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.

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?

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.

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!

NEW YORK, May 18 – Stanley Bing said on Monday that he plans to sell an undesignated amount of stock in his formerly privately held BingCo., and also plans a note sale to help repay funds he has borrowed from various sources. He also announced that he was taking a $872 million charge against earnings. The notes are being designed by his friend Stu right now, according to Bing, and will be very attractive.

The charge reflects losses on quite a few assets, mostly due to bad investments made after consultation with the best advisors in the business world.

These losses have been a drag on BingCo.’s cash position, which has declined since June ‘08.  The New York-based content company also announced the slashing of weekly dividends to children and pets, and an elimination of bonuses to all employees, of which there really aren’t any. At the same time, BingCo. management hopes the message will resound with Wall Street, which has shown virtually no interest in the Company since it went public some 18 months ago.

“We have no idea what it is the company does,” said Reed Barfinger of Barfinger & McGuffin, a firm that makes itself available for quotes to reporters who call it. “This lack of clarity used to be a huge asset, particularly in the online content world, but now people want at least an ounce or two of steak along with their sizzle.”

This could spell potential trouble for BingCo. In pre-market trading, the company’s shares fell about 2 percent to $0.14. Their 52-week high is $0.15, set last July 23.

BingCo. Executive Chairman and Chief Everything Officer Stanley Bing said in a statement that he will use the proceeds from the sale of shares and notes to pay back the $23,000 loan he received from CitiBank to finance the construction of a paved driveway at company headquarters.

Bing did not specify the size of the debt offering but said it would not be backed by the federal government, to which he also expects to owe some money very shortly in the form of a quarterly estimate.

Bing was among the institutions that recently underwent a “stress tests” of their ability to handle a deep recession, and was among those found to be quizzical. 

BingCo. does not give guidance. The company did however indicate it expects to be alive at the end of the year, mostly by accumulating more debt in order to pay the debt that comes with responsibilities and consequences.

The sky is blue. The trees are green. The birdies is on the wing. And the majority of our banks have flunked their stress tests. Does that make them sad? Nope. Are we worried? Not at all. Because while they are stressed, they are not stressed as badly as we might have feared. Two facts leap out. First, while 10 of 19 of our fiduciary institutions require some form of additional cash to keep from fainting, all they need, in aggregate, is a measly $75 billion.

Compared to the numbers we’ve been seeing lately in bailouts and fearful predictionary bloviage, why, that’s a mere bag of shells! And it turns out they don’t even want the money! “No thank you, Uncle Tim,” they are saying. “We’re gonna be okay after all.” Can you imagine?  

Best of all, it turns out that even if you take the very worst-case scenario, potential losses in this formerly fetid corner of our financial sector would reach only $599 billion. Not a T? Only a B? Ha! We sneeze at such numbers. 

Speaking of sneezing, it also turns out that we’re all probably not going to die of swine flu, at least this week. 

The fact is, there’s just so much darned good news around that I think we should all open our hermetically sealed windows right now, lean out over whatever avenue we work on, and no, not jump, just breathe in that nice spring air, which appears to be not quite as badly loaded with toxic hydrocarbons as we had feared. 

Who knows? We may have a panic gap here all of a sudden. What should we freak out about next, do you think? Should we look back once again to ascertain which was the worst in our lifetime, so that we can use that knowledge of the past, as economists do, to prognosticate the future? 

To examine this issue scientifically, I visited a cool new website that helps those trying to determine hierarchies of just about anything, scientifically, you know. My assessment of the worst panic of our collective time can be found here.  See if you agree.

Okay, I hear you. You’re sick of the bad vibes. You want to get your collective head out of the community toilet. Stuff you’re tired of hearing about: bailouts, stinky hedge fund shenanigans, executive compensation, retention bonuses for guys who weren’t retained, criminal excesses by shady Wall Street buttheads, economic prognostications offered by those who didn’t prognosticate anything when it needed to be prognosticated.

You’re ready to move on. The innate optimism of the American spirit is beginning to bubble bigtime within your breast. Enough of this gloom and doom! It’s time to have a burger, down a couple of brewskies, hit the new ground running.

You’re not stupid, of course. You see the unemployment rate. You see the sales figures for the first quarter. You know that if you look, there is dismal swamp as far as the eye can see. But maybe not. Not for those who see just beyond that grim horizon. Over that rim, there is dawn, the kind of light that only those who look can perceive.

Proof of this fact comes in a new poll from CBS News and the New York Times. The Times reports that:

“… the number of people who said they thought the country was headed in the right direction jumped from 15 percent in mid-January, just before Mr. Obama took office, to 39 percent today, while the number who said it was headed in the wrong direction dropped to 53 percent from 79 percent. That is the highest percentage of Americans who said the country was headed in the right direction since 42 percent said so in February 2005…”

This tiny new embryo of optimism is fragile. A vast majority of people are still worried about their jobs and are cutting expenses back as much as possible. That’s just common sense.

But you know how it is. One of our national characteristics is a certain kind of creative Attention Deficit Disorder. We can’t stay any one way for very long. And we’ve been in the dumps for quite some time now.

Disregarding stupidity and evil for a moment, a huge element of what got us here is pure psychology and decay in attitude. Repair that, ladies and gentleman, and the rest will surely follow. And you know. Even if it doesn’t, getting there just might be a whole lot more fun.

On April 1, Tim Geithner, speaking from the big G20 love fest, told Katie Couric that he would certainly consider replacing the CEOs of any bailed-out entity that the administration felt wasn’t performing up to snuff. I don’t think there’s anybody out there who doesn’t think that’s a good idea. You take the money. You do the job. If you don’t, so long Charley, right? Right. 

This will undoubtedly leave a huge CEO gap in a number of large institutions. In many cases, the government will probably try to fill the void with an executive who has been on the corporate scene before, as they did at General Motors. There’s certainly a rationale for that. The anointed one knows the company in question. He has some experience in the trenches. At the same time, isn’t that individual likely to be as much part of the problem as the solution? The Who said it: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Is that what we’re really after?

I submit that there are many qualified individuals from outside each of these banks, car companies, insurance behemoths and other corporate states that are now at least partially owned by We, the People. I believe I am one of them. 

Following are my qualifications to be a New Bailout CEO: 

• I have many nice suits and would not need government help to acquire any before ascending to my new post; 
• I have lost some hair over the years and now am required, on bad days, to do a moderate comb-over; 
• I don’t really understand a lot about the economy, relying on others for their wisdom, and would therefore not put up any resistance to virtually any plan that Mr. Geithner, Mr. Ratner or Mr. Ed, for that matter, might have in mind; 
• I can read a Teleprompter very well, and will not go off-point, ever, no matter what; 
• I can still button my jacket when I sit down, which is more than I can say about a lot of these guys; 
• I believe that Business can come back and am willing to say so; 
• I have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, which is clearly a qualification for haute executive status; 
• I am a big fan of Mr. Obama and all his guys; 
• I don’t mind taking a Town Car to appointments and have been doing so for many years, and would by no means insist on a stretch limo like some of these other bozos; 
• I fly commercial all the time and would promise to continue to do so; 
• I’m good at a cocktail party; 
• I like to delegate the important stuff. 

Of course, the compensation would have to make sense. I know the limits, which have been well-publicized. But what’s the upside?

You guys aren’t going to like this, but you know who I feel sorry for? Edward Liddy. That’s right. He’s the guy the government appointed to run AIG after Hank Greenberg and his gang set it up to crash and burn. Today Greenberg popped up on television like a vicious Mini-Me to pile on the dead bunny.

Greenberg left in a scandal in 2005 after setting up the business unit that got AIG into all of its trouble. You know that operation. The Financial Products group that came up with all those cute derivatives backed with now-toxic instruments. And here he is this morning, jabbering away like a wise elder statesman. Pfui.

This was only slightly worse than the drubbing that Mr. Liddy took at the hands of the suddenly irate congressmen in Washington on Wednesday. Many of our senior legislators had good points to make, no question about it. The situation is dire, and certainly subject to Federal review, as it was years ago when the SEC was supposed to be regulating the industry. Most of the politicians acquitted themselves well. But at times the hectoring got out of hand, to the point where you might have thought, if you were a cynical type of person, that these members of Congress were trying to come up with the quintessential sound bite that would land them on the evening news. Sure enough, at the end of the day, it was the showboat from Massachusetts whose “have you no shame!” diatribe did get the most airtime. I guess he knows his business, too.

Of course, Edward Liddy isn’t blameless. He obviously made some very bad decisions. But he is only the last in a series of managers – both at AIG and elsewhere – who has done so. It’s pretty evident noxious stuff has been going on everywhere for years. The culture of compensation of which he was a part is so deeply ingrained in corporate culture now that even Tim Geithner, the guy who is supposed to oversee the bailouts, didn’t pop up a huge red flag when he first heard about AIG’s contractual obligations to its disgraced lunkheads. 

Worst of all, for the poor doofus on the stand, is the thought that you’ve got to know is running through his head as everybody is saying nasty things about his mother: “I’m doing all this for one dollar a year.” 

Man. I would do it for less than five. As long as it came with a guaranteed bonus.

So now Congress is going to go after the AIG bonuses, responding to the rage that most sentient beings are feeling right now about the whole question. One suggestion is that the Government simply impose a 100% tax on the sums received by A.I.G. bonus heads. This would seem to be a logical extension of the Government’s current policy of taking about 52% of all my income. Still, it’s a dramatic solution to the problem.

I’m just as mad any anybody else at those numbskulls at A.I.G., of course.  It really stinks. You have to wonder how a “retention bonus” is meant to affect the performance of a manager who has already left the organization. Like, that’s just stupid.

If you want to give me some bulls**t rationale for why you’re going to suck up billions of dollars and spew it out to your colleagues and pals, come up with something credible or at least appropriately truculent, like “We did it. We’re keeping it. If you don’t like it, fire us and pay us our contractually-mandated severance packages.”  That at least is a truthful presentation of the executive mind-set.

Still, you have to worry a little about the policy implications. Does the government – even in pursuit of fairness and equity – have the right to implement new, punitive laws against individuals who have displeased it, and Us? New laws that prevent such things happening in the future, no question. But laws that retroactively impose justice kind of make me nervous for some reason. 

In the case of A.I.G., the government owns 80% of the company now, so it’s easy simply to assert that We the People can pretty much do what we want. And maybe we should. There’s no question that taxpayers didn’t fork over all that money so that individuals could haul it away in shopping bags as they exited the building they helped to wreck.

But you’ve got to think that Business is in for a really rough ride from here on in. Sweeping in on the heels of what all these moron financial types and other brain-damaged economists have wrought will be  a host of new laws, new regulations, new ways to protect the nation and its citizens from the greed and collective criminal mind of Wall Street, its denizens and its running dogs. And we deserve whatever we get.

Newton’s Third Law states that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. He was talking about physics. But it’s equally applicable to less scientific stuff as well.

Terror, for instance, breeds repression and a more surveillant society, one more concerned about safety and security and less about personal liberty.  In the wake of 9/11, this country did many things out of anger, fear and a desire to hold those guilty accountable. Some were reasonable. Others, in retrospect, were not.  Equal and opposite reactions are not always as good as they first may appear. 

Bernie Madoff is not the only criminal who prowled Wall Street. In many ways, he’s just the fall guy, a dramatic extension of the way business was done every day in the big craps game. In these A.I.G. guys, we have a perfect example of the global business culture that ran things for a long time and still does. Their very presence cries out for retribution, and Newton must be served.

Let me ask you a question: If you were a passenger on the Titanic, and somehow managed to wangle your way ahead of the women and children onto a life boat, would you demand to take your luggage?

I don’t think that’s a far-fetched comparison. Here we have a massive company that hit a huge iceberg – this one of its own devising – and just as it’s about to sink under the water it receives a timely and enormous rescue… and the guys who ran it into trouble in the first place are now leaving the boat with their silverware, furs and jewelry intact.

Of course, these are insurance guys. I don’t know what we all expect of them. In my experience, insurance guys are trained to justify just about anything.  Last month my health insurance company told me that a 5 a.m., six-hour visit I made last summer to the Emergency Room of my local hospital was not covered because it was not an emergency. It’s not that hard for people trained in that kind of reasoning to tell themselves that they’re entitled to their legally-promised bonuses.

The thing that’s interesting in this case is how many AIG executives seem to have mandatory boni in their contracts. In my experience, perhaps the top five guys in any corporation usually have that kind of protection. Here we seem to have an entire executive class that has the clause in their deals. I guess wish I had their attorney or worked in an industry that while it is so rigorous with others is so generous with itself.

There are, I suppose, only two solutions to this problem going forward. The first is for Congress to immediately pass a law that any firm that receives bailout money will be under certain constraints:

• No bonuses not approved by the taxpayers;
• No boondoggles to which the taxpayers are not invited;
• All executive expense accounts to be reviewed by Warren Buffett.

The other solution is more difficult: Trust in the people who run our financial system must be restored… one step at a time.

Wall Street thinks its problems are related to objective measures such as debt, equity, long and short selling, broken models, secular issues afflicting certain key industries. That’s nonsense. The reason why everybody is off of the investment train is a lot more simple. People hate Wall Street and the business people who work in or around it. 

It’s not hard to see why. It’s pretty clear that as things stand the interests of Wall Street are not those of working corporations and the people who are employed there. Americans are enraged and disgusted because they were sold a bill of goods and now they see the light. At the end of the great, decades-long confidence game the Street has run, we are all out of that commodity. No confidence, no investment.

How to restore that trust? I can think of one thing that could be done immediately. It’s not easy. It’s totally counter-intuitive. It will never happen. But it would be an excellent gesture. 

The AIG guys should renounce their bonuses. Their management and the government have no legal standing to do so. They’re going to have to do it for themselves. For all of us.

I say this in full knowledge of how improbable and difficult this would be. I know a whole lot of people, myself included, who depend on their bonus to live. It’s not a frill. It’s part of our compensation that we wait for, plan for, put our kids to school with. We don’t have yachts. We don’t have polo ponies. We have mortgages and child support and elderly cocker spaniels who have kidney trouble. That’s what our bonuses pay for.

But most of us don’t work for companies that have screwed up the entire economic system of the world. Most of us don’t work for corporations that require the People to step in and save their butts.  

The effect of such a renunciation would be immediate and dramatic. “Gee,” people around the world would say. “Maybe American business people aren’t total ethical morons after all.”

It’s a first step. Somebody has to take it. Why not the proud, courageous insurance men and women of AIG, standard-bearers on our collective  march toward a new tomorrow?

If you take my money, you have to abide by my rules. Isn’t that what your parents always used to say when you were an unruly teenager? You can’t have that girl or boy in your room with the door closed. You can’t smoke in the house. You can’t have any contraband in your desk, even if you’re just holding it for a friend. And you can’t pay out billions of dollars in bonuses to your pals.

Oops, that last part just snuck in there. But the comparison is apt. These bad boys have taken a bunch of dough from the family kitty. This morning it looks like another $30 billion is going to prop up AIG, the guys who are supposed to be so thoughtful and austere that they are qualified to prop up the rest of us. And still the stories of business-as-usual in the largesse arena keep emerging. Recently Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, citing that enterprising source, TMZ, went off on one bank who had recently received a billion-dollar bundle from the Feds, only to turn around and hold its long-scheduled boondoggle in Los Angeles, featuring salmon, steak, and performances by Cheryl Crow and Chicago.

Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?

I have a simple idea to make sure they do. I suggest that part of the national plan for recovery should be the creation of a National Handout Controller. In corporate terms, this would be the guy who goes over the expense accounts of every person who works for firms that have received bailout money. I know there are probably offices that purport to do this right now. But the establishment of such a dedicated position would speak to the serious nature of the function.

You don’t have to be told how it works, not if you have an expense account and work for a company that has its head on straight. You go to dinner at a nice restaurant with a client and have a $300 bottle of wine. You get a call. What’s up with the wine? Wasn’t there a $100 bottle that would have impressed your companion just as much? You order Castle Wolfenstein for your cell phone, so you can kill Nazis while you wait for the next plane. You get a call. Sure, it’s only $2.99 a month, but it’s clearly personal. We don’t kill Nazis here. We make plastic hangers. And you take a $50,000,000 plane to Washington to ask for more money, every hour in the air costing thousands and thousands of dollars? Guess what. Next time, fly commercial. And you can pick up the tab for your lack of taste and judgment, too. That will be $50,000, please. The corporation will take a check.

We can sure use it.

Oh, the whining over fine dining that’s been heard in the all-but empty bistros of Manhattan as the last expense account executives cut into their exquisitely tender veal and complain about the Obama salary cap!

Sure, a limit on comp will change the make-up of the individuals who surface for the top slots in banking and industry. And that’s a bad thing why? If a company needs a bailout — hey, let’s call it what it is: a handout — shouldn’t it come with certain strings attached? Son, if you want this money for college, you’re not going to be spending it on a car. Right? Only a wayward teen would expect otherwise.

Is $500,000 base, with a bonus to be decided upon performance, an unrealistic sum? It seems so to people accustomed to the good life that was promised to them in business school and the lucre they accumulated during the boom. But where does it fall in the vast scheme of things?

A little review of the factsyields some perspective. The numbers seem kind of unbelievable to me, but then I live in a variety of charming urban areas where a dinner for two that comes in under $100 is considered an eyepopping steal.

Median base salaries:

Elementary School Teacher: $49,979

Physician: $147,480

Manager: $128,540

Attorney: $88,944 (who are these guys?)

Architect: $56,637

Registered Nurse: $61, 603

Now granted, these are median salaries. The 75th percentile of these jobs, which are arguably every bit as important in our social scheme as that of Banker, are about 20% higher than the median in each case. And of course there are those at the top of their professions that make a lot more. But this gives you some notion of what a base of $500,000 means to just about everybody but a Banker.

I have an idea. How about we open the top slots at failing fiduciary institutions to Teachers, Architects and Registered Nurses? Let’s leave attorneys out of it. They’re already in there somewhere making hay while the the sun don’t shine, I bet.

First of all, let me say that I’m supportive of President Obama’s measures to limit executive pay in companies that accept new bailout money. There are loopholes that I’m sure smart guys will be able to finesse a bit, but for the most part it limits the comp of senior executives working in such firms to $500,000. Now, this may seem like a lot of money to people who do more than push various colors of paper around for a living, but in actuality, for a banker, you might as well be offering a salary of $1 per year. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but not by much. 

So I’m trying to figure out who will be attracted to the job of running the next big bank to suck up some more of the public weal. Who will NOT be taking the job will be anybody who has considered themselves a banker up until now, guys who were trained for it and are now in mid-career, who have built up lives dependent on the kind of money that bankers, up until now, could expect to draw down. It’s not only the base salary that’s a laughable pittance to such individuals. It’s the fact that bonuses will be tied directly to performance, and closely monitored by angry shareholders who have only one criteria for executive success: the stock price. 

Do you have any idea how irrational the stock market is? Great, profitable companies languish in the single digits. Idiotic brain farts out in left field are rewarded with huge multiples. Hoards of lemmings skitter back and forth, driven over a variety of cliffs by fear and greed. Would you want your comp based on that? I don’t think so. Not when there are so many other things you can do. Like be a consultant. 

I figure there are three kinds of people who will be running bailout institutions: 

1. Rich guys who have already made their nuts and who will provide either gravitas or branding power to their crumbling edifices, presiding over a cadre of hungry young pups who do all the work. Think Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffett, Donald Trump. 
2. Young business school graduates who want to make a name for themselves in both Finance and in the governmental functions that will be overseeing that industry; where these dudes used to gravitate to McKinsey to make their bones, they’ll now hop into banking and do a little workout samba on those bongos. 
3. Politicians with a background in accounting. Think about it. Five hundred grand is a molehill to a real banker. But it’s a mountainous pile to a politician. The top job in the field pays less, doesn’t it? 

It remains to be seen whether any of these will be qualified to lead the large fiduciary entities that form the foundation upon which our economy rests. On the other hand, how could they do any worse than the bozos who took all that money to screw things up?

Experts seem relatively unified, if such a thing is possible, on the issue of direct economic stimulus to every taxpayer. They’re against it. If all the various monies now being set aside were used, the check for each of us would come to nearly 10 grand, apparently. But the economists don’t think it’s a good idea.

The problem is that given all the bad news, past and future, most of us, it is feared, would simply do what the big banks have done with their bailouts: tuck them away for a rainier day. They were supposed to take their money and fork it over to people who wanted to borrow it. Ha! they said. We’re keeping it warm and dry, except for the cash we’re earmarked for bonuses. Smart bankers. They care about the economy. They know that if you give an executive hundreds of millions of dollars they will spend a bunch of it, and that will stimulate everybody.

Us smaller fry, it is thought, would take the $10,000 from Uncle Sam and put it in one of those teetering institutions, rather than putting it back into the economy where it is so desperately needed. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out yesterday, people aren’t spending enough, inventories are rising, the system is going stagnant and we’re all doomed. Or perhaps that was Sunday. It doesn’t matter. The gist is clear. We’re all very selfish and if we got a bailout of any kind we wouldn’t be responsible citizens and spend it right away.

Well I, for one, would like to assure the government that, should I receive $10,000 as a part of the national recovery effort, I would spend every penny of it. Possible areas of expenditure include:

• Blind auctions for certain educational and religious institutions
• New shocks for old Volvo
• Vacations (domestic)
• Cost of maintaining elderly cocker spaniel
• Expenses associated with under-compensated semi-adult children
• Heat, electricity, gas, etc.
• Grass-fed beef
• Wine

This is of course just a cursory list. I’m sure I could generate a whole bunch more if I really thought about it. Just sitting here I’m probably spending money on something I don’t even know about. In fact, 10 grand might not do it. Give me 20 and I’ll really show ‘em something.

How about you. Are you willing to take the pledge? Write your Congressman. Tell him or her that you are committed to spending whatever they give us. If all of us come together in one giant shout, perhaps we’ll get the job done to the benefit of us all.  Have you seen the price of dinner and movie these days?

In the huge Bank of America (BAC) fiasco/bailout/tailspin, there are a lot of people at whom it would be tempting to wave a wobbly finger. Ken Lewis is taking a lot of heat, and it’s not hard to see why. His decision to purchase Merrill Lynch back last fall is looking like the ultimate investment in a money pit. 

This morning it was revealed that during the last quarter of 2008, Merrill lost $15 billion. That’s a lot of money. I wonder what their security analysts would have to say about that. They’re still publishing their opinions about other companies, for some reason. Perhaps they would care to run some models and offer their views about their own?

Parenthetically, and apropos of very little, I do think it would be a good idea for executives in bad odor with the media, their shareholders, regulators and the public, to update their headshots when the first scent of smoke begins to waft through their hermetically sealed windows. The beamish one of Mr. Lewis, placed next to articles questioning his perspicacity, does him no favors.  Just a thought.

What does fascinate me, however, is the role of the consultants hired to investigate the wisdom of the deal from the shareholders’ perspective. As FORTUNE Senior Writer Colin Barr points out elsewhere on this site:

… CEO Ken Lewis’ decision to buy Merrill isn’t the only thing that looks questionable now. So does the advice he and the BofA board got on the hastily arranged Merrill deal from the bank’s advisers, Fox-Pitt Kelton and J.C. Flowers & Co.

The financial advisers offered opinions calling the deal fair to Bank of America shareholders… What’s more, the bank’s shareholders paid the advisers $20 million for the opinions – which the firms formulated after investigating Merrill Lynch’s condition over a single, hectic weekend.

$20 million bucks for… how many hours of work do you think that represented? Let’s be generous and say 1000, spread out over a lot of people. That means the firms were being paid $20,000 per hour for their work. That’s fine. Everybody has their price, and that was theirs. But don’t you think somebody should get a rebate? Do consultants ever give those? Perhaps not. Anway, why should they? They did what was required of them, after all, what is always required of such folks.

They told management what it wanted to hear.

Looking over the list of poor saps who were hoovered into the Madoff money vacuum, it occurred to me that we might have found an excellent beneficiary of at least some of Mr. Paulson’s remaining bailout bonanza.

Why not make the straggling losers in the ponzi parade sign a statement attesting to their credulity, greed and overall foolishness, issue them each a nice, pointy dunce cap - and then help them out with a piece of what they’ve lost? Sure, we can take off a significant percentage of their ill-taken losses as punishment for their sins. Then let’s help them.

I spoke to my broker yesterday. She’s in Southern Florida. It seems that a lot of the old people there who are living out their lives on their investments, assembled after a lifetime of work, are now selling their modest, two-bedroom condos and pawning their jewelry. They’re broke. Imagine that. Eighty years old and without a dime to your name, all because you had to get in on the latest sure thing from the guy everybody trusted. It’s not right.

Likewise, a bunch of very credible charities are sucking the hose, funds that helped indigent widows and holocaust survivors and people suffering from illness so dire that they will be gone long before Madoff will have to spend one night where he belongs. And why is the guy still walking around on Park Avenue, anyway? Don’t they have jails for such people? 

Anyhow, even after Mr. Bush dribbles a little rain on the parched Big Three, there’s still going to be hundred and hundreds of billions just sitting around collecting minimal interest. You’ve got a whole bunch of victims out there who are guilty of nothing more than believing in the risk/reward game. Didn’t we all?

Please, Mr. Paulson! Have a heart!  It’s Christmas!

Many smart people are busy deriding it. There are a host of philosophical, political and economic idealogues, each with a dozen excellent reasons, postulates and theories, backed up by cogent analysis of the first order, riding into battle against it. But it’s going to pass. And I’m glad.

I don’t care if the Detroit business model is wrong right now. I don’t care if their leadership is the biggest bunch of bozos who ever drew breath. The fact is, everybody looks kind of stupid right now, don’t they? In fact, the whole game has changed for just about everybody, no matter what part of the supply chain you’re in. A guy can’t even sell a Senate seat in peace and quiet anymore. And you can’t allow an entire industry to go down because its leadership is lousy, can you? Think where your industry would be if that standard was applied.

So if we’re really gonna bail out the big three in spite of all the good reasons not to, I’m glad, for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with all the good reasons not to.

First of all, people work there. A lot of people. Yeah, they belong to Unions, which are part of the problem and should be punished! Them and their damn high salaries. So tempting to see them whacked around a little, huh? Those super-rich blue collar workers with their high-paying Union jobs. Let’s get ‘em! And their families. And their communities. And the stores they shop at. And the schools that their property taxes help to keep going.

Well, I guess if there’s a bailout of some kind, the Unions are going to have to eat some of the salary and benefits they’ve won from Management over the years. They’ll have to, to make the system level again, probably. In the meantime? Bail them out, I say. Each and every one of them. Let’s make sure they don’t lose their homes and feed the vortex of disaster. I don’t care if we’re investing in a broken down model or helping people who make more money than you think they should. I like the idea of several hundred thousand people staying on the job, paying their mortgages, buying flat-screen TVs, shoes and hamburger.

I also like the idea of the Big Three, back in some kind of business now, really having to sell a whole bunch of those ill-considered and very comfortable gas-guzzlers that are so reprehensible and dumb to have built but still, smell very nice when they’re new. Because in order to sell them, they’re going to have to advertise on all the media that are right now sucking the hose and missing the massive chunk of revenue automotive advertising represents. I like to think of all those ads keeping Madison Avenue up nights working, instead of laying people off, and all the television, cable, radio, Internet and other media people running to fill the orders, earning enough bread to purchase one of the idiotic vehicles we really shouldn’t be making.

I like the idea of money being spent on companies that make something other than money, that produce a product other than a financial instrument, and maybe even putting a halt, even temporarily,  to the incredible, screaming descent in which we are now engaged.

Finally, I don’t believe anybody’s analysis about anything, frankly.  A couple of weeks ago, people were ridiculing the idea of simply printing more money to stablize the economy. Stupid! Boneheads! Simplistic boobies! Yesterday I read a Nobel Prize winning economist who suggested we do precisely that, and cited several excellent sources for his view. He may be right. He may be wrong. Who knows? I do know one thing. I know that nobody knows.

In short, there’s no opinion out there right now that’s worth more than any other. If ignorance was bliss we’d all be tap dancing down Wall Street.

So until we figure out what’s really going on? Let’s try to use the money we have to help the greatest number of people. And let’s start from the bottom, for a change.

Just a question I’ve been thinking about since yesterday… What do you think the boys at the Big Three auto companies were thinking about when each took his own private jet to Washington to ask for help? A number of subsequent queries suggest themselves:

• Are they stupid?
• Assuming that they are NOT completely stupid, didn’t anybody consider this might not be the absolutely best move, at least in terms of the optics?
• If somebody DID think about it, did they voice the opinion and were then overruled?
• Why were they overruled?
• If nobody thought about it, WHY didn’t they? Granted, the thousands of dollars spent in this form of transport have no discernible impact on the billions that are under review, but still…
• If they were going to fly private, why didn’t they all go in ONE jet? Do they hate each other that much? Or couldn’t they agree on which jet they would take?
• Did they think nobody would find out?
• Why do senior officers of corporations get so out of touch? Is it a part of the job description, or do they devolve as they serve their terms?
• Do politicians fly commercial? If so, why don’t I ever see any?
• Are senior officers of Detroit auto companies considered part of Middle America?
• Should we blame an entire industry for the failings of its senior officers?

Tell me what you think.

One of my very hostile but articulate readers, Mike from Spokane, gives me both barrels between the eyes this morning. I think Mike thinks I won’t publish it, because I’m a panty-waist business type swilling gin at breakfast. Here’s what he says:

Bing…with all due respect (as you recently stated to me), you have no idea what you’re frigging talking about. You, and corporate America, are so far removed from the realities of Main Street America, that you continue to confuse your personal financial comfort concerns with those of middle America.

I fully expect that you will delete all posts contrary to your limited and self-serving view, but at least you (or one of your corporate lackeys) will have to read statements that reflect what most of America regards as self-evident…that expanding and supporting corporate greed through taxpayer handouts for incompetence is no path out of the mess we’re in. Not much satisfaction from this end, but at least you, or one of your timorous syncophants, will know that your world has finally sunk below used car salesmen in terms of universal public esteem.

Finally, fearing being one step from flinging fries at the local ‘In&Out’ joint may play well while swilling $20 cocktails in some high-end Manhattan watering hole, but it is a daily reality for millions of Americans who invested billions in now collapsed 401K plans.

Mike, it’s always a pleasure to hear from you. But sometimes it’s hard to see things clearly with so much blood in your eye. I sent my corporate lackeys and timorous sycophants out of the room. This is between you and me.

First of all, this ”corporate America” that’s on a different plane that “Main Street America” is a myth. I have worked in theaters, as a cab driver, in small companies, large corporations and mega-watt global behemoths, and they are all the same. They are people working for a living. And in one and all, it’s the most dysfunctional that run the place. Whatever the gig, we work, we try to enjoy our jobs, and we go home. Guess where our homes are? Main Street.

Secondly, I come from Illinois. So I don’t want to hear a lot of pompous, self-aggrandizing bushwah about middle America, either. We all live here. We are all Americans. None of us are more American than any others. We are all equally American. Let’s move on.

I understand that you need to see people like me, because I sometimes wear a tie and work in an office, as rich, shallow mofos who deserve to be pilloried, in order to keep on feeling that righteous anger of yours. But in my opinion you’d do better to see all of us (except the very rich and unsuccessful putzes who whipped up this soggy mess) as citizens of the same troubled system. Everybody I know is very nervous about their jobs. Nobody I know has a pension. We worry about our stock price, and our families, and our friends, and what the hell is going to happen to us if the big companies that provide so many people with jobs aren’t helped out right now.

We don’t sympathize with the idiots who have gotten us all into such trouble. And we certainly don’t want THEM to benefit from any assistance that is given to these failing auto makers, banks, insurance companies, whatever. We just don’t want the entire ship to sink, taking the lives of all on board, because the captain and his crew are dolts, numbskulls and screw-ups, or because politicians, responding to the anger of their constituents, continue to follow instead of lead.

Take the miscreants out behind the barn! Line them up against the wall! Pepper them with heat-seeking projectiles! But when you’re done with that satisfying exercise, let’s try to save the American auto industry, the banks where we keep our money, and probably the mortgages of all those people who believed they could buy a home with no money down because a greedy guy in a suit told them they could.

Personally, at this point I’m not a big believer in the “free market” approach. It seems to benefit the guys in charge of the marketplace. And that’s not us. And by “us” I mean we, the people. And by the way: MY 401K blows, too.

Thanks for writing, Mike. Say hi to Spokane.