Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 03, 2011

So, anyone hear about the BP execs?

Woooo – looks like Trudeau got rejected for a loan, huh?

This is also the timeline of Wall Street’s progress.

Must be talking about Immelt. GE paid no federal taxes last year, and now wants a 3.2 billion dollar tax credit, while cutting the benefits of the new hires and non-union workers, and doubling Immelts compensation.

He certainly is being paid obscenely well for no values.

Just be patient a little longer. When the revolution comes, they’ll all be hanging from the lamp posts.

The Seven Ages of Man?

I have a dusty black book somewhere that says something about envy being a deadly sin. We all choose our path at youth, some want a family and home in their 20s. Some own your family and home in their thirties. Choice, once the die is tossed——–

oh yes. and absolute power corrupts absolutely

lewreader: what does your dusty black book say about avarice?

You have to be pretty old, like me, to remember when your local banker was a valued and respected member of the community.

That’s still true of many small, locally-owned banks, sandfan — and there are many of those. Not as many as there used to be, of course; the mega-banks buy them up or squeeze them out…rather like Wal-Mart in the retail industry. As consumers we go along with it for the lower prices and other conveniences, but we give up in other ways at least as much as we get.

If we insisted on more of our institutions being smaller and run within the communities they benefit, I wonder whether many of the problems and inequities we see now would not exist.

Nothing new here. I’ve known for most of my life that the actual value-to-humanity of your job multiplied by your paycheck equals a constant (that is, the less the world needs your job, the more you seem to get paid for it). Back in my corporate days, I found that my wife (a nurse, who helps people return to health and normal activity after heart attacks and surgery) got paid about half what I received for developing telecom stuff to fill “needs” that most people didn’t notice they’d had. Meanwhile, the CEO, who reduced the company’s value by 99 percent (that is, took the share price from 70 dollars to 70 cents in about two years) walked away with a four million dollar bonus. Maybe the money is indeed “compensation” (as it’s called) for the knowledge that you chose not to do something useful with your life.

Also a picture of the evolution of our whole society.

A repeat, but more true than ever.

Rerun.

Like Bob Ress, I recognized this as a Trudeau repeat. Is he on sabatical or something? Or is Jane P. making him go shopping with her rather than working?

“Envy”? I think when a small, massively wealthy minority keeps amassing larger fortunes, in the process destroying upward mobility for most of us, and ruining the future of our children, envy is probably not the foremost emotion that comes up.

A friend of the family was a banker who bought a Japanese family’s assets when they were put in an Idaho concentration camp. After the war, he sold them back their property, for ONE DOLLAR! That was the moral courage bankers, and America, used to display- not today.

Even if it is a rerun, Wiley nails it, I believe. (You should hear the commencement speakers at the community college where my husband (a professor who doesn’t make a six-figure salary) works. As I said in an earlier post, I “worked” for a CEO and was bored to death.

The admonition that warns against envy DOES make sense, but only in this way:

Envy, which can also be called covetousness, if allowed to thrive, destroys the one who covets. Envy eats away at our good feeling and good sense. It destroys hope. It encourages us to believe that our worth is measured by what we own and control. It damages our ability to make good choices.

Envy’s “wrongness” does not justify unfair distribution of wealth. Envy does not hurt the one envied it hurts the one who envies.

Those who justify their avarice (thanks wdgnas for the reminder) by citing the “sin” of envy are both ignorant and posturing.

The alternative to envy is NOT “keeping one’s place.” I suppose that anger is one, Running, but I hope there is something more productive. Anger does motivate us to find a better one though.

WOW…….NAILED IT !!!

This is repeated because it’s a message that bears repeating, and unfortunately, it doesn’t apply only to banks.

@dtroutma: That is the moral courage THAT banker used to display.

clearly everyone is missing the point…you do something vary badly and are richly rewarded…if u do something well u will be punished for being a threat to the system

I wouldn’t call it envy. The concept that anyone could think they deserve to be paid a million dollars a year seems to me psychotic. It might be fun to have the money, but you seem to need the mental condition to achieve it. If you made that much you underpaid your workers or suppliers or overcharged your clients or customers, unless it was an honest gamble, in which case you would at least know you didn’t really deserve it.

Barbaratoo Wiley????? I think he writes that other strip!!!

From that old black book:

“Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou not away.”

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal: […] “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

Of course, my copy of that book is bound in red, not black. Some would no doubt find that telling.

Trudeau hit the nail on the head again. He’s great. Doesn’t say much for our values, does it?

This strip does bring out the greed (or Covetousness, a very different sin from Envy) that guides big bankers and financial CEOs. But the legend in panel 3 conveys more than that. It says the hopeful youth who succeeds in banking will progressively lose his sense of values.

President Obama is too idealistic or communitarian to understand that greed is the bankers’ polestar, although they claim to be skilled captains navigating “the free market.”

If Obama knew that General Electric paid zero taxes on its foreign earnings, and (thanks to a $1.5 billion tax credit) only 7% on its $14 billion net earnings, why did he appoint its CEO, Immelt to his advisory panel?

And why does he consider the head of JP Morgan, Dimon, “one of the smartest guys I know” when Dimon is fighting viciously to prevent regulation of the $600 trillion market in credit default swaps (“forcing these swaps onto the open [or regulated] market will weaken America,” says Dimon)?

If Obama manages to implement universal health care, that by itself will be enough to make his presidency historic. At the same time, if he (or his successor) once more has to rescue banks who dominate the international casinos because they know they are “too big to fail,” then Obama’s presidency will rank with Hoover’s.

Ps. @ fritzoid

Don’t forget the words of Jesus that bankers take especially to heart:

Those who have will be given more, till they have enough and to spare; and those who have not will forfeit even what they have.

It would be more helpful to quote from a modern translation.

Well, all the modern translations I’ve checked are just as clear except they use the word “money” rather than “mammon.”

But here’s Luke 6:34-35, English Standard Version (2001):

”And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount. ”But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.”

Regarding revolutions. Ask Obama’s former advisor David Axelrod. His great-grandfather was Leon Trotsky. On his father’s side, high level participants in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and communist roots dating back to the early days of the modern era communist movement (Marx and Engels) during the mid to late 19th century.

The Obama administration: doctrinaire Maxists and robber barons. The Bush administration: country club socialist Republicans and robber barons. Really, there is no difference between the parties. The supposed ideological differences are manufactured for public consumption and make for good political theatre, but little else.

Now if only Jon Voight could really channel George Washington into our living rooms. I’d love to hear a lecture about his participation in a revolution that a occurred between 1774 and 1783. Saratoga, Princeton, Trenton, Brandywine Creek, Valley Forge, Kings Mountain, Cowpens, Yorktown. Guildford Courthouse, Lexington, Concord and Ticonderoga. Remember these place names of battles? No, you (collective you, the reader) were taught nothing of your heritage and your God-given birthright as an American.

What’s the first question (only) asked by the first born man to God? What does God answer? And if God couldn’t (wouldn’t) answer, why do you think Washington should? Didn’t even have to blow off the dust. Wise and holy men have pondered this for centuries. They could not answer it either. But the esteemed Senator from——-

The new Golden Rule seems to be No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

Sad.

@phdtogo – FWIW – Apparently there are multiple David Axelrods around the world & the one who is the great great grandson of Leon Trotsky is a committed Zionist who managed to kill a Palestinian elderly couple in the 1990’s.

FYI – go beyond the first Google post … and don’t trust “news sources” that quote Glenn Beck.

I think we all go from hope to hypocrisy, not just bankers.

I think we all go from hope to hypocrisy, not just bankers.

If you’re in business, the one thing you have to have to succeed is – customers!

If you’re in a ‘consumer-oriented’ business, you want your customers to be able to buy your products, to consume them, and come back for more.

Henry Ford (even in his cynical racism) understood this, and started paying his workers enough to buy his cars; their enthusiasm spread and he sold more; the notion ‘went viral’ (in its own way in its time, in modern parlance. That’s also known as an ‘infectious meme’).

China (for example; any global enterprise is way past countries) doesn’t see a need for American workers to have income; it’s all been disconnected, and the planet is already too small for that kind of thinking.

Consumers in Bangladesh have different buying patterns, but if they were well-paid, they would be in that consumer game as well.

If all you’re making and selling is weapons, you want more wars to use them up, so the survivors will come back for more (and the ‘New, Improved!’ models). Sad, but makes sense. But if it’s H-Bombs, you just recertify that the steel is OK for another ten years, before it gets brittle…

The original quotation was:

“Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

There, doesn’t that feel better?