Tuesday, September 23, 2008

A Simple Request

Now that I am one of a couple hundred million owners of some fantastically bad debt, as a newly minted captain of industry I would like to request that news organizations no longer pay any attention to the outdated concept of "shareholder". You see, for some time now corporations have cited shareholder pressure as the primary reason to send jobs overseas, cook the books, package bad mortgages with good ones into horribly complex securities, and so on and so forth. "The market demands it!!!" ...or so I heard.

As the proud owner of one of the good mortgages that provided value for whatever s#$tpile security it was packaged up in, and as the part-owner of large international companies like AIG, I no longer want to see stock tickers on my TV. I no longer want to pretend that the Dow Jones Industrial Average means anything to anyone.

I am your shareholder now.

Spotty has already mentioned that folks like Fishsticks are running around pointing fingers in any direction other than directly at that big pink elephant in the middle of the room. Your reading assignment for the day is The New Industrial State, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Folks, let's not kid ourselves; from this point on, we are all going to agree that we live in a planned economy bought, secured, and paid for with your tax dollars. It is for you that the wheels of industry turn, not the shareholders. When the market got a little too free, they came running to you. Don't ever forget that.

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