Just Business Or Just Bulls#!t?

When does just business become just bulls#!t? The examples listed below should come as no great news, but my take on who exactly is to blame might just surprise you.

When I was a kid watching the Andy Griffith Show, the grocery merchant who raised prices on his produce just before putting them on sale was held up as an object of scorn and ridicule. Today, this  money for nothin paradigm is standard. We consumers not only allow it, we continually reward it. 

I would argue that we have allowed profit to mutate, like a 1950’s uranium-fueled monster, from the prime motivation of business to its sole be-all/end-all, and have given them a green light to use the most heinous and despicable of means to achieve that end. Blatantly obvious? Well, I am not just talking about Hershey making the candy bar smaller before they raise the price.

As only one example, and solely in the name of profit, the marketing profiteers, or marketeers for short, have sexualized and brainwashed our young children to make them feel that they simply cannot do without various brands of fast food, designer clothes, makeup, and electronics.

Marketeers even have a catchy name for their targeted demographic: Tweens. Sound like a generation of innocent, cuddly stuffed animals? Not after Madison Avenue gets through with them.

Do 10-year-olds really need $120 shoes or the latest iphone? Yes they do, if they want to be cool and sexy enough to remain generally accepted in their circle of other cool and sexy 10-year-old friends. This message underlies the Tweens marketing strategy.

Just business? They are 10 years old for crying out loud! At what point do we acknowledge the pathology of the whole Toddlers and Tiaras syndrome and agree that it is not worth the profit to confuse and pollute the minds of kids who have yet to produce their first hormone just so marketeers can create a generation of children who begin and continue on a life-long quest of rampant consumption to avoid the unbearable loneliness of in-crowd ostracization?

And by “we”, I mean we parents who buy this stuff for our kids. If we stopped, the marketeers would stop peddling their stuff to our children. Marketeers may be acting amorally, but we are acting immorally, when we give up and give in to the entreaties of our already over-privileged offspring.

But it’s not just stuff that business folks are peddling to our kids. It is also junk, as in dope. Expensive, brain rewiring, addictive, suicide-inducing, psychotropic meds, once reserved exclusively for the severely mentally ill in state hospitals, are being hawked through every media outlet by the large pharmacorps, now course through the veins of one out of four Americans. Pharmadope is being handed out like candy to kids every time they get mad or sad  or get a bad math score.

Okay, most of us know that it does not exactly take a genius to complete an online Masters in psychology, team up with a greedy shrink, and make a bundle off of parental angst by selling pharmadope to our kids. But we let them.

After all, most parents are too busy being “sped-up” by their bosses to actually take the time and responsibility required to raise their own children. Instead of demanding that these pseudo-psychologist, charlatans actually learn more meaningful ways to counsel our sincerely troubled kids, and let the rest simply be mad or sad once in a while, we allow them to prescribe pharmadope which lops off the top 20% of their personalities.

And how do we respond to the scurvy antics of the oligopolists in the service industry? We just bend over and take it--that is how we respond.

The other day, our cable provider, without spending a dime and without a moment’s notice, deleted the classic movie channel that we had been getting from day one as part of our expanded basic service package. But first, they surreptitiously changed the name of our expanded service to basic starter service and then tried to tell us that the movie company forced them to put the channel in an upgraded package. Cable wanted $18/month to put back what they had just deleted. The movie company told me that this was not true at all.

This nasty news came as the final insult to injury as it appeared right on the heels of a 4.3% general price hike and numerous other increases for the same old service. They also informed me that the HDTV I was conned into buying was actually just a big flat-screen TV unless we paid them an extra $9/month for the upgraded HD service.

If I had bundled last year like all the big companies and my children had been telling me to, I’d be out some serious change today, and my only alternative would have been to rip out my entire connection to the outside world and start over. Those who bundled are now tightly bundled up in a straitjacket, and don’t tell me that this is not exactly how those cable folks planned it. We let it happen. Just business? At least they provide a real service in exchange for our hard-earned cash. 

When we think about the banking industry, we think of the old traditional bankers who took our money, put it together with other people’s money, lent it out to rich buddies, and made a profit on it. Nothing to complain about, because we got a toaster and some decent interest on our savings, right?

But bankers in the 21^st century lent out billions to families in adjustable rate mortgages, for amounts that exceeded the actual value of their homes, when they knew that said families could never pay back the money once the interest payments ballooned at the end of five years or so. Bad business? Not for 21^st Century Bankers. They made out like, uh, bandits.

21^st Century Bankers first made a lot of money charging a bunch of  origination fees etc. to the borrowers and made more money on the repayments until the balloons came due and the families were evicted from their under-water homes out into the streets.

21^st Century Bankers then bundled up thousands of these worthless loans, (and privately called them toxic securities, because nobody in their right mind would feel secure about touching them) and lied about their worth to their own rich buddy customers. 21^st Century  Bankers then unloaded these insecure securities for billions more than what they were worth, which was nothing.

21^st Century Bankers then lied to the insurance companies about the huge multiple meltdowns of yellow cake and took out big old insurance policies against their potential loss in value. So when the giant radioactive ants began to terrorize Wall Street, 21^st Century Bankers raked in even more billions from the insurance companies.

Then, 21^st Century Bankers lied to the U.S. Congress about their little diabolical scheme to flood the world with their toxic tailings.

If all this seems like it should be against the law, it is. The SEC got really mad at 21^st Century Bankers but only levied civil fines at a rate of pennies on the dollar on what banks got by committing the fraud. This allowed 21^st Century Bankers to keep tens of billions in illegally obtained cash on which they paid not a dime in taxes.

The rest of us were told that we had to bail out the 21^st Century Bankers and insurance companies, and we grumbled a bit and then just sat back while they put most of that unlawfully obtained money for nothin in off-shore accounts and used the rest to literally buy politicians just in time for the next round of swindling. Not surprised yet? Not thoroughly disgusted?

Well, it might surprise/disgust you to know that the current frontrunner in the Tea/GOP presidential race is a multi-millionaire who was born into millions, but made $200-$250 more millions by running a chop shop on companies that once had real people working inside.

Mitt Romney is proud to be a corporate raider. Corporate raiders don’t help a company to make a better widget. Their only goal is to increase profits for a tiny number of wealthy stockholders. Corporate raiders typically walk in the building, fire as many employees as possible, outsource those same jobs to semi-slave laborers overseas, and then automate the rest of the operation. Just business?

If Mitt and his corporate raiders can make more money by throwing the company into bankruptcy, no problemo. And, if an entire American small town community is destroyed by the mass firings, so be it. Mitt Romney made millions by bankrupting one in five of the companies he got a hold of, and that’s not counting the companies he merely shipped overseas.

Mitt Romney just told the press that he likes firing people, even though he claims he almost got fired once (lie), and also claims that he is currently unemployed (truth). He is still collecting millions in profits off of all the working folks he previously fired, and liked it.

Willard Mitt Romney began life with a silver spoon crammed firmly up his…well, those who say he looks like he is sporting a ram-rod may have a point--a ram rod made of precious metal.

Mitt Romney has said that he would have preferred applying his chop-shop strategy to the Big-Three auto makers and letting every family home go into foreclosure, so they could be bought up by a tiny number of rich investors. But he really, really supported bailing out the banks and the insurance companies and would do it again. Seriously, again. Just business?

Yes, Mitt is still raking in millions from the thousands of lives he destroyed and companies he shipped to China or Mexico or India or Brazil and he just tore down one of his four, $12 million homes because it wasn’t big enough for himself and Mrs. Romney. He has already set aside at least $100 million in trust, just for his kids. Not to worry, he has $100-200 million left to play with.

And Mitt Romney may be the next president of the United States, if we let him.

The point of all this is not to whine about what bastards business people have become, but rather what idiots and wimps we have become to let them lead us all like lemmings off whatever cliff-du-jour is making them money.

Until we are prepared to cramp our style, take a stand, just say no, or  just be really un-cool, unsexy, and un-complacent, then we deserve getting the business and have no right to complain about it all being bulls#!t.

It can be done.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

Some Experience Required?

In my youth, I was very fortunate to have had my college education and most of my bills paid for by my parents. And so, sitting in my subsidized existence, I would philosophize at lightning speed and convince myself that my ideas were truly original, and that I would some day be canonized, once my brilliance fully illuminated the beshadowed lives of those dull-witted old farts whom I was convinced only feigned wisdom. I also felt that they did so at my expense. 

Yet it seemed that my delusions of eventual intellectual immortality were constantly interrupted by a nagging feeling in the back of my great brain that I really had no earthly idea what I was talking about at all, and that my life led thus far was no more profound than a russet potato.

Then I got my first job in the real world where I now believe the bulk of my education actually began. I got to work with a band of truly decent caring folks who had barely finished high school, yet this educated idiot learned way more from them than from all my years in cloistered academia. In my first real job, I got to swim with sharks, get chased by a bear, perform my own music in front of thousands, step into North Korean territory, and most importantly, learn the meaning of true friendship.

And during law school, when my wife and I went hungry so that our first child could eat, I learned even more. In fact, I got to spend an entire generation happily and sometimes not so happily putting the needs of my wife and children ahead of my own self-gratification. I have no regrets. I learned how to love someone besides myself and still got to keep every precious experience.

And when I got to spend 22 years fighting tooth and nail with nothing more than my wits to give a second chance to thousands of poor souls who would otherwise have been crushed flat by a monolithic, heartless, politically motivated criminal justice system, I learned even more.  I got to keep those experiences as well.

And now, at 55 years of age, I get to start putting what little I have learned heretofore into some kind of perspective, a big picture, that I feel so fortunate to be able to begin painting, albeit by numbers, because as I have also come to learn, there is no truly original or profound work under the sun that I, as a human being, can up with. I can only mix from known colors as my mind’s eye sees fit. And those colors on my pallet come from an ocean of  real-world life-long learning in which I, for whatever set of reasons, have been somewhat successfully dog-paddling.

And for those of you who are on the beach, but have yet to take off your shoes and get your feet wet, please be advised that you have nothing to lose, but the pasty-white pallor that tells everyone a good  swim and a little sunshine wouldn't hurt you a bit!

J. Brandeis Sperandeo