Big Mike: God’s Work Pays Handsomely

There’s a little space on Facebook that lets you show the world what your political affiliation is. Most people who actually take the trouble to fill it in put Independent. It’s a catch-all term meaning, Politics is way too complicated. I’d have to take the time to figure everything out but I won’t because I really just wanna watch Dancing with the Stars.

On my Facebook page, I’ve written the following: Overthrow Goldman Sachs.

That’s my political philosophy right now. You might think it’s glib or a throw-away line. It isn’t. Substitute another gargantuan, evil, bloated, greed-driven plutocracy from any other era and the philosophy still holds. President Eisenhower, for instance, named the boss of General Motors, the nation’s largest corporation at the time, to be his Secretary of Defense in 1953. In his confirmation hearings good old Charlie Wilson told senators who’d wondered if he might favor GM when looking to grant military contracts that he’d always believed “… what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

Had there been a Facebook in 1953 (and had I been alive) I would have written Overthrow GM.

Another example. Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park and the sainted figure from elementary school history class, actually ran a business empire out of his lab. He drove his paid army of inventors mercilessly, refusing to share profits and glory with those who developed machines for which he still enjoys the credit. He cheated Nikola Tesla out of a huge payout for improving Edison’s electricity generation plants. He OK’d the fatal electrocution of animals and even, in one case, a man to demonstrate the supposed superiority of his DC transmission system over AC. The author Gus Russo suggests that Edison’s employment of goons and arsonists to intimidate motion picture competitors in the East led to the migration of studio heads to California where they set up shops around Hollywood.

Had there been a Facebook in 1920 (and had I been alive) I’d have written Overthrow Edison.

I’d have written the same for JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and a host of other uber-wealthy thieves and bullies. I’m not anti-success. I want businesses to succeed. I’m all for people (especially me) making money. But, honestly, how much money do any of us need? Once you get past your first billion dollars, any more is just and annoyance and extra work for your accountants.

If I suddenly found myself hired for a job that paid a million dollars a year, I’d work for six months and then quit. I could do very well on a half million-dollar nest egg. Of course, that’s never going to happen. The people who make that kind of dough are made of different DNA than I am. I may be genetically related to the chimpanzee; they’re closer to the hyena.

Anyway, our friends at Goldman Sachs just released their most recent quarterly report. The company made $5 billion in the last quarter of 2009, the best showing in its history. This is the gang, by the way, that you and I bailed out with our tax dollars because its employees have been pissing investment money around on snake oil schemes since the dawn of the Age of Reagan. Perhaps as much as any other entity in this holy land, Goldman Sachs was responsible for the economic meltdown. Rather than throw its executives in jail, Presidents Bush and Obama chose to toss a few billion dollars its way to get it through its woes. I’ve yet to receive a personal word of thanks from chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

This is the guy, by the way, who last year said he was doing “god’s work.” Not even Charlie Wilson or JP Morgan was craven enough to say that.

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