but that which is measured by hits, twitters and chatter, or makes its way by other means to the top of our collective mind.

You see, Chris, in this world of ours, all attention spans, be they those of children or of adults, are very tiny, very short, and very, very fragile. As we make our way through the vast cloud of information, entertainment, opinion, music, random noise and other forms of auditory, visual, and intellectual stimulation, each human being is a minuscule atom, a quark within the boundless physical and virtual universe that surrounds us. None of us can grasp the total picture.

Yes, SANTA CLAUS, there is a Virginia. She still exists as certainly as love and hope and childhood exist inside every person, as you know they do, shining unaided within each of us and lighting our way to true peace and joy that transcends this time and place.

Good Lord! How gray the world would be if there were no Virginia. It would be as gray as if there were no Santa Claus! There would be no song, no poetry, no rhythm to our existence beyond that which we can do and see and want and buy.  The eternal childhood that makes our lives have meaning would be extinguished. Not believe in Virginia! You might as well not believe in quantum physics!

Can you find her? Perhaps not by looking with your eyes. You might get your elves to scour the brick-and-mortar malls and online destinations, chat rooms and Facebook pages from one end of the world to the other on Christmas Eve to catch her, but even if they did not see her hanging out in one random location or another, what would that prove? Nobody sees Virginia, but that doesn’t mean she’s not out there.

Did you ever see an aura? Of course not, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have one. Or karma? Can it be measured? Certainly not. But still it shapes the length and color of our days. How about the Higgs boson? Talk to 1,000 scientists from here to CERN and not one will disbelieve in it, and yet nobody can find a single one, even with a trillion dollar accelerator.

There is a firewall between us and the unseen world. Only love, kindness, understanding, and simplicity can lift that veil. And in the end, amid all the noise and haste, what lies beyond is really all that matters, all that has ever mattered. No Virginia? Thank God, she lives, Santa, and she always will. Ten thousand years from now, when we have evolved into strange, unrecognizable amalgams of organic material and cybernetic wetware, she will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

When I was a boy, I used to worry if I didn’t get enough sleep. I would go to bed thinking, “Boy, I hope I’m not too tired to function tomorrow morning.” I would get up at whatever hour was required of me, and if I hadn’t logged my seven or eight hours, I would say to myself, “Wow, I’d better get a nap in later or I’m going to fall asleep at the afternoon meeting.” And sometimes I even did.

That assumption — that I’m ever going to get enough sleep — seems like a luxury to me now, a fond dream, albeit a waking one.  I work in two time zones, for one thing. I learned pretty quickly that the only way you function, moving from New York to LA, is to pretend that there is no such thing as a time zone. Midnight is midnight. Noon is noon. So when I wake in New York at 6 AM after a week in Los Angeles, I don’t even register any more that it’s really 3 AM in my head. It’s 6 AM. It’s time to get up. Yeah, there’s a kind of cottony softness to everything for an hour or so, but so what? Shake it off. On the other side of the continent, when I wake up at 3 AM LA time as bright and frisky as a wounded beaver, I simply hop online and get the day started a tad early. If I thought about the whole thing too much, I guess I’d be horrified. Instead, I’m just a little dragged out now and then and perhaps a tad more cranky. Who isn’t these days?

One major lesson I’ve learned, and it’s not a good one, probably, is that I can actually function on three or four hours, not just now and then, but consistently. Some days I need to close my door and faint for a couple of minutes to set things right, a habit I’ve been pursuing since I was new to the corporation. I used to sleep on the floor with my head right next to the closed door, so that if anybody opened it I would be slammed in the head and wake. Sounds stupid, I know, but it worked. “What are you doing down there?” they would say, and I would reply, “Looking for a cuff link. What’s up.” And life would go on.

Today I just put my feet up on my desk and faint completely. The state is something that can’t really be called sleep per se. It’s more like death. Total systemic shut-down. It’s possible I drool. When the phone rings, I awake in a much better place, ready for whatever the next couple of hours has to hold. At night, when others are contemplating slumber, I often find myself most alert, weirdly. So it begins all over again.

I may be wrong here, but I think most of senior management, in corporations and governments alike, function on something like this very same sleep schedule. Work all day. Stay up late. Get up early. I wonder what it does to our decision-making processes. Actually, I don’t have to wonder. I know what it does. It makes people a little bit grouchy, more impatient, more solution-oriented, with shorter attention spans and a greater need for visual, auditory and sensory stimulation. We are never tired. We are always tired. And if we stop moving forward, we sink in the water, like sharks. They don’t sleep much either, do they. Maybe that’s why they’re one of the few species to survive while so many others have fallen to the wayside. And why they pretty much run any corner of the ocean they choose to inhabit, come to think of it.

Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the bank,
Four thousand mortgages were still in the tank
Then spoke Sanjiv Das (with very good diction):
“For one month, we’ll have no foreclosure or eviction!”

But seriously. It’s kind of a nice thing that CitiMortgage announced today. It only lasts for 30 days, which as one crabby blogger pointed out will simply put more people on the street in a much colder month. But it’s something, isn’t it? And yes, it helps the company close out the year without more foreclosures on its books, but still, that can’t be the only reason they’re doing it, right? And okay, companies do these kinds of things to get a good PR pop out of the action, but so what? They deserve a few hours of good PR! The result is that 4000 mortgage-holders will have another month to figure out what they can do to save their homes. That can’t be bad, right?

My point is, that sometimes Big Business does do good things simply because it’s made up of people just like you and me. The landscape abounds with companies that in this season of love and giving and doing something nice. I’m trying to think of some other examples…

Let’s see…

Hmmm….

Okay! Well, there’s my friend Morton’s corporation that promised it wouldn’t fire any more people until January… perhaps we can do better…

There’s the stores that have generously extended Black Friday in perpetuity, except that for some it now takes place on a Saturday… but really, that’s just a sales ploy, isn’t it.

Give me some time. We’ll get there…

How about this: My flight attendant on American Airlines gave me an extra banana at breakfast during my flight this morning… does that count? I mean, it was nice of her. But it doesn’t really represent an institutional act of kindness, does it…

I’ve got it! How about all those nice financial institutions that are going to pay back their TARP money by the end of the year? That’s a lot of money that the Federal Government will have that it thought might have just been washed down the drain in the big flood of ‘08. There are a lot of things that we can do with that money, and I think it’s great that the banks and insurance companies are giving it back. Of course, it is possible that in doing so they make themselves eligible for ‘09 bonuses that are under less scrutiny by Obama’s pay czar, but that can’t be the only reason. I know somebody at one of the TARP companies said, “Hey, guys, this is the season of giving, so let’s give it back!” Could have happened that way, right?

What else? I’m coming up short here. Perhaps you can help.

USA Today reports this morning that “Federal prosecution of serious financial crime plummeted as the nation headed toward one of the worst economic meltdowns in U.S. history.”  The story then goes on to note that, according to government records, between 2003 and 2009 “the number of federal corporate fraud cases plunged 55%; securities fraud charges dropped 17%; and bankruptcy fraud cases fell by 44%.”

This, of course, on the heels of prior reports that the SEC had investigated Bernie Madoff and instead of prosecuting him ended up inviting him in for tea and crumpets and a little consultation when he was in town.

The mind boggles. What could be the possible reasons why the government, charged with prosecuting white collar criminals who exploit our sacred financial institutions and the people they serve, would fail so egregiously to pursue their brief with aggression and verve? I’m considering several possible reasons:

• They were very busy making sure that the corporate annual reports of legitimate enterprises were properly formatted and all footnotes in order;
• The Administration during the period in question made sure to staff all Federal regulatory agencies with senior officers who were hostile to their core functions;
• Nobody in Washington at that time considered making a lot of money by any means possible to be a crime;
• The cat ate their homework.
• People at the agencies correctly saw that if they started prosecuting anybody for a variety of crimes, they’d have to go after most of the people then doing business in certain portions of the market;
• There was no perceived institutional upside in going after certain types of criminals;
• Everybody forgot what a crime was.

These are just a few possibilities. Students of the situation will note that the number of new cases prosecuted for corporate fraud took an immediate hockey stick upward in 2009. Studies are now underway to ascertain the cause of this increase.

I certainly rail against the boneheads on the Internet who don’t check their facts carefully enough, so it’s kind of embarrassing that here I am one of them today. As many of you noticed in your comments, I was completely messed up when I said that the Arthur Anderson that was involved with Enron was the same as Accenture. It isn’t. The following explanation comes from Jim McAvoy of Accenture, which I will print in its entirety:

Accenture was not involved in the Enron scandal. Accenture is a management consulting and technology services company.  Accenture does not now, and has never, engaged in the practice of public accounting.  
 
From its establishment in 1989 until its incorporation in 2001, Accenture, then known as Andersen Consulting, was a separate legal entity from Arthur Andersen and operated independently from that company.
 
In 1990, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission recognized that Accenture’s predecessor, Andersen Consulting, was a legal entity distinct from Arthur Andersen.  After 1989, Arthur Andersen formed its own consulting practice, which was distinct and separate from Accenture’s business.
 
In 2000, in an International Chamber of Commerce arbitration decision, the ICC also recognized that the partnership then named Andersen Consulting was a legally separate entity from Andersen Worldwide and the Arthur Andersen firms.  The arbitrator agreed that Andersen Consulting was not a subsidiary or division of Arthur Andersen or Andersen Worldwide.  The decision confirmed that Andersen Consulting was not owned by Arthur Andersen, so there was no spin-off or break-off, and no parental link.

Under the terms of the ICC ruling, Andersen Consulting was given until December 31, 2000 to adopt a new name. Accenture began operating under its new brand on January 1, 2001.  Accenture then went public on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2001.  The Enron scandal, and Arthur Andersen’s role in it, did not become public until the fall of 2001 — ten months after we began operating under the name Accenture.

Finally, On November 7, 2003, the federal court in Houston approved the settlement of the class actions on behalf of shareholders and employees of Enron. Accenture was not a party to the settlement agreement, and under the terms of the final settlement with the class plaintiffs, Accenture was released from all claims that were brought by these plaintiff groups. This was final and conclusive proof that there was no connection between Accenture and either Arthur Andersen or Enron.
 
I think you will agree, these facts disprove  your allegations that Accenture was Arthur Anderson.

Yes, it does, Jim, and I’m sorry about the mix-up. Hope this post sets things right, so I can go back tomorrow making fun of people who make the same kind of mistakes.

One by one, Tiger’s endorsements are disappearing, going the way of his squeaky-clean image. It’s like they used to say about IBM, updated: Nobody will ever get fired for firing Tiger Woods.  It’s just too easy. It’s the swiftest road to moral superiority at this point. Particularly now that Tiger has taken the advice of his stupid advisors and quit his game for an indefinite period of time, thereby ensuring that he can spend 100% being nothing more than a scandalous embarrassment to his friends, fans and family.

I personally feel that there are, or should be, several great companies that should move into the gap left by all those who have booted Tiger Woods from their endorsement roster, and snap up the greatest golfer who ever lived (even though he is clearly not the greatest person who ever lived). Companies that come to mind include:

• The City of Las Vegas: The image of Tiger saying “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” would be incredibly powerful.
• Stanley: Who better to be a spokesman for power tools?
• Harley-Davidson: Why not appeal to the outlaw in every man?
• Lawyers.com: Possible tag line: “Take it from me. You never know when you’re going to need a good attorney.” Mrs. Woods could then step into the shot to add, “And I like them too!”
• Eli Lilly: The pharmacological solutions to various mood and sleep disorders is virtually unlimited, and it’s hard to think of a person who better represents the occasional psychological pain a person can get themselves into.

The key to the problem is pretty clear. Tiger simply has to find products and services whose customer base doesn’t care about his lifestyle and questionable ethical choices. I haven’t even begun to consider the obvious candidates that may be found in any CVS or liquor store. After all, this is a family destination.

The House of Representatives, that hotbed of liberalism, is now working on legislation that would make sure the depredations of the 00’s would never happen again. I consider this a very good thing, as long as none of the regulations apply to me personally.

For instance, I’m all for the idea of a consumer protection agency mandated to oversee credit cards and mortgages. It’s clear that excesses in those arenas led to the virtual collapse of our economy, and that changes in the area are not only necessary, but wouldn’t have a negative impact on me at all. I might even benefit from it in some remote way. So that sounds pretty good.

I also applaud the effort to use TARP money to help protect the unemployed from foreclosures. There is no reason why those big dollops of cash should be used exclusively to help financial institutions and their managers. Everyday Americans in trouble should have access to them too. Also, a solid real estate market can only benefit people who own their own homes, like me. Once again, way to go, House.

I’m a little more dubious about the idea of rewarding whistle blowers who rat on their own executives, even if the latter are engaging in securities fraud. As a concept, it sounds good. But too many whistle blowers are loose cannons. I’m a corporate executive. I hate loose cannons. I only like cannons that are securely tied down. So I’m not against supporting whistle blowers, really. It just makes me a little nervous.

As for the notion of giving shareholders an advisory vote on executive pay… no, I don’t think I like that one at all. Who does the House think it is? What is this? Russia? Thank God we have the Senate around to protect my interests, or else I’d be really worried.

Visitors to YouTube, Twitter and other locations around the web may run into a unique video, starting today. It shows about fifteen seconds of a very cute elephant who is water skiing. After the viewer is lulled into this amusing and soothing pleasure bath, a brief promotional message is provided.

Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iSV7vYqv-M.

The video is the launch document of my new online campaign to promote my potential best-seller, How To Relax Without Getting The Axe.  Other videos will follow featuring a variety of adorable animals in a range of cute activities, all designed to lure unsuspecting web cruisers to a benign, gently commercial message.

Which is, of course, what I’m doing right now. Have a good weekend!

Everybody’s got an opinion on this one, but a lot of the scuttlebutt out there is quite boneheaded, in my humble opinion. I am particularly amused by those who pompously stand up like righteous fellows and advise him to hold a press conference and “come clean.” Equally moronic, in my view, was the poor, limp apology that he was advised to offer by some genius or other.  As readers of this space may know, I strongly believe that apologies in this culture are greeted with lusty calls for the apologizer’s execution.

As a student of the subject, I would offer some guidelines to Tiger’s handlers, some of them to be considered in retrospect, others that may guide the road ahead, if such road there be.

Level 1 Problem: One long-term indiscretion that has been concealed for years and only recently come to light.

Solution: Sit-down with Larry King. 

Level 2 Problem: Sleazy affair with one (or possibly two) bimbos whose pictures have been provided to tabloids. Possibly drug or alcohol abuse involved.

Solution: Quiet withdrawal from public life for some time to address substance abuse issues in formal rehab. Action is announced via public statement made either on personal web page or via legal representative, with pleas for public’s understanding and humanity, ha ha ha. After that, book lunches in prominent watering holes.  Start a blog. Phase back into the mainstream. There is life after this particular death, unless perhaps you were the one responsible for prosecuting said bimbos and their clientele.

Level 3 Problem:  More than seven lithe young sexual partners coming out of the woodwork, none of whom has any reticence about revealing pictures of themselves, text messages, e-mails, letters, tapes of phone messages, etc. TMZ fully engaged on predatory mission. Possible billion dollar economic implications. Life as it was previously known is over.

Solution: Silence. As utter and complete as the interstitial material between the stars. Wait for interest in the matter to subside, as it always does, eventually. Even if the news cycle extends for months it will eventually end. After the long period of negation and absence is over, the chastened individual may emerge into the sunlight, pale and trembling, and throw himself upon the mercy of the collective consciousness, with some symbolic retribution involved. Michael Vick championing the rights of animals comes to mind.

These are not all the levels, of course. And most instances involve some mingling of all three. The goal in each case, however, is the same: NOT to allow the repulsive, drooling, atavistic drive of the public maw to swallow the miscreant, i.e. you.  Level 1 problems should be managed so that they don’t escalate to Level 2 problems, then on to Level 3 and beyond. This is the natural shape that the media, both mainstream and otherwise, would like the disaster to take, and the public goes right along with that scenario 100%. In general, calls for people to “come clean” are very often nothing more than disguised cries for blood and expressions of disappointment when that beverage is not made available.

In short, Tiger is pretty much doing what he has to do right now, with the possible exception of that apology, which provided a complete news cycle when it was issued and mandated much greater space in all the thirsty media.

At this point, the randy champion’s job should be to deprive the story of oxygen for as long as he possibly can. True, he’s getting no help from the skeins of women who are now taking money to sell him out. His wife is understandably no help at all. He has also reportedly made his mother-in-law ill. His endorsement ads are fast disappearing from the media. And there’s still plenty of mystery around that car crash, which may or may not involve some medication issues. And he’s supposed to get up in front of the media and pour out his obviously tormented heart? Come on!

My advice to Tiger, for what it’s worth, is to say nothing more about his personal life, ever. If things get legal, allow his lawyers to speak for him. Keep his temper. Try to maintain his cool if he can. Encourage the media to investigate the subject of sex addiction. And as soon as possible get out there and do what he does for a living: hit that little white ball like no man who ever went before. 

You’d be amazed how forgiving the public is to guys who can take the heat and still play a world-class game. Right, Silvio?

I would suggest that compensation czar Ken Feinberg place the following ad in all the appropriate entities immediately:

WANTED: Bright, dedicated corporate professionals for key posts at massive insurance entity now essentially owned by the federal government. Positions open in finance and operations. Must be willing to work for only $500,000 per year, although compensation could increase with success (or not — who really knows if Congress will have a problem with that). Age is not a defining factor, but applicant must be knowledgeable in the insurance business, adept at managerial arts, well-versed in reorganization technology, good communicator, willing to be paid for performance. Massive golden/platinum parachute not available, since job is underwritten by taxpayer dollars.  Job would start immediately, since employer is totally sick of current crop of whiny, entitled executives who fail to understand the implications of the word “bailout.” Please apply directly to Office of Timothy Geithner, Washington, D.C.

I think he’d get a couple of qualified takers.

Those who haven’t already seen it should immediately hit this link for what I think is the best rundown of how the Internet is polluting and distorting our information cycle.  It was written by tech writer Ed Bott on ZDNet two days ago. It chronicles the way that the web takes a bogus “report” cooked up by an irresponsible organization and shoots it out all over the place. The poor company under this kind of fire can do nothing but try to put out the conflagration with their corporate squirt gun. Bott writes:

I’ve spent the better part of the last 48 hours looking into the colossal fiasco that is the “Black Screen of Death” story. It’s a near-perfect case study in how Internet-driven tech journalism rewards sloppy reporting and how the echo chamber devalues getting the story right.

The company in question here is Microsoft, which was victimized by a story that said Windows was suffering from a dreaded Black Screen bug. There was no truth to it. But the story went viral, which in this day and age is easy. Everybody is an aggregator. Nobody checks facts. Nobody feels any responsibility for bulls**t stuff they help spread out there. Hey! They’re just passing along the viral goodies!

It’s like a sneeze on an airplane. Everybody gets sick. Nobody’s to blame.

But seriously. If you haven’t read the post, read it here.  And keep it in mind the next time you see something on the Internet, anywhere on the Internet. At its best aggregation is entertaining. Most of the time? It’s gossip. And it’s pretty much where the state of the art is going in tech, politics and this week, sports. Hell, it’s not just going there. It’s arrived.  Have you heard the new stuff about Tiger?

People write me all the time with a variety of questions, but seldom do I get one as stunning in its concision as the query lobbed in by a reader to my mailbox at bingblog@gmail.com. “Hey, Stan,” he or she writes, “How can you tell when your Boss is a bad one?”  Well, Simple One, let me count a few of the ways:

1. You can tell by the knot you get in your gut whenever you have to deal with him. You never know which person is going to show up – the nice, benevolent manager or the insane, angry hophead.
2. You can tell by the feeling you get when you have to get dressed every morning, the sensation that life wasn’t meant to be like this, that nobody knows what the day ahead will hold, and not in a good way, either.
3. You can tell because on days when he is supposed to be there, leading the way, guiding his people with a firm and gentle hand, he is nowhere to be found. Yet on days when everybody is executing the plan with distinction, there he is, standing in the middle of everything, gumming up the works, micro-managing, driving everybody crazy.
4. You can tell because her word is not to be trusted, she lies when it suits her, and worst of all, she believes her lies once they are uttered.
5. You can tell because he is never wrong. Sometimes he may be “misinformed,” or “misled by others,” but he is never, ever, wrong. Those who think he might be in error, ever, had better keep that opinion to themselves.
6. All credit goes to him, all blame goes to others.
7. Her only loyalty is to herself. More times than you can count, you have seen her sell people down the river who used to be her favorites. If there is trouble, she’s the first one to throw her colleagues and subordinates overboard into the shark-infested waters. Strangely, she is also the first person to question other people’s loyalty.
8. Work hours are hard to predict. There are long stretches of unmanaged, vague, pointless activity or inactivity, followed by short bursts of frenzy. Weekends are not safe. Vacations are not honored. Your time is not your own.
9. His door is closed most of the time, particularly after lunch.
10. The main topic of conversation is what an annoying, hurtful, scary, irrational nutbag the boss is. Wherever people gather, that’s what they talk about. And when they go, they die unmourned, except perhaps by the one person at the office who did his or her bidding.

That’s just ten. How many others can YOU think of, my friends?

I’m very interested in the current trend invented by the sales and marketing people at America, Inc. by which days of the week are being branded.  Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, was invented during the 1960s, according to Wikipedia, which is right more times than people give it credit for.  Cyber Monday was invented around 2004 by the National Retail Federation, supposedly in response to their observation that online sales went up the Monday after Black Friday.

Did you buy anything on Cyber Monday? I didn’t, although around noon that day I experienced a tremendous urge to purchase something online. I didn’t understand why at the time, but now I do. It was the collective unconscious pulling me into a transaction it wanted to make. Thank goodness I took a nap instead, or I might have sprung for that Barcalounger.

I find myself liking this meta-branding that’s being done for us. It means all the pesky decision-making that usually goes into shopping and buying as individuals is eliminated, and we can simply plunge into the warm, sticky group mind for such important issues. I think other days should be coined for a variety of purposes. Indeed, a day without branding should be anathema to us. What would we do on such a day? Who would lead us to the appropriate trough?

Some suggestions:

• Tough It Out Tuesday: Specials are offered to people who want to spend whatever money they have on discretionary items, even though they’ve fallen on hard times.
• Wacky Wall Street Wednesday: The third Wednesday in every month is given over to the purchase of stocks and bonds. Brokerages could offer special deals to make the day worthy of its new positioning.
• Think About Other People Thursday: We’d take one Thursday every year to consider the situations of people other than ourselves. What a concept!
• Foreclosure Friday: Banks offer cheap homes left vacant by their irresponsible lending practices.
• Suck-It-Up Saturday: One day a year, we recognize the difficulties faced by those whose bonuses are suddenly only eight digits long.

This is only the beginning. Days could be the recipients of multiple brands, of course. Cyber Monday only comes once a year, leaving plenty of room for Mortgage Monday or Madoff Monday, depending. Whole months could also be branded — how have we lived this long without Over-Leveraged October?

This news arrived via e-mail just this morning:

Canon USA wants me to Wrap Up All My Holiday Shopping right now, and has many ways for me to save money.

Lulu.com, which helps people make vanity books, has a Cyber-Monday Sale.

Fantagraphic Books, which is a premiere publisher of comics for the intellectually robust, has a 30% off sale on all comix published in 2009.

JetBlue Airways is offering a Great Trio Sale with airfares of $39/$69/$99. My experience with JetBlue sales is that I never qualify for them or am interested in where they are going. My last airfare between New York and San Francisco on JetBlue was more than $400.

Apple is offering Great Pricing on Exclusive Accessories. They must be really great, because they sent me the e-mail twice.

Amazon.com wants me to Give The Gift of Reading with their Kindle.

Sur La Table, which has been contacting me almost daily since I bought four placemats a month ago, wants to offer me an entire 14-pice set of Wusthoff knives for only $119. With free shipping! That’s a good deal. Except I already have that set. Somebody else may need one, though. I’m not sure yet.

Perhaps instead I should get the Supreme Joyful Tidings Gift Tower from Wolferman’s Bakery. I have no idea how I got on their e-mailing list, but they’ve been on my case for a while now. Nice tower.

EBay has Hot Gifts for Stanley Bing for under $50, with Free Shipping also.

Or I could Save 10% off everything at Ace Hardware today only!

Cushman Fruit Company, whoever they are, wants me to know that it’s my Last Chance to Enjoy 25% off on selected gifts, with Free Standard Delivery on Others. Cushman’s spokeslogo seems to be a talking orange.

Red Envelope’s 25% off sale has been extended another 24-hours. This has always appeared to me to be a sign of weakness, but perhaps it was because demand is so high?

The Republic of Tea has holiday news. There are gifts under $15 plus a special holiday offer that I will learn about if I decide to open the e-mail.

PayPal, which is owned by EBay and offers me a way to pay online without much hassle, wants to inform me that there are Cyber Deals from Wal-Mart, plus other holiday offers.

The Museum of Modern Art wants me to shop their Holiday Gift Guide. Members get 20% off Today Only.

And all of that before 7:30 AM Eastern Time. That seems like a lot to me. It’s not even counting the stuff I put an automatic Junk Mail label on, which now resides in my Deleted Files folder, unread. Perhaps I’d better check that now. I don’t want to miss all the opportunities now being offered to me by Walgreens.

Pick up those new GPS systems, now on sale at Best Buy, Wal-Mart and other fine stores for under $100!

Don’t forget that flat-screen TV that’s suddenly within your price range!

Remember to stop by the gigundo superstore to stock up on potato chips, lawn furniture and frozen shrimp!

Swing by the enormous drugstore! Get medicine! Print 100 pictures for only $1.00! While you’re there, load up on toys, nostrums and personal care products! The holidays are almost here!

Hit the department store for pantyhose, shoes, perfume, purses, and those fabulous studded denims you’ve had your eye on — they’re all on sale today only!

On your way home, stop by your local American automobile dealership and nab a new Ford, Chevy or Chrysler! Terms are great! Quality has never been better!

If you’re an investment banker, kick the tires on an underperforming entity! You’ll be glad you did!

Somewhere out there in this great, shining land of ours, there’s a product, service or asset waiting for you! We’ve been in the doldrums far too long! Make Black Friday lead to Black Saturday and then Black  Sunday and then a tsunami of Black Weekdays! Get out there and express your love of all that’s good and strong about our nation! Let commerce ring!

Thanksgiving is upon us. And it’s the rare individual among us who doesn’t have a lot to be thankful for. As we prepare for Thursday’s festivities, I thought it would be nice to ask you what you would put on that list. Personally, here are some of the things that give me a warm and fuzzy:

I am thankful that Bernard Madoff is now a big kingpin in prison, both because it means he IS in prison and because I also get a laugh at the mental image of two old farts indulging in a pushing match from which the despicable swindler emerges triumphant. I like to think that a background in high finance prepares you for anything.

I am thankful that most of my friends still have at least modest expense accounts. It means I can still sponge off them now and then.

I am thankful that my house is still worth basically what it was assessed at when I got my mortgage.

I am thankful that Wall Street is still a festering sump pump of illogic, hubris and greed, and will continue to provide me with plenty to write about for the foreseeable future.

I am thankful GM still exists and is making a new Camaro.

I am thankful for Tim Geithner’s temper. It makes him do funny, interesting and sometimes very satisfying stuff. 

I am thankful that fewer people than ever can talk about the benefits of a deregulated, free-market system without laughing. Of course, I’m not thankful that they’ll keep trying until, in the end, they win again.

I am thankful that I haven’t needed to speak to a single attorney on a matter of personal importance this past year.

I am thankful that my medical insurance company paid a small percentage of my costs back to me, even if it was under protest and after repeated bludgeoning. Actually, I’m not that thankful. I think they stink. But I’m grateful that I have this opportunity to say so.

I am thankful for newspapers and magazines. I know that every smug aggregator out there must be too, since they provide 95% of all content you get on the web.

And in that regard, last of all, I’m thankful that a new system of communication exists by which I can write whatever the hell I’m thinking on any given day, with no benefit of research, no fact-checking and very little personal responsibility attached. In short, I’m very thankful for the Internet.

How about you? What do you find yourself appreciating at this potentially festive season?

I was riding in a taxi the other day. The driver had the radio on. I don’t like to tell drivers who have their radios on to turn them off. First, if it’s not too loud, I figure it’s their home for 10-12 hours per day and they have the right to establish their own environment as much as possible. I used to drive a cab, briefly. It wasn’t much fun. A lot of waiting. A lot of aggravating. Bad money unless you work ungodly hours. So if they want to listen to their favorite station while they sit and honk and fester, I’m sympathetic. I also think that if you poke the wrong taxi driver, the guy could turn around and blow your head off. There’s that.

So we’re riding along and I realize there’s something strange on the radio. What is it? Could it be? Yep. It’s Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.” Hm, I think to myself. Did I go to sleep and wake up in December? I looked at my BlackBerry. Nope. It was indeed still mid-November. Bing concluded his crooning. There was a short pause. Then Mel Torme piped up to tell me that chestnuts were already roasting on an open fire. I rolled down the window. It was 62 degrees in New York that day. The Halal vendor at the corner of 53rd was dispensing chicken, but there wasn’t a chestnut in sight. Most people were walking around without coats. By the time I got to my destination, the Andrews Sisters were welcoming Santa Claus, who apparently was as confused as I was, and was coming to town a month and a half early.

Look, I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m concerned Christmas is not Ramadan, which lasts for a month, nor is it Lent, which takes a full 40 days to run its course. Even in the Middle Ages, the holiday extended no more than 12 days, taking into account all those lords a-leaping and toads a-creeping or whatever. A few years ago, I noticed that the holidays were starting immediately after Thanksgiving, on Black Friday — a shopping institution that premiered as a marketing concept in the mid-1960s. But mid-November? Why not right after Labor Day? Why not immediately post-Memorial Day? Why not have the season of shopping and giving last all year round?

I realize the retail sector wants this to be a great return to materialism after the last bummer years. But personally, I don’t want to see Santa and his minions until there’s a little snow on Rudolph’s nose, or hear about the first Noel until we’ve all had the time to kill a billion turkeys. Then the gloves can come off and the herald angels can start shoving all those bargains down our throats full throttle.

I’m in Logan Airport in Boston this morning. It’s 5:30 AM. On the radio coming here, the top news had something to do with Sarah Palin. I say the news, but it’s not news. It’s just Sarah Palin. On the radio, you can’t see her in her nice red sweatshirt. But it was still her. She was running through her memorized speech about the Middle East.

On the way through security, there were televisions in the ceiling. Barbara Walters was interviewing Sarah Palin. I couldn’t hear what she was talking about, but it was definitely her.

In the book/magazine/gum store, there she was again. Then there was a split screen of two other people who were talking about her. Then there she was again. She was talking about the economy. I’m not interested in what Sarah Palin has to say at this point about the economy. Perhaps that’s churlish of me, but there you are.

Now I’m having a bagel and coffee at the airport bar outside my gate. On the four television sets above the bar are Justin Timberlake, a commercial for Freedom Debt Relief (twice)… and Sarah Palin. This time I can see the red sweatshirt. On the airport Muzak is REM. They’re singing “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” I’m not making it up.

I know there are many, many people who want to see Sarah Palin. Even Oprah did and gave her a nice, friendly launch for her platform, too. It’s just that I’m not one of the people who does. She’s a very attractive person, no question about it. But she scares me. Perhaps “scares” is not the right word. Whenever I see her I get a stabbing feeling that the world is not of my making.

One day, I imagine that the Sarah Palin book tour will be over, and the machine will go back to promoting its next product.

I can’t wait.

It is my understanding that by the time we get to Web 4.0 everything we do will be up in the cloud. All our writing, our spreadsheets, our photos, our videos, all up in the cloud, wherever that is. I guess it will be like heaven. Nobody knows where that is, either, even those who believe in it.

You may be more evolved than I am on this subject, but that idea makes me a little bit nervous. Perhaps it’s all the DID YOU BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER TODAY warnings I’ve received during the course of my digital life. Maybe it’s just my innate mistrust of things I can’t actually put my hands on and see. Me, I like to have it all on these neat little hard drives they make now, with a terabyte of storage for a couple hundred bucks. Give me a brick over a cloud any day.  I know I’m in the minority, though. It’s all headed for the cloud and ain’t nothin’ we can do about it.

So this morning I got to the office, and there was no cloud. In fact, there was no internet. No web. No e-mail. No shared documents. No access to you guys. Nothing. Just what we used to call a dead terminal. We used to like our dead terminals. We wrote on them, played games on them, ran numbers on them. Now you might as well try to work with a loaf of bread. A computer not connected to the great giant brain stem is nothing more than a doorstop.

I called IT. They were going crazy. I called HR, because that’s what you do around here when something malfunctions. Ambrose, the head of the department, was beside himself. Seems that a PowerPoint presentation he had to make to senior management was up in the cloud, too, safe and sound, naturally, but he couldn’t get to it. “We’re going to have to go to Plan B,” he said with a foreboding so dire I didn’t dare ask him what Plan B was.

We all had coffee. Walked around a little. An hour or so passed, and then suddenly the cloud was back. Connectivity was restored. We were all functioning business people again. I called Ambrose, who was very relieved. I heard clicking in the background and the sound of a printer churning out a hard copy behind him. “What was it?” I asked him.

“Mouse ate through a cable in midtown,” he said.

“A mouse?” I said.

“Apparently,” he said. “Incredible, huh?”

Yep. Incredible. One mouse brought down the entire communications function of a gigantic corporation. Not a hacker. Not the end of the world, brought to you by the Mayans and Roland Emmerich. Just one… small… rodent.

You know what they say, I’m sure. The best laid plans of women and men often go a-mouse. Well, maybe they didn’t say it exactly like that. But I’m sticking to my brick for the foreseeable future. I figure it would take one hell of a mouse to put that out of commission.

China is growing triple digits as we politely chug along toward greater mediocrity. Sarah Palin is topping the charts.  Winter is coming in. My 401(k) is still under water. War in the east is widening. Bonuses will hit record highs on Wall Street this year. Do all these things bother me? Sure they do. But not as much as the guys who run the stores at the airport.

I don’t like to think of myself as a peevish person. But I do have peeves.  And my peeves define me.

You go to the airport store. There’s at least one in every terminal. They have every stupid magazine in the world, so you look at them for a while. Brad is turning to Jen because of Angelina. Kate is courageously putting her life back together after Jon screwed it up, or vice versa. Rob Pattinson… something. There’s medicine and some books and gum, lots of gum, very expensive gum, and stuffed animals and shot glasses and tee-shirts celebrating Burbank or St. Louis (the Gateway to America!) and lousy headphones and all that stuff like that there. And eventually you come up with something you didn’t really need, two magazines, some mints, a little ferret that rolls over and over on the ground when you turn it on, an oinking pig that changes direction when it bumps into a wall… and then you go to the checkout… and the person behind the counter says, “Did you find everything you wanted?” Which is fine. You could interpret it as a caring question. Like, they’re really worried that I might not have found that copy of Digital Coin Collector I was looking for. So I say “Yes, thanks.” And that’s when it happens.

“Water?” says the lady. “Some candy?”

Okay, I don’t know why this rubs me the wrong way so badly. But after years of traveling, during which this scenario developed and took shape and heft and national proportions, I’ve gotten really sick of it. Perhaps you can help me with it. It doesn’t seem so egregious, looking at it on the screen here. “Batteries?”

For a while, my tactic was simply to stare at the cashier with a bored expression and say nothing. Not no. Not yes. Just… nothing. As I would any comment not worthy of reply. They don’t get it, though. “Some magazines?” they will inquire if all I got was Tic Tacs. “Some Tic Tacs?” they will say when all I got was a magazine.

Lately, I’ve tried a small push-back, just to keep myself sane. “No thanks,” I’ll reply. “Why? Would YOU like some candy?”  Doesn’t stop them. Nothing does. They are indefatigable.

One time, at LAX, after paying $28.50 for a bunch of swill I didn’t really need (a copy of Car & Driver, a paperback I’d never read, a bottle of Coke Zero, some arcane gum whose packaging interested me), I got really peeved when the cashier asked me if I wanted a sports drink too. “Why do you guys all do this?” I asked the lady, perhaps a bit too sharply. She looked at me, very crestfallen, as if I had called attention to a physical defect over which she had no control. “We are required to,” was all she said. Afterwards, I felt bad. Why am I ragging on this poor employee who is only carrying out the instructions of her master?

Something too close to home, maybe, huh.

The effort to purchase Donald Trump’s aged 727 continues apace. I believe we now have close to $1000 in various currencies toward our goal of $300,000.  Most people have responded well to the idea. Some complained, however, that we gave free publicity to Mr. Trump in his campaign to reap a profit from the sale of his luxury liner. To this cavil I responded that, in my experience, it is generally the rich who get things for free. As an example, I mentioned the fact that, for some reason, only upscale grocery stores frequented by the wealthy offer free samples of tasty tidbits.  I was specifically thinking of a supermarket not far from where I used to live outside of New York City, in an town adjacent to my own called Scarsdale (close by where a famous diet doctor was heartlessly murdered by his elegant lover). This store offered what was in effect a sumptuous feast to anybody rich enough to shop there. You should have seen the Gucci and Louis Vuittons scarfing down that free brie.

At any rate, my thoughts on this important matter generated an interesting comment from John, who lives in Los Angeles. ”Bing,” he writes, “I get free tastings in Cosco all the time. Of course, they have been getting more and more upscale every day. Heck, they’re so upscale now they might refuse to renew my membership.  Better go shop while I can.”

John lives in the home of people who, as Groucho Marx once said about himself, don’t want to belong to any club that would have them as a member. Los Angeles is all about clubs you can and can’t get into, and those are only places people really want to go. That said, guys like John do have their clubs. In his case, it’s COSTCO, and he would be very sad if that establishment reviewed his status and decided they had grown too upscale for him. Imagine that! Ejected from COSTCO! At the very least that would mean losing access to what are among the best Polish hot dogs available outside a street stand. Not to mention the shame.

This made me consider for a moment which clubs I now belong to, and which still make sense for me. There aren’t that many. A few years ago, I belonged to a health club. I joined for three years, on a very special membership plan. Paid my first installment. Never went again. Not once. What I had to go through to get free of that commitment I won’t bore you with. Suffice it to say it’s sometimes very nice to have a column in a major financial publication. I did learn a lesson, though. I never set foot inside a health club anymore. I know I will join. And I know I will never go once I do. So I guess that was a valuable experience.

I also belonged, for a brief time, to a Beach and Tennis Club back in the day. It wasn’t that expensive. I don’t know why we did it. Maybe our friends who liked the place convinced us, I can’t remember. What I do recall is that once we were granted entry, after a hard-fought process, I never wanted to go again. The pool was unheated. The beach was full of rocks. My kids don’t play tennis. The best part of it was the snack bar. So after a while, we quit.

Not long ago, a professional friend asked if I would like to apply for membership to his Club. I had had lunch there several times. It was okay. You go into a big room filled mostly with guys who look like they’d rather be yachting. Lots of blue blazers and khaki pants. You fill out a little paper slip with checkmarks to tell the waiter what you’d like to eat, just like you do in a hospital. They bring you your food under little metal domes… also like a hospital. It’s very dark wood everyplace, and the seats have brass grommets. Over in a corner there was a guy who definitely could have been Ben Bernanke. For a while, I was seduced by the idea of belonging to such a Club. Then my wife said to me, “What are you going to do there?” I thought about that and realized that all I would probably do is eat lunch, wonder if I should play squash, and decide against it. In the end, I would join and once again, that objective achieved, decide I had no interest in going ever again.

Finally, a guy I know in show business tried to get me to join the Friar’s Club. The Friar’s Club is a place where comedians, producers, agents and other folks in the field go to hang with each other, play poker, feel like they would have known Frank Sinatra if he was still alive. The Rat Pack was very big at the Friars, as was the entire generation defined by Milton Berle. A lot of guys in the business still like to go there. It makes them feel like they belong to something important, something with a tradition. It’s hard to find that these days. I went there once for lunch. I had something that tasted a lot like Franco American spaghetti and meatballs in a room where at least half the guys were on oxygen. I kid you not.

So I guess I don’t really belong to any club, now that I come to think about it. Like John, I have a COSTCO card, but perhaps that doesn’t really count. I also belong to the club of people who rent from Avis. And when I fly American, I go to the Admiral’s Club. But what kind of buzz do you get from belong to a club anybody can join with a credit card? When I shop, I also can give my phone number and get a deal on certain store-brand items. I guess that’s a club, right? They call it one. But aside from those, I guess I’m not cut out to be a Club kind of guy. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go down to Michael’s for lunch. I like the place. The food is good, they always give me pretty much the same table, and I get to see the same faces every day. You come to appreciate that kind of thing after a while.

Today it is reported that Donald Trump, clearly not feeling the pinch of the times, is upgrading his mode of travel and putting his old 1968 private jet on the block. A nice tour of the facilities may be found here on this very site.

As jets go, it’s pretty standard. The interior looks like a huge stretch, with inverted glassware and the customary burnished wood everywhere you look. Lots of nice seating. Very comfy. Potential purchasers may wish to remove the enormous TRUMP that festoons the side, as well as the large pouf of ruddy, flaxen hair that has been surgically attached to the front dome, but beyond that it’s pretty much in walk-in condition. The price is reported to be between $4 and $8 million.

This doesn’t seem like a lot, frankly, to own a piece of history. I was reading a magazine called Malibu Times last weekend, don’t ask me why, and the smallest, most run-down cottage in that community is going for $4 million and a lot of places are $15 million and up. It’s clear there’s a lot of money around in this supposedly challenged economy. In a few months, employees of the top three bailed out banks, the ones that crawled out from under their TARPs,  will be receiving some $30 Billion with a B in Bonuses. That means $250,000 for each, if it was distributed equally, which it won’t be. Some will get BMWs. Others will receive half of Romania.

Nobody said that everybody was equal in our society, of course. I mean, you know, we’re all equal, but some are clearly more equal than others. That’s capitalism, God bless its tiny heart. But the gap, ladies and gentlemen, is getting to be wide enough to drive a revolution through. More than 10% unemployed. More than that under-employed. And Donald Trump is upgrading his jet. Something must be done!

I say all the readers of this site should consider getting together and purchasing the jet. No, no. Wait a minute. I’m not kidding. If they’re publicly asking for $4 million, I’ll bet we could get it for $3 million. With current financing being the way it is, putting the plane itself up as collateral we could probably finance, say 85% of it. That means coming up with less than half a million. We can do that.

Once we have the plane, we could all share it, or even use it for some good purpose. Take food to people who need it. Escort children on rides around scenic locations. Make a whistle stop to various communities who have never seen a private jet, even an old one like this, and instruct them in how successful people conduct themselves. It could be a traveling Museum of Affluence, teaching an important lesson to us all about… something.

Perhaps these are not the best ideas. Maybe you can do better. But certainly, a communal ownership of such an important artifact will not only provide an important social purpose, it may also prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. I mean, imagine if the Russians got ahold of it.

Let me get the ball rolling. I am personally ready to put up $250 toward this project. That’s all I can afford right now. My daughter is thinking of going to grad school and my son has decided that he doesn’t really like having a job he has to go to every day. Perhaps you can do better. If so, please do so. You know what they say. From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How stupid has conventional wisdom been this year?

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

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

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

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

Railroads? I’m on board.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO: Global.

YES: Local.

NO: Dead stuff and why it’s dying.

YES: Having fun in Tokyo.

NO: What old guys are thinking.

YES: What young people are doing.

NO: Tech.

YES: Sex.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prior holders of the crown include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All it would take would be a little legislation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Who knows? Do you?

Sometimes you just don’t know what to think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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