Showing posts with label Wall Street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wall Street. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Don't be like this rich guy

What is hell? It's dying knowing that after your death you'll be remembered as having been a bad person, if you're remembered at all. A bad person died five days ago and his name was Albert J. Dunlap, often called "Chainsaw Al."
He was famous for gutting companies and making them, in the short term, profitable in a way that made him beloved by Wall Street. If you're liked and admired by Wall Street, you're very probably not a good person. Not definitely; probably.
From Dunlap's obituary in the Washington Post:
“In all my years of reporting, I had never come across an executive as manipulative, ruthless, and destructive as Al Dunlap,” journalist John A. Byrne, author of the 1999 Dunlap biography “Chainsaw,” later wrote in Fast Company magazine. Mr. Dunlap, he added, “sucked the very life and soul out of companies and people. He stole dignity, purpose, and sense out of organizations and replaced those ideals with fear and intimidation.”
Imagine something like that being in your obituary!
Dunlap was eighty-one when he died and in his later years he contributed much of his fortune to Florida State University. Chances are they threw parties for him and said great things about him, never mentioning the countless lives he diminished if not ruined. 
Dunlap probably died at peace, thinking he was, overall, a good person. That's one definition of heaven.

Monday, October 3, 2011

The Wall Street Takeover

Like many losers, The Complete and Total Loser would like to see a societal upheaval of some sort. A zombie apocalypse, an alien invasion, an asteroid strike -- such things would be fine with him. He fantasizes that somehow the lack of skills he has to succeed in the world will morph into skills that will help him survive in a speculative fiction future. Really, though, he knows that he would be among the first on the zombie menu, the first to be vaporized by a spaceship's ray gun and the first to freeze and starve to death in a nuclear winter.
The Loser knows nothing will come of the current activity in Lower Manhattan. The rich are too rich and have their hooks in the politicians, who control the police and the military, and also control the media, which knows where its money comes from. As for bypassing the media with the Internet, nice idea but it won't happen. You need slick production values and, these days, a heart warming story line of some sort to hold anyone's attention for longer than a few weeks. Any changes in how we live now will occur in small, dull increments. Drat.