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DATE: 4 March 2009

 

TO: My Political E-Mail List

 

SUBJECT: My Mistake

While eating my lunch, I just heard on MSNBC part of an interview with the CEO of a major bank (which shall go nameless, although not penniless when taking tens of billions from the American taxpayer) in which he defended the huge salaries (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year) and even bigger bonuses (in the tens of millions of dollars a year) that the executives at big banks and financial institutions got, even as they were running them into the ground: He said that when you get up into the top 20 earners at one of these companies (not coincidentally including himself) they are the “top producers” and are worth that much to the company.

 

Hmm. Even if they hadn’t run their companies into the ground, and made the American taxpayers involuntary stakeholders (to keep the rest of our economy from collapsing), I thought the “top producers” at a bank were the countless employees like my late mom, a head teller. I guess she stayed late after work all those nights, making sure that all those balance sheets balanced literally to the penny, for nothing — or next to it, compared to what those guys at the top paid themselves in bonuses, out of their depositors’ and investors’ (and ultimately the taxpayers’) money.

 

My mistake.

 

I’m going to go lose my lunch now.

 

Doug

 

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