Pigs at the trough

The market is down big again today, and I’m sitting here waiting to hear how many of my friends will be among the 600 people losing their jobs at Time this week. I know a few of the names already; they are young family men with a couple of kids who will now be out of work, cast-off from an industry that is contracting, sitting at home in a house they can’t afford and can’t sell, with depleted savings and little chance of finding a decent job in the near term.

Their fate is due primarily to the failures of the company’s management to adjust to changes in the market that have taken place over nearly a decade. Senior management has rewarded themselves with new, more powerful jobs and contracts.

Meanwhile, the government is pumping tens of billions more into AIG and the other weak sisters of Wall Street like they were force feeding ducks to make a cash pâté. In gratitude, the recipients sit on the dough rather than taking the risk of making loans to either businesses or consumers. That was some deal Paulson and Congress cut.

Fannie Mae reported a $29 billion loss today, wiping out all of their previously reported profits for the decade.

American Express is turning itself into a bank holding company so that it can find a place at the Federal feeding trough, because, God knows, they deserve some of that money, too, after lowering their decades-long conservative standards the past few years to grab some of the easy money in substandard credit.

The GM, Ford and Chrysler managements are threatening the loss of tens of thousands more jobs if they don’t get their share of the pork – billions more. They ended free health care for their white collar retirees this week and would do the same in a heartbeat for the union retirees if there weren’t contracts in place to prevent them. We spent most of the last 25-30 years blaming the unions for the auto industry’s problems, but every time there was a choice to be made management made the wrong one: wrong vehicles, wrong styling, too many brands, bad union contracts, and on and on.

The leaders of these companies made millions in undeserved bonuses, wrote books, became statesmen and retired to Arizona to play some golf. The people they led lost their jobs and their homes.

No plutocrat actually exploded like the Python man above, but they were all just so many pigs at the trough. Shame on them.