Greed is Good! Pot is Bad!!

Why are we beating up on this guy for smoking some weed:



When we SHOULD be taking this guy out into the middle of Fifth Avenue at 57th Street and beating the fucking shit out him for giving away $165 million taxpayer bucks to a BUNCH OF FUCKING LOSERS who ran AIG into near bankruptcy last year and who are now being rewarded with OUR money for it:



How infinite is the American capacity for forgiveness of bald-faced greed and for lack of forgiveness of so-called moral failings which 90% of us have made?

We're beyond hypocrisy -- we live in the fucking Twilight Zone.

Fall of the House of Lehman

Disclosure: I worked at Lehman (variously named during my tenure: Shearson-American Express, Shearson-Lehman Brothers, Shearson-Lehman-Hutton and, just before I left, plain old Lehman Brothers) from December 1983 (just prior to Lehman being acquired by Shearson in the Spring of 1984) until January or February of 1992.

I was "supposed" to have been fully vested in their in-house pension fund after five years of continuous service. It remains to be seen if there's any pension fund left now that the house has collapsed.

We (by which I mean Shearson American Express) acquired Lehman in a fire sale brought about by internal fighting at the old firm. The place was not on the verge of collapse financially, but it was on the verge of collapse politically. Finally, they sold themselves to us. It was an uncomfortable marriage from the outset. It had actually been pushed on us by our corporate parent, the American Express Company, who wanted to RAPIDLY pump up piddling little Shearson into a world-class brokerage powerhouse. However, there was baggage.

One suitcase of which was and is Richard J. Fuld. He was the head of trading at Lehman at the time of the acquisition. Lehman was a fixed-income behemoth when we bought them.

As the years went by the Lehmanites exercised their power and eventually forced out all of the top equity people and replaced them with their own, hand-picked, asskissers. My department was eventually handed over to two people wholly incompetent to head Equity Trading. Eventually Mr. Fuld became co-chief executive and, finally, the sole chief executive of the firm.

One of the reasons I left the firm was because of the wholescale movement of funds (there's no other way to describe it) which occured every New Year's Day when the Lehman Brothers "secret partnerships" would, without notice, dip into the profits of each department of the firm and skim untold millions of dollars off the departmental P&L statements and onto the books of the SPs. These partnerships had, I guess, been "grandfathered" in as part of the deal during the acquistion in '84.

When I found out what was happening I asked one of the vice-treasurers what was going on with my departments (suddenly missing) $600,000. This was her response.

"Oh... that's Mr. Fuld's."

"Kiss my fucking ass" I thought. "Oh." I said.

I made up my mind, on the spot, to seek employment elsewhere. I did NOT want to have to sit in a witness box in a Chancery Courtroom in Delaware someday and answer questions posed by the shareholders of American Express as to where their profits were going.

Maybe the whole thing was legal. Maybe not. I don't know. I got out.

That was 16 years ago.

Do I blame Dick Fuld for the collapse of Lehman (again)? Nah. I remember something that Peter Cohen once said to me. "You don't run big corporations... they run you."

I'm sure nobody is more shell-shocked today at Lehman Brothers than Dick Fuld.

But I still want my piddling-assed pension.

You're Out of the Woods...

"Manhattan Skyline - New York City" copyright Ian Britton.
Date: Oct 10, 2001 2:11:54 PM

Those buildings over there on the left are the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan. The three "glass" plated ones are the anchor tenants there. The one on the left, closest to the camera, is the home of Merrill Lynch. To the right is the Oppenheimer Capital building, and the one behind Merrill Lynch, and slightly taller, is the American Express Building. I worked in that building from 1986 until 1992.

What you don't see is what used to be behind these buildings, across the West Side Highway. I refer of course to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. This picture was taken a month after they were destroyed by terrorists, from the New Jersey side of the Hudson.

I have a lot of memories of that area. Prior to 1986 my old firm (Lehman Brothers and before that, Shearson American Express), had it's block trading department on the 104th floor of the South Tower (the one that was hit 2nd and collapsed first). I worked there from 1983 to 1986, before we moved across the street to the (then) new AMEX building.

I still work in the city but I no longer live there. I left it, just as my friend Bev left San Francisco/Berkeley for Davis, a long time ago. Central New Jersey is my home now, and I love it here.

Occasionally, such as today, I return to the city on a Saturday to get a haircut (like Bev's husband Walt, who still drives 80 miles to see his dentist [see Bev's Blog for today HERE], I still go to NY to get my haircut... and to see my dentist) and to see a show (today it's "Howard Katz" starring Alfred Molina who played Doctor Ock, the villain in the LAST Spiderman movie) and then to kill some time at Bloomingdale's, looking at crap I can't afford to buy in order impress people I don't really like, and then to have dinner with a new friend of mine and his wife, out in the glorious outer boro of Queens. ("outer boro" NYese for "Mars.")

I used to think that I'd miss my old life in New York. The one where I made tons of money, ate in swell restaurants, wore really nice clothes, flew around to wherever I wanted and wreaked whatever havoc I thought I could get away with.

But I don't.

Oh, it had it's moments.

But at the end, they were only bad ones.

And after 9/11, there wasn't anything left there for me. It was like the terrorists had wiped out any last "fond" memories I might have had of the place.

Now, it's just a place. Not glamorous, not exciting, not fabulous. It's just New York.