Fuld punched by anonymous hero-avenger

How predictable of Maureen Dowd to make light of physical violence and to draw attention to the notorious French Revolution. What would a modern-day Edmund Burke say about that (assuming anyone on this blog cares what Burke thought and wrote)?

Fuld and the bigs at AIG should be held to account. But what about the Clinton-Obama cronies at Fannie Mae (Johnson, Raines, et. al.) and their Democratic Congressional enablers like Barney Frank (whose lover was a Fannie Mae executive) and Chris Dodd?

Rod, you mentioned a while back that you were going to do some stuff on Saul Alinksky's "Rules for Radicals" and its influence on Obama. What happened?

How predictable of Maureen Dowd to commend physical violence and to draw light-hearted attention to the notorious French Revolution, the model for all the brutal and totalitarian movements and regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries. I wonder what a modern-day Edmund Burke would say about that (assuming anyone on this blog still cares what Burke wrote or thought)?

Yes, let's hold Fuld and the bigs at AIG accountable.

But what about the Clinton-Obama cronies at Fannie Mae (Raines, Johnson, et. al.) who got us into this mess? Or their Congressional Democrat enablers like Barney Frank (whose lover was a Fannie Mae exec.) and Chris Dodd (who got more campaign cash from Fannie Mae than anyone else) and Barack Obama (who got the second highest amount of campaign loot from these looters)?

BTW, Rod, weren't you going to do some stuff on Saul Alinksy ("Rules for Radicals") and his influence on the sleek and cleverly spoken junior Senator from Illinois? What happened?

Rod--with regard to Fuld, I think it would be of great help if the specific misdeeds of a company are elaborated on when posting articles such as this. I know what AIG has done. What I don't know is what the Lehman Bros. did that we should be outraged about. I'm not saying they didn't do anything--I'd just like to know what specific bad acts they've done--something more than "greed." You've done that with AIG.

Again, my understanding is that the housing crisis has been one of the biggest factors in this recession, namely the lack of oversight of Fannie and Freddie. *That* is problem which at its source begins in D.C., not Wall Street. Let's see some analysis of what the other folks actually did wrong before we rejoice in their CEOs getting decked.

Now you know why they buried Karl Marx in London.

It is not enough that this is an outrage; it should result in serious shaming in ways that actually hurt. This cannot continue. But it always has and apparently always will?

In the 80s (those 'boom years' that were 'fabulous' everywhere but where I lived...) the largest aerospace industry went belly up. I was in luxury retail at the time. Invited to did with the CEO after they had gone under, everyone losing their pensions, 401s, jobs, the works. Except of course the chief exec and his crew. They all got huge plundering escape cash bag golden paras__ts, properties, and of course had liquidated their stocks at peak which among other things was insider trading. He told me all this after he was into his McAllen Scotch .......deeply...in which case, when the waitress brought him a fresh double rock glass full of the 18 year, I took it and tossed in into his face and left.

Years later when I became a senior exec myself in my business, I learned things that were too illegal / immoral vile to believe. How, when the company was almost bought in a hostile takeover (again in those 'fabulous 80s that amnesiacs recall so lovingly) the rank and file employees were forbidden to sell their stock. The price was so high that at that point, although I had only been with the company for 3 years when this happened, my stock at that point ($66 a share) was valued enough to pay off the ENTIRE MORTGAGE on my new house. Of course I could not sell. And ultimately it became cheap stock again ($13). But again, years later when I became an inside looking out exec,...a decade later..... I learned (again over Scotches) that indeed; the SR. EXECUTIVES HAD SOLD their shares at that time, and made a fortune. That's when I decided to write again and leave corporate America.

Waterboard Fuld and the AIG execs.

Round the clock.

Daily.

Until the recession concludes.

On national television.

How many companies still even pay dividends anymore?

I often think of my grandfather when I look at the fluctuations in the stock market. He was lucky during the Depression because he had a job, and he believed in investing and was really self-made man. But his idea of investing -- which he passed along to my mother -- was to buy shares of a solid company, particularly local companies -- local banks and utilities -- that paid solid dividends, and hold them for 20, 30, 40 years. Sometimes he would reinvest the dividends, sometimes he would use the money to pay for things. But for him the whole point was to own a share of the company, and share in the profits through the dividends. Because he had lived through the Depression, he believed in having a diversified portfolio, and he certainly wasn't above selling a stock if the company looked shaky or wasn't paying a regular dividend. But to him, the dividends were the whole point. If he were alive today (and were still managing his money), I suspect he would be investing in bonds rather than stocks, because it's something regular and predicatable, the way stock dividends used to be for him.

Rawlins Gilliland, the inability for the rank and file to trade their shares while the execs cash out is depressingly common. Look at Enron at the start of this decade.

If you find yourself in that situation in the future consider purchasing protective puts as an insurance policy.

The problem is that like democracy, capitalism depends on good men and women to run it. It has been quite some time since we bothered to raise good men and women as the norm. Unfortunately, government supervision and better rules are inadequate substitutes for men and women of character.

oops- the first line of my last post should be "I knew Rod was going to be scolded for saying that Fuld should have been punched". The way I wrote it made it seem like it was Rod who got punched! :)

For starters, the story about the Lehman Bros. CEO being punched was making the rounds weeks ago. But anyone who has lived a charmed corporate life, feel free to raise you politically correct hand. But as for me, I would buy the guy who socked that lousy Fuld a steak dinner. And so would anyone who has been a victime of 80s and beyond corporate/wall street/ business class double standard; where the 'ruling class' gets theirs, and protects 'theirs' at the expense of those who got them there or worked for them or invested in their company. Only to be treated like 'suckers'. Sock it to them all.

Fuld should be KILLED. He was leveraged about 40 to 1, into derivatives and other airball schemes and deserves to die. He helped to ripoff pension funds and investors from all over the world. Many of these guys should be executed. Phil Gramm, Angelo Mozillo, Franklin Raines, etc., all of those scumbags should be put to death. They are thieves, pure and simple. They played fast and loose with our money and our lives, and now they are getting bailed out. Already the scum on Wall St. has 70 BILLION from the bailout earmarked for bonuses. They deserve our contempt and our hatred.

Dowd's Portraits of Greed idea is a good one. If the Times does these Portraits, they need to compare the public statements of these people with their exercise of stock options and other personal business transactions.

If they do that, then everyone will realize that most of these men knew without a shadow of a doubt that we were in the midst of a credit bubble. They say they didn't know, but it's just cover. The amount of evidence is just overwhelming: the president of the National Association of Mortgage Lenders selling his investment properties precisely at the peak of the housing bubble, the coporate officers of the homebuilders exercising stock options right before housing starts began to decline, Schwarzman taking the private-equity Blackstone Group public right before liquidity dried up, etc., etc.

I've been watching their public statements and private actions for years. Believe me, you don't know the half of it ... yet. Once all this comes out it will be decades before the reputation of the business sector recovers. It will take about that much time for the reputation of conservatives to recover as well.

You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

As for what to do with these men, I think we need to adopt a uniquely American approach, both modern and traditional. First, sue their *ss off in civil court. Leave them without a dime. Then, tar and feather them.

me: whaaa . . .?? What do boomers have to do with this? And where did I say that life here and now was heaven on earth? Whatever point you believe you have taken, it has nothing to do with anything I said. I advise you to put a paper bag over your head and take a few deep breaths. And then maybe you could apply yourself to answering my questions.

me--perhaps I was too brusque in my above response. It appears that I've said something you find highly offensive. Honestly, though, from your reaction I am quite unable to figure out what it was. Could you explain in a bit more detail?

sigaliris, I was being sarcastic, not upset. It just seems that every time anyone makes some sort of allusion to current problems or that there are some things which our fore bearers did better than we do and you feel the need to jump in to make sure we all know that the past was really just as crappy if not crappier than anything we are dealing with today. The simple fact is that people have been complaining about how much better things were back when for as long as there have been people to complain. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes they are wrong. But you seem to have a reflexive "you're wrong" response to any allusion to anything ever having been better than it is today.

sigaliris, and sorry I came off as offended. I'm not. No offense, but you sometimes come off like the mirror opposite of the old guy who responds to pretty much every comment with, "Oh, yeah, well when I was a kid we knew the meaning of respect and hard work." Conservatives aren't actually laboring under the delusion that life before 1965 was perfect and yearning to return to the good old days. But neither are we convinced that everyone was evil and stupid before the great enlightenment of the 60s either.

Thanks, me, I think I understand you now. That's actually pretty funny--I am the AntiCoot! Out there on the porch with my shotgun hollering "Hey you kids! Get over here and jump on my lawn, or else!"

My question was serious, not sarcastic, though that may not have been clear. Do you have in mind some financiers and business executives that you think of as "men of character"? (I'm not even bothering to say "women of character," because there are so few women at those rarefied levels--but if you can think of any, by all means name them too.) And is there a historic period that you would cite as exemplary of the kind of thing we should return to? Because I'm not seeing it.

I certainly don't think the 60s were a period of "great enlightenment." Remember, I was there. It was messed up. Just like today. Which kind of proves my point, rather than yours, I think. But you may be right that I think like this because I'm old. There was a time when I, too, thought, "Oh my gosh. Things have never been this bad. People need to shape up, pronto." But that was because I was young and hadn't lived through the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, etc. etc. After awhile, I realized that I'd been thinking things had never been this bad for quite some time now, and I began to think that maybe every solution bears within it the seeds of its own subversion, and that people don't change much. We try to keep the greed and duplicity down to a dull roar with various rules and penalties. Then greed and duplicity find a way around those penalties, and then public outrage inspires another set of rules. And so on.

Raising your children to be men and women of good character is a great endeavor, and parents like you may be the only thing standing in the way of cultural meltdown, from generation to generation. However, if they do grow up to be good people, that almost guarantees that they'll never be CEO of Lehman Brothers, so I'm not sure it's a solution in that sense.

"because there are so few women at those rarefied levels--but if you can think of any, by all means name them too.)"

Jamie Gorelick. Democrat. Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae, 1997-2003. Not content with enabling 9/11 by erecting walls between the CIA and FBI, she was also neck deep in the mortgage bailout mess, on the wrong side on every issue, and walked away with nearly as many millions as Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson. Immunized by her political leanings from any and all prosecution or even investigation (usually by being put on the panel of investigators herself).

Qwinn

I agree with Joe, assault is wrong...but I can see where the guy was coming from. A guy on the news said yesterday that we all had the opportunity to invest in AIG for years and chose not to, now the fed has forced us all to invest in it and that stinks. Then we find out that they are going on expensive vacations on the company dime (which means at least partly taxpayer funded) when the rest of the country is in a recession and well damn it where is the guy I wanna punch him now.......

Me, I was ready to post a, um, "me too" post in support of Sig's. Your exchange above forced me to reconsider how I would phrase it.

I've been "plugged in" to the business world since 1976. I've worked with and for larger companies and medium ones, and some that were nearly the stereotyped "mom and pop" ones, and I have to tell you, there just hasn't been any such thing as "good men and women" being raised up to leadership roles. The primary (and perhaps Sig might argue, the only) criterion was, is and ever shall be "success".

"Good guys finish last" is a cliche that I have personally seen proven, directly and precisely.

There is a "good old days" attribute that I have seen change for the worse, in my travels. We have moved from "a quality product at a fair price" to "the best deal no matter what." Just as one example, I have grown up hearing about and seeing for myself the added cost of owning an American car, and I have with only one exception purchased Toyota cars my entire car-owning life. It wasn't always that way. I used to hear stories of great American cars. They just don't make them any more, and haven't for a very long time. From that POV, it makes perfect sense that leasing a car has become the norm. Who wants to own a car with a lemon date, when one can just drive another one and let the next owner try to make lemonaid?

To bring it back to topic: Fuld got punched by a man who expected "the best deal no matter what" without understanding that someone always has to be the loser in that formula.

Your anger would be better directed at our dysfunctional government. It throws away far more money than these CEOs could ever hope to.

Your anger would be better directed at our dysfunctional government. It throws away far more money than these CEOs could ever hope to.

Don't worry, MB. We have a lot more where that came from, and justly so.

and sig, I would posit that your perception of things going downhill forever is probably the result of reality, not some misperception on your part. And if you talk to much older people about where they thought the world was going when they were younger or read what people wrote prior to say, mid-century (or at least the Great Depression), you'll find that this sentiment hasn't always been the prevailing one. People used to be excited about where we were going and optimistic about the well being of our world.

It's become such a cliche that I am always a bit surprised when I talk with people who have worked with kids and they all insist that things really have gotten worse over the course of their career. And they all tend to pick a few markers over the last 40 years at which they saw changes for the worse. (1995 being the last point at which they saw a marked change.) When I ask why they think this is, almost to a one (and I have had this conversation with dozens of people from younger people to people who have already retired) they come up with the same explanation: selfish parents who don't want to put in the really hard work of parenting. Even the helicopter parents are usually doing it because they are concerned about themselves and making sure their children are a good reflection of themselves.

I have said before, and I will continue to say it: as a whole we are doing a crappy job raising our kids and have been for a very long time.

One of our Founding Fathers (Adams, IIRC, could be wrong) stated that capitalism was the hope of mankind, but that without moral people involved in it, it would be its downfall. I'm all about making money, love people who do. They hire the rest of us. But when moral decisions go out the window in favor of the bottom line, the wheels fall off.

What red-blooded American doesn't want to punch out his boss? This guy saw his chance and he took it. He lived our dream.

Sounds like something on Daily Kos or DU. Real Christian, Rod.

How about we prosecute the guilty instead of assaulting them like leftist thugs? Hey, and while we're at it, why don't we punish the people truly responsible for this mess--the members of Congress enabling Fannie/Freddie and forcing people to give subprime loans to deadbeats? They've taken more from you and I than any of the pompous greed-goblins on Wall Street.

So, if I run into Barney Frank or Chris Dodd it's okay with you if I punch them in the face? I mean, they tend to put me in touch with my inner Adam Smith (and Hayek), so it should be alright, right? They cost us a lot more than Enron or Lehman Brothers, so we should all want to punch them in the face.

Fuld is an evil, self-serving guy who has lied for a living for a very long time. He owns, at last count, 5 multimillion dollar houses scattered across the country, including one that is on a private island in florida. Fuld is quite used to obtaining and maintaining power and money for his own well being, in the face of other equally narcissistic and capable greed driven freaks that work at Lehman on the hope that they, too, can one day ascend to the office of massive compensation coupled with utter lack of accountablility.
Fuld made over 500 million dollars helping to perpetuate the fraud that he helped create. Fuld knew what he was doing, and has planned for this 'day of reckoning' for a long time. He has kept every nickel he made perpuating this fraud, while making a gigantic public issue about his 'not taking his bonus this year'. Fuld has without doubt planned his own personal PR campaign to minimize the actual accountability he is due, by trying to appear that he, too, is a victim, and he, too, was caught completely unawares, and he, too, had NO IDEA that this was going to happen.
But it's a sham.

I am only curious about how much he paid to the 'very senior level' employees to confirm this false story. Fuld is simply trying to short circuit any notions that the real victims might have about inflicting actual physical damage on him, by trying to give them a fantasy story to say "That's right! Hell Yeah!" about.

Nobody punched Fuld. It's part of his effort to skate away scot free from a multi-year fraud that has paid him exhorbitantly while defrauding people all over the USA, and the planet.