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I was riding in a taxi the other day. The driver had the radio on. I don’t like to tell drivers who have their radios on to turn them off. First, if it’s not too loud, I figure it’s their home for 10-12 hours per day and they have the right to establish their own environment as much as possible. I used to drive a cab, briefly. It wasn’t much fun. A lot of waiting. A lot of aggravating. Bad money unless you work ungodly hours. So if they want to listen to their favorite station while they sit and honk and fester, I’m sympathetic. I also think that if you poke the wrong taxi driver, the guy could turn around and blow your head off. There’s that.

So we’re riding along and I realize there’s something strange on the radio. What is it? Could it be? Yep. It’s Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.” Hm, I think to myself. Did I go to sleep and wake up in December? I looked at my BlackBerry. Nope. It was indeed still mid-November. Bing concluded his crooning. There was a short pause. Then Mel Torme piped up to tell me that chestnuts were already roasting on an open fire. I rolled down the window. It was 62 degrees in New York that day. The Halal vendor at the corner of 53rd was dispensing chicken, but there wasn’t a chestnut in sight. Most people were walking around without coats. By the time I got to my destination, the Andrews Sisters were welcoming Santa Claus, who apparently was as confused as I was, and was coming to town a month and a half early.

Look, I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m concerned Christmas is not Ramadan, which lasts for a month, nor is it Lent, which takes a full 40 days to run its course. Even in the Middle Ages, the holiday extended no more than 12 days, taking into account all those lords a-leaping and toads a-creeping or whatever. A few years ago, I noticed that the holidays were starting immediately after Thanksgiving, on Black Friday — a shopping institution that premiered as a marketing concept in the mid-1960s. But mid-November? Why not right after Labor Day? Why not immediately post-Memorial Day? Why not have the season of shopping and giving last all year round?

I realize the retail sector wants this to be a great return to materialism after the last bummer years. But personally, I don’t want to see Santa and his minions until there’s a little snow on Rudolph’s nose, or hear about the first Noel until we’ve all had the time to kill a billion turkeys. Then the gloves can come off and the herald angels can start shoving all those bargains down our throats full throttle.

I’m in Logan Airport in Boston this morning. It’s 5:30 AM. On the radio coming here, the top news had something to do with Sarah Palin. I say the news, but it’s not news. It’s just Sarah Palin. On the radio, you can’t see her in her nice red sweatshirt. But it was still her. She was running through her memorized speech about the Middle East.

On the way through security, there were televisions in the ceiling. Barbara Walters was interviewing Sarah Palin. I couldn’t hear what she was talking about, but it was definitely her.

In the book/magazine/gum store, there she was again. Then there was a split screen of two other people who were talking about her. Then there she was again. She was talking about the economy. I’m not interested in what Sarah Palin has to say at this point about the economy. Perhaps that’s churlish of me, but there you are.

Now I’m having a bagel and coffee at the airport bar outside my gate. On the four television sets above the bar are Justin Timberlake, a commercial for Freedom Debt Relief (twice)… and Sarah Palin. This time I can see the red sweatshirt. On the airport Muzak is REM. They’re singing “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” I’m not making it up.

I know there are many, many people who want to see Sarah Palin. Even Oprah did and gave her a nice, friendly launch for her platform, too. It’s just that I’m not one of the people who does. She’s a very attractive person, no question about it. But she scares me. Perhaps “scares” is not the right word. Whenever I see her I get a stabbing feeling that the world is not of my making.

One day, I imagine that the Sarah Palin book tour will be over, and the machine will go back to promoting its next product.

I can’t wait.

It is my understanding that by the time we get to Web 4.0 everything we do will be up in the cloud. All our writing, our spreadsheets, our photos, our videos, all up in the cloud, wherever that is. I guess it will be like heaven. Nobody knows where that is, either, even those who believe in it.

You may be more evolved than I am on this subject, but that idea makes me a little bit nervous. Perhaps it’s all the DID YOU BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER TODAY warnings I’ve received during the course of my digital life. Maybe it’s just my innate mistrust of things I can’t actually put my hands on and see. Me, I like to have it all on these neat little hard drives they make now, with a terabyte of storage for a couple hundred bucks. Give me a brick over a cloud any day.  I know I’m in the minority, though. It’s all headed for the cloud and ain’t nothin’ we can do about it.

So this morning I got to the office, and there was no cloud. In fact, there was no internet. No web. No e-mail. No shared documents. No access to you guys. Nothing. Just what we used to call a dead terminal. We used to like our dead terminals. We wrote on them, played games on them, ran numbers on them. Now you might as well try to work with a loaf of bread. A computer not connected to the great giant brain stem is nothing more than a doorstop.

I called IT. They were going crazy. I called HR, because that’s what you do around here when something malfunctions. Ambrose, the head of the department, was beside himself. Seems that a PowerPoint presentation he had to make to senior management was up in the cloud, too, safe and sound, naturally, but he couldn’t get to it. “We’re going to have to go to Plan B,” he said with a foreboding so dire I didn’t dare ask him what Plan B was.

We all had coffee. Walked around a little. An hour or so passed, and then suddenly the cloud was back. Connectivity was restored. We were all functioning business people again. I called Ambrose, who was very relieved. I heard clicking in the background and the sound of a printer churning out a hard copy behind him. “What was it?” I asked him.

“Mouse ate through a cable in midtown,” he said.

“A mouse?” I said.

“Apparently,” he said. “Incredible, huh?”

Yep. Incredible. One mouse brought down the entire communications function of a gigantic corporation. Not a hacker. Not the end of the world, brought to you by the Mayans and Roland Emmerich. Just one… small… rodent.

You know what they say, I’m sure. The best laid plans of women and men often go a-mouse. Well, maybe they didn’t say it exactly like that. But I’m sticking to my brick for the foreseeable future. I figure it would take one hell of a mouse to put that out of commission.

China is growing triple digits as we politely chug along toward greater mediocrity. Sarah Palin is topping the charts.  Winter is coming in. My 401(k) is still under water. War in the east is widening. Bonuses will hit record highs on Wall Street this year. Do all these things bother me? Sure they do. But not as much as the guys who run the stores at the airport.

I don’t like to think of myself as a peevish person. But I do have peeves.  And my peeves define me.

You go to the airport store. There’s at least one in every terminal. They have every stupid magazine in the world, so you look at them for a while. Brad is turning to Jen because of Angelina. Kate is courageously putting her life back together after Jon screwed it up, or vice versa. Rob Pattinson… something. There’s medicine and some books and gum, lots of gum, very expensive gum, and stuffed animals and shot glasses and tee-shirts celebrating Burbank or St. Louis (the Gateway to America!) and lousy headphones and all that stuff like that there. And eventually you come up with something you didn’t really need, two magazines, some mints, a little ferret that rolls over and over on the ground when you turn it on, an oinking pig that changes direction when it bumps into a wall… and then you go to the checkout… and the person behind the counter says, “Did you find everything you wanted?” Which is fine. You could interpret it as a caring question. Like, they’re really worried that I might not have found that copy of Digital Coin Collector I was looking for. So I say “Yes, thanks.” And that’s when it happens.

“Water?” says the lady. “Some candy?”

Okay, I don’t know why this rubs me the wrong way so badly. But after years of traveling, during which this scenario developed and took shape and heft and national proportions, I’ve gotten really sick of it. Perhaps you can help me with it. It doesn’t seem so egregious, looking at it on the screen here. “Batteries?”

For a while, my tactic was simply to stare at the cashier with a bored expression and say nothing. Not no. Not yes. Just… nothing. As I would any comment not worthy of reply. They don’t get it, though. “Some magazines?” they will inquire if all I got was Tic Tacs. “Some Tic Tacs?” they will say when all I got was a magazine.

Lately, I’ve tried a small push-back, just to keep myself sane. “No thanks,” I’ll reply. “Why? Would YOU like some candy?”  Doesn’t stop them. Nothing does. They are indefatigable.

One time, at LAX, after paying $28.50 for a bunch of swill I didn’t really need (a copy of Car & Driver, a paperback I’d never read, a bottle of Coke Zero, some arcane gum whose packaging interested me), I got really peeved when the cashier asked me if I wanted a sports drink too. “Why do you guys all do this?” I asked the lady, perhaps a bit too sharply. She looked at me, very crestfallen, as if I had called attention to a physical defect over which she had no control. “We are required to,” was all she said. Afterwards, I felt bad. Why am I ragging on this poor employee who is only carrying out the instructions of her master?

Something too close to home, maybe, huh.

The effort to purchase Donald Trump’s aged 727 continues apace. I believe we now have close to $1000 in various currencies toward our goal of $300,000.  Most people have responded well to the idea. Some complained, however, that we gave free publicity to Mr. Trump in his campaign to reap a profit from the sale of his luxury liner. To this cavil I responded that, in my experience, it is generally the rich who get things for free. As an example, I mentioned the fact that, for some reason, only upscale grocery stores frequented by the wealthy offer free samples of tasty tidbits.  I was specifically thinking of a supermarket not far from where I used to live outside of New York City, in an town adjacent to my own called Scarsdale (close by where a famous diet doctor was heartlessly murdered by his elegant lover). This store offered what was in effect a sumptuous feast to anybody rich enough to shop there. You should have seen the Gucci and Louis Vuittons scarfing down that free brie.

At any rate, my thoughts on this important matter generated an interesting comment from John, who lives in Los Angeles. ”Bing,” he writes, “I get free tastings in Cosco all the time. Of course, they have been getting more and more upscale every day. Heck, they’re so upscale now they might refuse to renew my membership.  Better go shop while I can.”

John lives in the home of people who, as Groucho Marx once said about himself, don’t want to belong to any club that would have them as a member. Los Angeles is all about clubs you can and can’t get into, and those are only places people really want to go. That said, guys like John do have their clubs. In his case, it’s COSTCO, and he would be very sad if that establishment reviewed his status and decided they had grown too upscale for him. Imagine that! Ejected from COSTCO! At the very least that would mean losing access to what are among the best Polish hot dogs available outside a street stand. Not to mention the shame.

This made me consider for a moment which clubs I now belong to, and which still make sense for me. There aren’t that many. A few years ago, I belonged to a health club. I joined for three years, on a very special membership plan. Paid my first installment. Never went again. Not once. What I had to go through to get free of that commitment I won’t bore you with. Suffice it to say it’s sometimes very nice to have a column in a major financial publication. I did learn a lesson, though. I never set foot inside a health club anymore. I know I will join. And I know I will never go once I do. So I guess that was a valuable experience.

I also belonged, for a brief time, to a Beach and Tennis Club back in the day. It wasn’t that expensive. I don’t know why we did it. Maybe our friends who liked the place convinced us, I can’t remember. What I do recall is that once we were granted entry, after a hard-fought process, I never wanted to go again. The pool was unheated. The beach was full of rocks. My kids don’t play tennis. The best part of it was the snack bar. So after a while, we quit.

Not long ago, a professional friend asked if I would like to apply for membership to his Club. I had had lunch there several times. It was okay. You go into a big room filled mostly with guys who look like they’d rather be yachting. Lots of blue blazers and khaki pants. You fill out a little paper slip with checkmarks to tell the waiter what you’d like to eat, just like you do in a hospital. They bring you your food under little metal domes… also like a hospital. It’s very dark wood everyplace, and the seats have brass grommets. Over in a corner there was a guy who definitely could have been Ben Bernanke. For a while, I was seduced by the idea of belonging to such a Club. Then my wife said to me, “What are you going to do there?” I thought about that and realized that all I would probably do is eat lunch, wonder if I should play squash, and decide against it. In the end, I would join and once again, that objective achieved, decide I had no interest in going ever again.

Finally, a guy I know in show business tried to get me to join the Friar’s Club. The Friar’s Club is a place where comedians, producers, agents and other folks in the field go to hang with each other, play poker, feel like they would have known Frank Sinatra if he was still alive. The Rat Pack was very big at the Friars, as was the entire generation defined by Milton Berle. A lot of guys in the business still like to go there. It makes them feel like they belong to something important, something with a tradition. It’s hard to find that these days. I went there once for lunch. I had something that tasted a lot like Franco American spaghetti and meatballs in a room where at least half the guys were on oxygen. I kid you not.

So I guess I don’t really belong to any club, now that I come to think about it. Like John, I have a COSTCO card, but perhaps that doesn’t really count. I also belong to the club of people who rent from Avis. And when I fly American, I go to the Admiral’s Club. But what kind of buzz do you get from belong to a club anybody can join with a credit card? When I shop, I also can give my phone number and get a deal on certain store-brand items. I guess that’s a club, right? They call it one. But aside from those, I guess I’m not cut out to be a Club kind of guy. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go down to Michael’s for lunch. I like the place. The food is good, they always give me pretty much the same table, and I get to see the same faces every day. You come to appreciate that kind of thing after a while.

Today it is reported that Donald Trump, clearly not feeling the pinch of the times, is upgrading his mode of travel and putting his old 1968 private jet on the block. A nice tour of the facilities may be found here on this very site.

As jets go, it’s pretty standard. The interior looks like a huge stretch, with inverted glassware and the customary burnished wood everywhere you look. Lots of nice seating. Very comfy. Potential purchasers may wish to remove the enormous TRUMP that festoons the side, as well as the large pouf of ruddy, flaxen hair that has been surgically attached to the front dome, but beyond that it’s pretty much in walk-in condition. The price is reported to be between $4 and $8 million.

This doesn’t seem like a lot, frankly, to own a piece of history. I was reading a magazine called Malibu Times last weekend, don’t ask me why, and the smallest, most run-down cottage in that community is going for $4 million and a lot of places are $15 million and up. It’s clear there’s a lot of money around in this supposedly challenged economy. In a few months, employees of the top three bailed out banks, the ones that crawled out from under their TARPs,  will be receiving some $30 Billion with a B in Bonuses. That means $250,000 for each, if it was distributed equally, which it won’t be. Some will get BMWs. Others will receive half of Romania.

Nobody said that everybody was equal in our society, of course. I mean, you know, we’re all equal, but some are clearly more equal than others. That’s capitalism, God bless its tiny heart. But the gap, ladies and gentlemen, is getting to be wide enough to drive a revolution through. More than 10% unemployed. More than that under-employed. And Donald Trump is upgrading his jet. Something must be done!

I say all the readers of this site should consider getting together and purchasing the jet. No, no. Wait a minute. I’m not kidding. If they’re publicly asking for $4 million, I’ll bet we could get it for $3 million. With current financing being the way it is, putting the plane itself up as collateral we could probably finance, say 85% of it. That means coming up with less than half a million. We can do that.

Once we have the plane, we could all share it, or even use it for some good purpose. Take food to people who need it. Escort children on rides around scenic locations. Make a whistle stop to various communities who have never seen a private jet, even an old one like this, and instruct them in how successful people conduct themselves. It could be a traveling Museum of Affluence, teaching an important lesson to us all about… something.

Perhaps these are not the best ideas. Maybe you can do better. But certainly, a communal ownership of such an important artifact will not only provide an important social purpose, it may also prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. I mean, imagine if the Russians got ahold of it.

Let me get the ball rolling. I am personally ready to put up $250 toward this project. That’s all I can afford right now. My daughter is thinking of going to grad school and my son has decided that he doesn’t really like having a job he has to go to every day. Perhaps you can do better. If so, please do so. You know what they say. From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.

Next week marks the publication of my new paperback – How To Relax Without Getting The Axe. It’s a thorough rethinking and repositioning of my seminal work on executive life, Executricks, or How To Retire While You’re Still Working, published about six seconds before the recession hit over a year or so ago. The premise of that book was that he or she who perfects an executive lifestyle can emulate the existence of an affluent retiree. The basic concept of that book, and the suite of executive strategies contained therein, stands tall to this day, and those who acquired the work in hard cover have nothing to complain about. It was clear, however, when I contemplated the publication of the paperback this fall, that nobody at this juncture is thinking about retirement, affluent or otherwise. We’re all thinking about how to hang on to what we’ve got and protect our flanks from competitors, ambitious peers and colleagues and vicious McKinseyites now running down our hallways with silver hatchets.

So as much as I hate actual work, I sat down and rewrote the book for the somewhat despicable times in which we live. I believe it is very important that we all continue to live and work with distinction as true executives do, even if we are not executives, even if many executives now labor in somewhat reduced circumstances. The basic tools of executive life remain as solid and staunch as  they were in better times. People still delegate. They continue to operate from remote and inaccessible locations. They use/abuse the perks of their jobs. They work on the things they choose, for intense, brief bursts. They define their jobs more than you or I can do. They have more fun. And as we see from today’s news from the world of banking, they continue to live without shame and suck up huge bonuses if they can get them.

There is no reason why people like you and I cannot study these executricks, modifying them for the world we now live in, and soldier through the muck and mire to, as much as possible, relax without getting the axe. Others are doing it. We can, too. With, of course, the right guide at hand. It’s now available on Amazon both in print and in a Kindle edition for you e-readers. I discuss the book at some length today on Reuters, if you are interested.

And by the way. If in the next month or so you go to an airport bookstore and they do not have my book, please let me know about it. I’m not in a perfectly sanguine mood these days and there are some butts I’d like to kick if I get the slightest provocation. That’s a well-known executive skill too, you know.

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

I’ve been in a good mood all week about the announcement that Warren Buffett was investing $32 billion in Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the nation’s 2nd largest railroad. “From my standpoint, it’s a lot easier to make a $32 billion investment than 10 $3 billion investments,” Mr. Buffett said, and also noted, with his customary dry wit, that he was probably doing it because his dad never bought him a train set as a kid.

At first blush, this is so radically counter-intuitive a move that you just don’t know what to say about it.  A railroad? Really? Isn’t that hopelessly brick-and-mortar? And so 19th century? Why not an investment in this and that? High-tech wazoos or something? Synthetic brain cells, maybe? Online gadgetrons? There’s so much fascinating new stuff out there! But choo-choos? Seriously?

And then you think, wait… this is Warren Buffett we’re talking about. The guy who never invests in anything he doesn’t understand.  How much of what’s going on right now do YOU understand? Want somebody to explain the business model for the latest Silicon Alley start-up to you again? How about stem-cell research? Cloning? Alternative energy sources that may be commercialized one day?

We do know one thing. As the American economy improves, people are going to need to ship things from one end of the country to another. Rail is a cheaper way for people to do so than a lot of other methods. If you believe in our nation and its businesses, the move makes tremendous sense, even if it doesn’t adhere 100% to conventional wisdom.

How stupid has conventional wisdom been this year?

Let’s take a little quiz. If you had $30 billion and you had a choice where to put it, would you invest in…

• Railroads or Airlines?  (Railroads)
• Railroads or magazines? (Railroads)
• Railroads or newspapers? (Railroads)
• Railroad or automotive companies? (Railroads)
• Railroads or the latest social networking phenom? (Railroads!)
• Railroads or chicken? (Chicken)

In the latter case, you should probably know that I will always bet on chicken if given the opportunity. The ubiquity of chicken in our daily lives shows no signs of diminution. Wherever you turn around, somebody’s eating one.  You can bet that’s going to continue. So compared with most other investments available right now, other than insured triple tax free bonds, chicken is even better than railroads.

Other than that, you have to like the way Warren is thinking.  It says that you don’t have to be nuts or smoking something in order to put your money on the home team, which is not Wall Street — it’s America. It’s a bet FOR something, not against.

Railroads? I’m on board.

Reaction is mixed to the big new eBay advertising campaign, “Come to think of it — eBay.” Of course, reaction to anything is mixed these days. Anybody who does anything worth noting is stuck like a shish kebab by somebody who’s got a bone to pick with something or another.

Personally, I think it’s kinda good that eBay is going to gear up a huge ad campaign at all. It’s the first in 18 months for them, and signals further improvements for the environment.  On the other hand, you want brick-and-mortar stores to do well this holiday season. The more successful eBay is at marketing itself as a place you buy new stuff, the less shopping there may be at the Nordstroms, Wal-Marts and dollar discount stores this Xmas. So there’s that.

Then there’s the slogan itself. “Come to think of it — eBay.” Personally, I find myself wondering about it a little bit. Sure, it’s positive. It says, “Hey, I was trying to think of a place to go shopping. I should have thought of eBay first because you can pretty much find anything you want there.” It’s not altogether dissimilar to the famous, “Wow! I shoulda had a V-8!” campaign that sold millions of confused drinkers on the weird, salty, vegetable beverage that has always been slightly less than top of mind for thirsty consumers. As a slogan, it’s catchy. It makes you think a bit. Maybe too much?

Ah, there’s the rub. Does it make you think TOO much? As in, “I guess I haven’t thought about eBay because it’s pretty much the last place I’d go for holiday shopping,” or “Yeah, I’ll go on eBay right after I’ve tried everything else”? The truth is, I don’t know. I shop on eBay a lot. I think it’s reliable and fun. I’ve bought cameras, rugs, guitars, and other random stuff on it. I go back all the time. So maybe I’m not the right audience for a “come to think of it” strategy. I tend to like slogans that say, “You GOTTA love this!” as opposed to crafty end runs that try to embed themselves in one wrinkle of my gray matter.

I’m a sucker for slogans, of course, as I’m sure are you. Others that have remained with me over the years include:

• Take a puff — it’s springtime
• I’d rather fight than switch
• You can be sure — if it’s Westinghouse
• I want my MAYPO!
• Have you driven a Ford lately?
• I’m a Pepper
• Let Hertz put YOU in the driver’s seat
• Goodyear: Where the rubber meets the road
• Campbell’s Soup! It’s mmm-mmmm good!
• Beef: It’s what’s for dinner
• Alka-Seltzer: No matter what shape your stomach is in
• Pork: The other white meat
• Be all that you can be
• My doctor said Mylanta

We’ll see how this new one works out. I’ll just stash it in my vast vault of fatuous slogans and jingles and see if it stay in there, like the Buster Brown shoe jingle, or vaporizes like so many others have over the years.

What do you think? Will “Come to think of it — eBay” drive you like a hot, dry lemming to the ocean of objects on sale at that worthy destination? Come to think of it, time will tell.

Those who were enjoying a weekend of high sports drama or familial bliss might have missed another media obituary this past Sunday – David Carr’s persuasive au revoir to business journalism in the New York Times.

Carr cites several “technical reasons underlying the collapse — and that’s what it is — of business journalism.” It’s hard to argue with him, not to mention dangerous. You don’t want a guy like Carr mad at you. Still, you’ve got to hope he’s being a bit pessimistic in order to make his point, and that there’s still some life in the game if somebody can figure out a new way to do it.

Carr suggests that the beat itself has lost its mojo, because its subject — essentially the aggrandizement of Business and its practitioners — has disappeared. We’re not interested in big, glossy spreads of the superpeople who run the economy and its constituent parts.  We don’t want to see one more big piece on how great this or that financial wizard might be… because we’re not in the wizard business anymore.

Yet the need for stories that concern the making and spending of money have never been more important. The collapse of this discipline as a popular art form will spell disaster in the short and long term. Short term — we won’t know what’s really going on even more than usual. Long term — same, only bigger. So what should those who cover Business be writing about, and not? Here are some early suggestions:

NO: The Financial Sector. I’m bored with it. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be coverage. But about 80% of all stuff right now is about Wall Street, banks, financial institutions, rich farts getting bonuses, and so forth. Been there. Done that.  Unless a guy is running around in front of the stock exchange with his or her pants on fire, I’m not as interested as I should be anymore.

YES: People in other areas of enterprise who are making news in one way or another. There must be some other fields of endeavor where people make something other than decisions and big money. I mean… aren’t there?

NO: Prognostications from economists and security analysts. With the winnowing-away of huge swaths of reporters and editors, a lot of newspapers, magazines and websites now confine themselves almost exclusively to reporting on the reports of those whose job it is to issue reports. Sometimes these guys are right. Sometimes they’re wrong. They’re seldom very interesting to read about. But it fills space, particularly the more outlandish and opinionated ones.

YES: Bovine methane emissions and attempts to either reduce or monetize them.

NO: Davos. The Allen Conference. Any other story that features the usual stiffs wearing blue jeans and white water rafting. That includes Bono.

YES: Auto workers who are still employed. How science is making our lives better. Malls that are sinking into the swamps on which they were built. Stem-cell startups in weird locations. Businesses that are actually making money, instead of those that are grooming themselves for a VC run. You know… business.  Remember business?

NO: Global.

YES: Local.

NO: Dead stuff and why it’s dying.

YES: Having fun in Tokyo.

NO: What old guys are thinking.

YES: What young people are doing.

NO: Tech.

YES: Sex.

Business is about life, not death; about freedom, not prison; about struggle, not defeat. Sometimes when the story isn’t going your way, you have to change the story. What was first in importance is now last; what was last is suddenly first.

Maybe it’s time we all started looking at the front end of the elephant for a while. The view is different from up there.

For more than a year — almost two, if you count the gloomy prognostications of my friend Fred, which began in August of 2007 — we’ve had to listen to people telling us that the world was ending. For a while, it sure looked like it was. “You think THIS is bad,” they would say, “just wait until the Barfinger number explodes on the downside of the augmented credit facility situation!” At which point, you know, we would be treated to a horrific scenario in which nobody in the world would have a home anymore, or could get a loan ever again, or go to an office that was not in receivership.

A fair amount of this “wisdom” was promulgated by people who profit on the downfall of others. They were doing well, because they had bet on the collapse of all the hopes and dreams the others had worked for, and were excited that things might get even worse, making them even richer.

Other fustian was provided by the enormous cadre of Glass Half Emptys that populate our financial and corporate cosmos. They’re the guys with the lean and hungry look you see at budget time, and they’re simply constitutionally and emotionally wired to see the worst, always, to anticipate it and sort of enjoy it, in their own way, when it comes. When times are good, they still see the grim reaper lurking around every corner. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.  So their innate pessimism is validated every now and then, which makes them think it’s a rational, not spiritual posture.

And then there was the reality, which was bad enough to scare even the most positive among us. Like, when you read that banks — all banks — are no longer safe repositories of money, what’s a little investor to think? When big bald pufferfish are on cable 24/7/365 scaring the bejeesus out of you with their words as well as their faces, who are we to demur? Even when the economy began showing signs of life, as of course anyone who believes in this nation and its businesses knew it would, there were plenty of people who harshed our glow with talk of dead cats bouncing and false sunrises.

So yeah, we just went through a horrible spasm of End of Worlditis, like Europe did during the plague years, when being a professional bummer was a growth industry.  But now, I think, we can tell these harbingers of doom to get lost. In fact, let’s do it right now. I want you to go to the window and lean out and yell as loud as you can: “Get lost, harbingers of doom! Particularly on CNBC!”

The numbers are there. You read it in the morning papers. Gross Domestic Product expanded in the third quarter by 3.5%.  Housing and consumer spending have hit bottom. We have a government prepared to offer creative incentives and stimuli to keep the ball in the air. Other metrics are in line with a generally upbeat weather report. So let’s start remembering what a growing operating environment feels like again, and stop cringing and trembling and whining and moaning and reacting to every rustle in the bushes. Let’s start thinking, not emoting.  There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

The Case of the Northwest Pilots keeps getting funnier and funnier. Of course, it wouldn’t be one bit amusing if it had happened to me, but as Woody Allen once said, when I get a hangnail, it’s tragedy;  when you fall down the stairs, it’s comedy. Or maybe it wasn’t Woody Allen. Maybe it was Paul Allen. Or Herb. Sorry. Just thinking about those two in the cockpit doing… what was it they were doing?… makes my mind wander.

As you know, original speculation was that the pilots were taking their semi-approved staggered naps simultaneously. This made sense to me. Flying one of those big planes is almost as boring as running a business meeting. Once the thing is up in the air, you set the automatic controls, lean back and wait for it to be over. It’s my estimate that fully 63% of all business people have at one time or another copped a parcel of Z’s when the gears of the machine were grinding. Why shouldn’t pilots? Okay, I can think of a lot of reasons why not and I’m sure you can too. But the idea that these guys slept through their wake up alarm and allowed their enormous vehicle to drift over the landing zone didn’t seem far-fetched.

Yesterday I heard that the somnolence theory has now been supplanted by the story that the two were cruising the web and lost track of the time. This summons up a couple of images to my mind. I’m thinking they weren’t just Googling. I’m willing to bet that if they were online, it was some kind of World of Warcraft thing. As good as YouTube or Wikipedia might be, you don’t lose yourself in it the way you do when a Orc is about to hammer in your brain pan and send you back sixteen levels. There they are, 37,000 feet up, a planeful of people behind them, whacking away at their joysticks in some digital dungeon? I can buy that. In the days I was addicted to DOOM, I used to spend the entire night blasting away at hideous monsters, so in the zone that I didn’t realize that the sun had risen until my wife came in to tell me it was time to go to work. So maybe that’s what they were doing when they were out of touch for 78 minutes. As an explanation, it still seems pretty lame to me. Maybe one was sleeping and the other was earning experience points as a Zarkon warrior or something like that.

Anyway you slice it, though, it points to a breakdown in the system somewhere. Now it turns out it wasn’t just the snoozy (boozy?) gamer/pilot dudes who are in hot water. The air traffic controllers and the FAA, which is supposed to regulate such things, were egregiously late in notifying the military of the wayward Northwest flight to Minneapolis. The information that a flight has essentially gone out of the blue and into the black is supposed to be conveyed in about 10 minutes time. It took at least 40 minutes for the news to be conveyed upward to the guys who monitor our skies. Doesn’t generate a whole lot of confidence, does it?

All of this is capped off by the news that the pilot’s union is unhappy with the fact that the FAA has revoked the licenses of the pilots in question and is now preparing a response. I’ll be interested to see it.

Today is This Is It Day in Los Angeles. All the theaters at the swank new multiplex downtown are devoted to the premiere of Michael Jackson’s new posthumous movie, a lovely, gift-wrapped sausage made up of everything they could find on the floor after the Grade A beef left the factory. A host of the dead man’s stuff is also going to be sold today, including gloves, jackets, psychotically reverent oil paintings of the royal duke himself, gloves, vehicles, and gloves. Sixty percent of all Fandango activity is now said to be dedicated to fans going online for tickets to the picture, which will run in London for almost as long as he was supposed to.

His management company AEG, as you recall, scheduled that never-ending gig in a vain attempt to recoup some of the money they had sunk into the King of Pop. I will always believe that it was the pressure of knowing he had to go out and do that job that drove the sleepless, terrified entertainer to what was, in effect, an assisted suicide. But AEG has to be happy now. You can almost feel the money gushing into their pockets.  And given the state of his debt load, I believe it’s quite possible that his handlers will get to keep it all, with a little left over on the side for the kids, for optical reasons.

Yes, when This Is It and associated projects are through, it’s quite clear that Michael Jackson will take his place as the most successful dead man of all time, leaving aside a number of religious figures who continue to generate significant revenue each year for their associated organizations.

Prior holders of the crown include:

• Elvis, who continues to attain in death the kind of annual financial performance that often eluded him in life;
• Lenin, whose embalmed body was on display in the Kremlin for decades;
• Shakespeare, who died so long ago that, while his plays have produced better ROI than most hedge funds, unfortunately makes nothing for himself and his heirs.

Alive, Michael Jackson was a problem for the guys at AEG. Dead? He’s the best investment in the history of the business. You can almost hear them thinking, “Hey! Why didn’t we think of this sooner?” Who knows? Perhaps they did.

I got a Universal Remote. Have any of you ever had one that worked? This one didn’t. Doesn’t. Won’t.

I’ve had them in the past. But sometimes when you have an object that disappoints you, you try again a few years later. Like, a while back I tried to set up a wireless network in my apartment. It was a PC thing, with routers and PCMCIA cards and stuff like that. Didn’t work at all. Sputtered a lot. Died at inopportune times. I hated it. More recently, I got a Mac with built in Airporter. Got an Airport Extreme to go along with it. Bingo. Wireless up the wazoo. Love it.

Some things, however, never change. I think I’ve already told you about my hate/hate relationship with Bluetooth. From the fact that my ear was not built to take the little dinglething in stride to the obnoxious anti-linking situation with whatever cell phone I seem to possess… my tooth will never be blue. I’ve tried three times. Three strikes is out in any game I care about.

Now there’s this Universal Remote here. It’s supposed to tie together my little sound system with my DVD player and cable box. I am supposed to press B, which will turn on all my components, then press CBL for cable, DVD for DVD (duh) and AMP for the sound system.  Simple? No question. I put my other remotes in a drawer with tremendous satisfaction, put batteries in the Universal Remote and voila. Ready to roll.

Except it wasn’t. I didn’t. Roll, I mean. I pressed B. Everything went on. The TV said “Video 2 NO SIGNAL” and there was no picture. The sound was fine. The cable box was on. But I think a picture is part of the whole deal, don’t you? I pressed some other buttons. Now the sound went out too.

So I went to the cabinet and got out my poor, disrespected TV remote. Cycled through the Inputs. Found the right HD button to restore the picture. Then I took out the remote associated with my sound system and got that up and running again, too. Pretty soon it was all back to normal. Then I put my new Universal Remote into a drawer. I’ll take it out in a couple of months and see if I’m smart enough to get it working then. Perhaps I won’t have a cocktail beforehand, like I did last night.

You want to be sharp when you’re operating heavy machinery.

So it’s finally coming down. The pay czar has studied the situation. Thought about it. And declared his intention to send a message. Pay for the top 175 executives at the financial institutions that took a bailout are to have their base pay cut by as much as 90%, and total comp by 50%.  Seven companies will be affected. Of course, we don’t know precisely which executives are on the hook, but I think we can draw our own conclusions.

America has been waiting for quite some time to see some green blood in the water, and this move only begins to address the underlying rage our nation feels at Wall Street and its minions. Still, you have to feel a twinge of empathy for these 175 individuals who are the first to shoulder the blame for all that our financial institutions have done to screw up our economy. Thousands were involved, of course, but these 175 must stand in the forefront of their cadre, trembling, as their golden parachutes are folded up and put away, their ceremonial swords broken over the knee of the government.

Think of the sacrifices that these few, unlucky individuals will have to bear! Here are just a few:

• Significant and immediate cutbacks in philanthropic activity.
• The new yacht will have to be canceled. Last year’s model will have to do.
• The private jet will have to go. At best a Netjet time share will fill in the gap, but it’s quite possible that from here on in some of these folks will have to fly commercial. That’s huge.
• That third home in East Hampton or Malibu will be put on the block; some executives will even be down to just one primary residence.
• No Easter break in St. Bart’s for the entire extended family, and the compound in Martha’s Vineyard will have to be leased out for the entire month of August.
• Taxicabs instead of car and driver. While the occasional limo may be a possibility, waiting time is out of the question.
• Some club memberships will have to be winnowed out, leaving perhaps only one golf and one beach and tennis club for the foreseeable future.
• Support payments to former spouses will have to be renegotiated.

Obviously, dire times call for dire measures. Whether the radical actions contemplated by the Federal Government are warranted, or are too much, too soon, has yet to be ascertained.

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

Those who wonder why the President took a hectoring tone last night with the guys on Wall Street who run the banks that run the banks that manipulate the markets that shape the economy need look no further, I think, than the story sent in by Laura Cosino in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s an inspiring tale — if you’re an accountant. It demonstrates just how creative and innovative that profession can be, particularly when its practitioners work for a big institution that makes its own rules. Laura writes:

“I actually let my bank know how much I appreciate Over-draft protection! I got a letter in the mail stating that I was $374 over-drawn and they would like me to do something immediately. I was confused by this because I didn’t remember making any purchases. It turned out that I had overdrafted my account by $1.36 through a subtraction error I had made in my checkbook. I called the bank to tell them there was a mistake! I had only overdrafted one time, but yet they had charged me 7 overdraft fees. I told them that I had gone through my check register multiple times and no matter how I did it, I was only short on one transaction. They informed me that they don’t do their accounting the same way as I do, they don’t deduct the transaction the same day that it is made. The bank likes to put everything in “pending” deduct it from my balance, then pick the largest transactions and let them clear first (they thought larger transactions may be more important-paying a credit card bill) and after they do that…they leave all of your other small transactions for the end. They then pay those transactions, and charge you a fee for every single one. I was totally confused by this, I don’t remember my high school accounting class teaching to balance your check book this way. Needless to say, they don’t refund any charges no matter the reason…and according to the rep on the phone, there is no one higher at Fifth Third Bank than him.”

Too bad, Laura! You’re out of luck. We all are, actually, if the audience at that fund-raiser gets its secret druthers. They might have paid $30,000 to attend their public flogging, but I would venture to say that not one person in that room is willing to submit to the lesson that was articulated. And when Finance is allowed to implement its own ideas of regulation and control we can all look forward to being caught in the overdraft.

All it would take would be a little legislation.

How about this. Let’s have a federal bill that states that any bank that took a bailout loan and hasn’t paid it back yet isn’t permitted to foreclose on anybody’s primary residence. In addition, bonuses for senior officers at lending institutions will be reduced by a factor tied to its foreclosure record for that year. High rate of foreclosures would mean low bonuses.  At the same time, institutions that refrain from foreclosing on people’s homes would be granted tax abatements on their profits indexed to the amount they are putting at risk by allowing homeowners to renegotiate their loans and remain in their residences.

Of course, passage of such a law would also involve responsibilities on the part of defaulting borrowers. For instance, no resident would be permitted to simply walk away from a house simply because its market value had fallen 10% below the size of its mortgage. That seems to be happening all over the place right now. That’s not good. Lenders have rights, too.

In short, a  spirit of enlightened responsibility and mutually assured destruction must be re-established on both sides of the equation — lender and borrower alike. They say you can’t legislate these things, but they’re usually wrong. Just about everything can be. They say that short-term, mechanistic fixes aren’t organic to the system and can’t be sustained. Really? Tell that to the guy I just gave five bucks on the way to work. He’s having breakfast on that right now. Not to mention all the banks that just reported record profits, who got their own handouts not long ago.

The situation as it exists is dire. People are out on the street. Banks own a bunch of worthless real estate that is flooding the market, just sitting there. Stupid banks made stupid deals with hopeful people. Together, they made their bed. Now they should be forced to lie in it, side by side, until this long night is over.

Any lawyers out there are invited to improve on the basic structure of this concept.  And any politician who wishes should feel free to appropriate it and take credit for it. Isn’t that what you people do?

1. Say “Happy Boss’s Day” to your boss. Without irony, if possible.
2. If you have a problem on the job, do not bring it to your boss on this day without also carrying with you an appropriate solution. This will be a nice change for some of you.
3. If there is an issue that you know has been bothering him, do not bring it up. In fact, don’t talk to him about anything substantive at all. And if you know he doesn’t really like you very much, don’t talk to him.
4. Drop by and sit in her guest chair for a while without asking her for a single darn thing. Like, for just this one day make believe that there’s nothing you want from her except the pleasure of her company. Tomorrow will be here soon enough.
5. If you and Forbisher are at odds again, do not descend on your boss’s office asking for adjudication. Work it out between you, you big babies.
6. If you are the boss of a boss, do not pick this day to torture him or her about his or her expense report. No boss should do anything to any other boss today that makes them feel less like a boss and more like a piece of phlegm in the lungs of the corporation.
7. If your boss is on the road, call him and wish him many happy returns.
8. Why not ask him out for a drink after work? If you usually do that anyway, have an extra one “For the boss.” You pick it up. Do not put it on your company card, if you have one, or have trouble finding your wallet if you do not.
9. If his or her door is closed, slip a little card saying “I love you” under it, unless that violates local sexual harassment policies. If it does, change it to read, “I like you very much.”
10. Come on! Give him a hug! Doesn’t that feel good? No? Well, it’s not supposed to!

A few months ago, I had dinner with a friend of mine who’s in the magazine business. “Business Week is for sale,” I said. “You guys want to buy it?”

“I don’t think we need any more liabilities,” he replied.

Of course, I knew where he was coming from, and if you saw things the way he saw them, the way most people in that business, like so many others, are/were seeing things these days you’d be in touch with the dark side, too. Everything is dying. Digital media is eating what little lunch we all have left. Woe is us. Books, newspapers, television, magazines, radio, you name it, it’s all doomed, nothing will remain but little screens where we all download our pre-arranged dollop of opinionated pablum every ninety seconds or so.

But hold on a minute. It turns out that fewer magazines folded in 2009 than in the two years prior. While USA Today is way down right now, the Wall Street Journal has crept up to take its place as the most circulated paper in America. And the New York Times has decided that it’s not going to unload The Boston Globe after all. Television networks — save one — have had the best fall launch in quite some time. Radio’s not going anywhere, the hype about satellite notwithstanding. And now here comes Bloomberg with what sure looks like a vote of confidence in little old Business Week, which for a while looked like the guy at the party who nobody wanted to dance with. 

Winners and losers. Losers and winners. The only thing that separates the two may lie in how they see the water level. 

So congratulations, Bloomberg dudes, for seeing the whole half-full thing.

Fall is just busting out all over. You can hardly stand up safely the good news is just flying around so fast.

The Dow, for instance, is about to go over 10,000 again. Won’t that be nice? Sure. It shows that no matter what’s really going on underneath our economic system, investors want to make money and think they can still do so by buying and selling stocks and sometimes even bonds. Yay for those cockeyed optimists! They make the world go ’round!

Oil has hit a high for the year. You might think this is bad, and it is, if you have to buy gasoline every day. But it’s good as a leading indicator of where we might be going. It means that really smart guys in Saudi Arabia and Texas have decided that the spending power of your average American citizen is improving, and so they can gouge us a little bit more every day until we stop buying so much gasoline again or cars that eat it up so fast.  They have confidence that we’re all going to be able to suck it up and get to that magic $5 per gallon price they’re definitely pumping for, so to speak.

And in perhaps the most stunning proof of economic life, Wall Street is set to pay out its biggest payday ever — about $140 billion to the guys who broke the machine and then got the assignment to fix it. What’s that?  Don’t seem fair? Nonsense. JPMorgan profits are up sixfold! A whole bunch of others can’t wait to pay off their TARP money! Reports give several reasons for the big payday — melting credit markets, an improving stock market, lingering positive vibes from the bailouts… but we know it’s not that, don’t we? We know that Wall Street is paying itself $140 billion… because it can! That’s why!

All hope for ridiculous future wealth for each of us resides with the rampant, uncontrolled, irrational exercise of organized greed that drives the markets. It looks like we’re well on the way to total recovery in more ways than one, ladies and gentlemen.