A Sickening Sense of Entitlement

The former CEO of Merrill Lynch spends $1.22 million of the corporation's money on decorating his office, then on his way out dishes out $3 to $4 billion of federal bailout money in bonuses to upper management--despite the fact they had led the firm to a $15 billion dollar loss and absorption by Bank of America. AIG gets $85 billion in bailout money and sends the bigwigs to a swanky California seaside resort a week later at a cost of $440,000 for the weekend. The crash of Citigroup would probably implode the stock market. It gets $45 billion of federal rescue money. The next thing you know, they are signing up for a $50 million corporate jet.

What is wrong with these people? It would never even occur to me to ask my employer to shell out money to decorate my office, particularly in dire times for the bottom line. In ten years I have asked for one paint job and to replace a ceiling tile discolored by a leak in the roof. I hesitate to use too many of the district's pens and markers. How about you? Don't you try to watch the company's pennies too? Why are these clowns so different? Simple. It's because they are not like you and me. Their lives may as well have been lived in a parallel universe compared to ours.

Most of the top management at firms like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, Morgan Stanley Chase and so forth come from a tiny sliver of society whose lives are as far out of the norm as the Tsar's was to his serfs. These are the children of millionaires and billionaires. They went to private boarding schools and got into Ivy League business schools as legacies. I know plenty of scholarship students who saw their type at prestigious schools. They had $1,000 a week clothing allowances, scarcely went to class and somehow muddled through with a minimum of effort. They stepped into mid-upper management right out of school based on the extensive social and business network of their fellow aristocrats. They were immediately admitted to the most exclusive clubs and associations in the Big Apple and other major financial centers.

These people have no clue what it is like to actually have to work hard, save money, land a job or keep one based on their merits. John Thain left Goldman Sachs with $300 million in stock. Merrill hired him at $83 million a year. He couldn't afford to spruce up his own office? It likely never crossed his mind. Everything is an entitlement to people like him. In one of life's supreme ironies, the wealthiest are the class most apt to get practically everything in life gratis. Connections, many decades of gaming the system to cater to their whims and address their every interest, and a casually sickening sense of entitlement make it all so common and all so easy. Warren Buffett, a self-made billionaire, is one who recognizes the incongruity for what it is, complaining of the injustice of his paying a lower tax rate than his secretary.

The current administration appears to be getting a little fed up with this state of affairs. Vice President Biden said he wanted to throw such people "in the brig." President Obama called such a lack of responsibility "shameful." It might just be that some much tighter regulations will be attached to the second half of the TARP bailout money, the half under Obama's control. There is talk of salary limits, requirements for using the money and paying it back, and so forth. The word is that much of it will go this time to help mortgage payers rather than profligate and ungrateful financial houses, anyway.

It all just goes to show that these scions of the domestic noble class cannot be trusted to take care of the national or even their own corporate interest without the most stringent regulation. This is the real "good ole boy" network writ large. They have led lives of incredible privilege, having everything handed to them. In their experience, the rest of the human race exists to provide for their every whim. They are, in short, spoiled brats. Giving them free reign has wrecked property values, retirement prospects, and the housing, stock and job markets for untold millions. Enough. Either we take control of them or they will have control of us. If it is handled right, the economic crisis caused by their overreach may prove a blessing if it shocks the public out of compliant accession to their steady accretion of power and gives Obama the political wherewithal to act.