What were they thinking? I’m not really surprised when the managers of large corporations do something dishonest. But I’m surprised when they do dumb things—against their own self-interest.
During the past few months, we have been learning more and more about the mortgage scandal. And major corporations have gone bankrupt, gotten billions of dollars in protection from the federal government, or been forced into mergers.
Across the country, people bought homes with mortgages they couldn’t afford. Then the day of reckoning came and they couldn’t make the monthly mortgage payments.
Maybe some of them honestly didn’t know this was going to happen, but how could the heads of major corporations be so ignorant? Didn’t they have many more options for staying out of trouble? Were the transactions so complicated they couldn’t figure out the buck was going to stop with them? Didn’t they have legal staffs that could explain these “paper” transactions? (If your attorney can’t explain a document to you in clear English, don’t sign it.)
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There’s an old saying, “Only a Gooney Bird fouls his own nest.” Crapping on consumers is one thing, but crapping on your own business… Even if the government bails you out, your business will never be the same.
Hadn’t these CEOs ever heard of hedging their bets, or not putting all their eggs in one basket? Or chickens coming home to roost?
The dirtiest word in the English language is “deregulation.” After the stock market crash of 1929, society soon developed a pretty good idea of the people we couldn’t trust. Regulations were passed to control these people.
Then 25 or 30 years ago, we started hearing more and more about deregulation. So we deregulated and deregulated until…
When I was a boy on the farm, I had a pet rooster. One night, a weasel found a way to get into the chicken house, and killed my pet rooster. I was upset, but these things happen. But we never left open the chicken house door, and invited weasels to live there.
Neither political party is blameless, but it isn’t hard to figure out which political party is most responsible for the mess the United States is in. Here’s a hint: The stock market crashed in 1929 while Herbert Hoover was president. He was soundly defeated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.
After that, Hoover was about as welcome at the Republican Convention every four years as George W. Bush was at the convention in 2008.
Is Barack Obama an elitist? Don’t know, don’t care. If he is, then so was John F. Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
We had better elect the best and the brightest. If you had to go to the hospital for brain surgery, would you prefer an elitist or a “good old boy?”
Obama is a graduate of Harvard Law School. I’m impressed. If I had applied to Harvard, the next week I would have received a letter. “We received your application…You’re joking, right?”
Some of us went to law schools that got us ready for state bar exams. A select few got ready for much better things.
Al Crabb is a former newspaper editor and reporter who lives in Charlottesville.