Jill

Headline today in the St Cloud Times: Petters resigns from post

( Article under here )

Basically, Tom Petters helped rebuild Fingerhut, one of the main employers here in town, after it collapsed. His company also owns Sun Country airlines which flies out of Minneapolis. He and his ilk are currently being investigated for defrauding their investors out of possibly more than $100 million.

The silver lining? Sun Country CEO Stan Gadek. No airline's bottom line is healthy right now, including Sun Country. Under normal circumstances, as they say in the article, the airline would take out a short term loan from its parent company during this slow period and repay it during the profitable period. They are unable to now because of the federal investigation. So what does Stan do? Does he layoff people? No. He does cut their pay in half for the rest of the year, though. But the thing he does that really stands out as excellent leadership in my mind is this: "Gadek said he will work without pay until the financial crisis is resolved."

Do you know of any other CEO working without pay as his/her company faces financial hardship? Do you think any of the executives at Washington Mutual or the Lehman Brothers or Ford or Chrysler are working without pay until their financial crisis is resolved? No.

I strongly believe that this is the right thing for them to do. I also think that Congress can take a cue from Mr. Gadek with regards to our current national financial crisis.

I am seriously worried about our economy.

I think it's crap that our government has to bail out financial institutions that were doing questionable ethics just to make a couple extra billion dollars. Where are those billions of dollars now, fuckers? I'll tell you where. They're in the fields of unowned new housing developments selling for tens of thousands of dollars less than they are worth with no buyers. My coworker lives in Arkansas and has had his home on the market for four years and can't sell it because the houses around him that have never been lived in are trying to sell for $60,000 less than his mortgage. And who does that affect? Not the corporate executives of the banks that have gone under. They can just wipe their hands clean and drive off in their favorite new sports car to the golf course to play a few rounds with the previous Enron executives.

I also think its crap that the government has to bail out the car companies. On the one hand, I think they should have got in gear themselves to trim expenses and unprofitable car lines long ago. They also should have realized that oil is not a permanent resource and should have diversified so that not all of their investments were based on it. On the other hand, the automobile industry is connected to so much of our economy, and Canada's economy, and Mexico's economy that if they go under, hundreds of thousands of people will be out of jobs across the continent. Not just the guys in the Ford work shirts, but the steel workers and engine builders in Ontario and the textile manufacturers in the south and the tire manufacturers in the east, and so on. That scares me more than anything. Hundreds of thousands of hard working American/Canadian/Mexican taxpayers suddenly out of work in cities whose main employers were probably related to the automobile industry.

And where is the government getting all of this money to bail out these companies? How many trillions of dollars is the government itself in debt for? People can boycott the Chinese Olympics, but it's Chinese dollars that pave the streets in their town.

If Ron Paul wasn't such a crazy fuck when it comes to human rights, I'd almost vote for him. But I won't make the same mistake I made in 2000 - no Nader vote, or equivalent, for me this year.