At the end it is all about trust....
i.e. Do shareholders trust the management and R&D/technology of GTEM? Thanks to some of those posting here on IHub, I still do.
But hell! Wouldn't I love to get some news from our new CEO!
KK boys come on, say something!
Please!
1. The Hard Rain That's Falling on Capitalism
By BEN STEIN NYT January 29, 2007
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You may be a businessman or some high-degree thief,
They may call you doctor or they may call you chief
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
Bob Dylan,
"Gotta Serve Somebody"
A few evenings ago, my wife and I were standing in the
kitchen of our home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., feeding our
voracious hounds, when a song came on the radio. It goes, "If
only you believe in miracles, baby, so would I ... "
Suddenly a flood of thoughts came into my head. I put on my
swim trunks, and even though it was 42 degrees outside, I got
into my superheated pool and swam, looking up at the stars,
and this is what I thought:
My whole life is a miracle so far. I live in glorious houses
- tar-paper shacks by hedge fund standards, but plenty for
me. I have a great American-made car. Above all, I have the
most wonderful wife and the handsomest son on the planet.
My parents had a great, super life. They went from obscurity
and lower-middle-class status in the Great Depression to fame
and fortune in the postwar period. Their good fate was
attributable mostly to their genius and hard work, but also
to two culprits usually criticized in the media: President
Richard M. Nixon, who made my father famous and powerful, and
variable annuities, which made him and my mom well-to-do.
Thanks to Nixon's appointing Pop as chairman of the Council
of Economic Advisers and to TIAA-CREF selling Mom and Pop
those annuities, their latter decades were happy and comfy.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I am the honorary
spokesman for the National Retirement Planning Coalition, one
of whose many sponsors is the National Association for
Variable Annuities.)
All of the miracles of our lives are because of America and
our ancestors' lucky, brilliant decision to move here from
the desperation of Eastern Europe. All of it is thanks to the
brave men and women who fought and died and bled on World War
II battlefields like Anzio and Tarawa to keep us free, and to
the framers of the Constitution.
But it's also thanks to capitalism. I realized this as I swam
back and forth in my pool looking up at the stars and the
contrails. Under capitalism, my grandparents, my parents and
I could be paid the value of what we produced.
Their (our) income and position in life were (are) a function
of what value we could add, not of the status of poor
stateless Jews that we would have been in Europe.
Capitalism values people as individuals according to
contract, as we lawyers and economists learn, not according
to the status of our birth. This in itself is a miracle.
This miracle has been vibrant in the lives of hundreds of
millions of Americans who have gone from nothing to
something, thanks to the dynamics of capitalism. They have
seen their pay rise and they have been able to convert their
sweat and toil and creativity into capital by saving and
investing in the stock market and becoming capitalists
themselves - myself.
The system of capitalism is wide open. If you have an idea,
you can turn it into capital.
But, as I swam and watched the private jets' lights as they
glided right above my head into Palm Springs International
Airport, I had a chilling thought: in capitalism, the most
fundamental building block is trust.
When yeoman farmers sent their savings to banks in London and
Glasgow and Paris, they had to be able to count on it not
being stolen. That was what allowed capital to be accumulated
and deployed, and for the entire world economy to take off.
When I see what the top dogs at all too many corporations are
now doing to that trust, I feel queasy. Outrageous - yes,
obscene - pay. Greedy backdating of stock options, which in
my opinion is straight-up theft. Managers buying assets from
their trustors, the stockholders, at pennies on the dollar,
then forestalling competing bids with lockups and insane
breakup fees.
These misdeeds and many, many more are hammer blows at the
granite foundation of trust we built in the 1940s and '50s.
How long democratic capitalism can survive these blows before
it gives in and gives birth to revolution or to an out-and-
out aristocracy, I am not sure.
Empires come and go. Economic systems come and go. There is
no heavenly guarantee that capitalism will last forever as we
know it.
It's built on man's notion that he can trust his neighbor
with his money, and that if the neighbor misbehaves, the law
will chase him and catch him, and that the ladder of law has
no top and no bottom, that even the nobles get properly
handled (Bob Dylan again) once they have been caught.
If that trust disappears - if the system is no longer a
system for the ordinary citizen but only for the tough guys -
how much longer can the miracle last?
EACH day's newspaper, it seems, brings more tidings of
unrestrained selfishness and self-dealing and rafts of
powerful people saying it's good for us to be robbed if only
we truly understood the system.
The problem is, we're getting to understand it all too well.
And there is no one in Washington - absolutely no one - to
help.
