Mr.
President: Bankers and Pro Athletes are Fundamentally
Different
12 February 2010By Dave Lindorff
President Barack Obama is a relative newbie to
Washington. He didn’t even complete one term in the
senate, and now he’s just finished his first year in
the White House, so it’s stunning to see how quickly
this one-time “community organizer” has lost his
moorings in the marbled halls of power in Washington.
In an interview reported in the Bloomberg news
service, Obama expresses no concern with the latest
huge bonuses that CEOs Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase
($17 million) and Lloyd Blankenfein of Goldman Sachs
(9 million) paid themselves, saying not only that they
are “savvy businessmen” and that “success and wealth”
are “part of the American system,” but equating them
with professional baseball players who “are making
more than that who don't get to the World Series
either.”
Talk about being out of it!
Mr. President, we average Americans aren’t stupid. We
know the difference between a banker and a ball
player. And we also know the difference between a guy
who rewards himself, and a player, who negotiates a
salary up front.
These greedy bankers like Dimon and Blankenfein are
not “savvy businessmen,” at least if we’re talking
about running a business and making a profit “by
earning it, the old fashioned way” as the old
Smith-Barney ad used to put it before that firm got
eaten up. They are savvy con-men who know how to scam
the government into bailing them out. And the money
they are paying themselves as bonuses for their talent
at extortion is taxpayer money, not profits from any
“savvy” business decisions.
Professional baseball players, in contrast, negotiate
contracts with owners, and are paid based upon what
those owners perceive as their ability to win games
and attract ticket-buying spectators. They may or may
not live up to the expectations of the owners who pay
them their huge salaries, but at least they are being
paid based upon an expectation that they will deliver
the goods.
Furthermore, when these bankers are paid fat bonuses,
what is happening is they are being “incentivized” to
engage in the most anti-social practices--namely
steering their financial institutions into extremely
risky investments that, as we have seen, have the
ability to crash an entire global economy. They don’t
care if they put their enterprises in fatal jeopardy,
they don’t care if they put the US or global economy
in jeopardy, they don’t care if millions of people
lose their jobs as a consequence of their actions. All
they care about is that they walk away with these fat,
self-determined bonuses.
If baseball players are paid fat salaries, and then
don’t deliver the goods, like the Phillies’ big hitter
Ryan Howard, who was virtually blanked in the last
World Series contest against the New York Yankees,
then nobody is hurt except the bitterly disappointed
hometown fans. I’ll admit that it was painful watching
a guy who’s getting $15 million just fan the ball over
and over at critical moments last fall, but nobody
lost a job over Ryan’s failure to connect. Okay, maybe
some people lost money on bets on the Phillies, but
that was their own doing. In fact, I’ll tell you what:
I felt sorry for Howard, swinging away over and over
at those Yankee pitches on national TV, and then
having to walk back to the dugout to Bronx cheers. The
fact that he had a fat paycheck didn’t make me any
less sympathetic.
Besides, we ordinary folks mostly don’t begrudge our
players their big salaries. We know they’re just
working stiffs who are making the most of some
excellent skills they developed as kids, so we wish
them well, and besides, we also know that they are
racking up those bucks while they can, because
athletes don’t have long work lives. Many end up
injured because they’ve pushed their bodies beyond the
limit, and they deserve their pay as compensation for
the aches and pains they will endure in middle and old
age.
It’s a different story entirely for guys like Dimon
and Blankenfein. These guys don’t burn out. They just
keep raking in the money. When they finally leave
their richly appointed CEO offices, they either move
to a position as chairman of the board, or they just
take all their ill-gotten gains and become
behind-the-scenes investors in giant private
investment firms. With bankers, it’s all about power,
and about figuring out ways to game the system in
order to suck as much money as possible out of the
rest of our pockets.
Ball players are just ball players. They’re not
seeking power, and they’re not trying to rob the rest
of us blind.
If the president doesn’t get the difference here, he
has truly lost his way.
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