thinkprogress.org — The Times of London reports that just three days before going bankrupt, the board of Wall Street financial giant Lehman Brothers “signed off on more than $100m (£59m) in payouts to five top executives.”
Oct 14, 2008 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountOct 15, 2008
We've built this society up to fail. We've put our leaders outside our own reach. We've allowed our businesses to profit off of shortcuts at all costs (environmental, social). It is an overextended mess. Look at our trucking system, look at our food production. Good practices are discouraged in favor of PROFITS. And people know this! But they honestly don't give a s**t! Mostly because it's so f**king easy. Big farms produce tasteless, oversized, modified, pesticide-covered crap. Most of them, if the small farmer took over, are not salvageable for decades because of the chemicals. Companies pay huge money to hijack our culture. Cultural value is not built up around things that mean anything on a human level. And people will defend this to the death, and I truly wonder why. Advertisements make me sick. If a product is worth buying, word of mouth can easily control demand, and limit this idiotic global demand. Being able to get things so easily all over the globe sure is convenient, but it takes the value out of pretty much everything.You want to do something about it? Fight back for our local farms. Come up with solutions to long-distance distribution. Learn about our options for our banking systems, and money. Move closer to work. Identify the ways in which you pay money to companies who do things you do not condone. Stop buying their products.We've ALLOWED the system to be rigged. Blame yourself as much as anyone else.
peppermintpigOct 15, 2008
I thought so.Now hopefully people who thought the bailout was a good idea can follow a sequence of events and deduce a set of principles with which to avoid this in the future.
stevetsOct 15, 2008
They never received the payments because the company declared bankruptcy the following day. There goes thinkprogress again, sensationalizing headlines just like the MSM.
markillianOct 15, 2008
I totally agree! All we hear is about lately is: get the execs, sue the execs, hang the execs... But nobody ever says anything about who they are accountable to: the Board! They hired the execs, threw money at them as if they were Baseball League players and gave them the now infamous Golden Parachutes! Forget the execs, they did (poorly) the job they were hired to do, go after the people that hired them in the first place and that were suppose to supervise them!
wosatOct 15, 2008
Just in case the expression "perp walk" is getting lost on some folks...<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perp_walk">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perp_walk</a>quote: The term perp walk is an American slang term which refers to the police practice of intentionally parading an arrested suspect (or "perp", short for "alleged perpetrator") through a public place so that the media may observe and record the event. The suspect is typically handcuffed or otherwise restrained, and is often dressed in prison garb.
mountainwebOct 15, 2008
Not a question of did they get the money but the intent was that the board would allow them to steal that much money from the company.
blacklabelsarOct 16, 2008
FRA"The executives never received the payments – detailed in internal Lehman documents seen by The Sunday Times - because the company filed for bankruptcy protection the next working day, September 15."That probably saved their lives.
phillesh69Oct 16, 2008
Yeah, it wasn't intentional hyperbole. I meant million, but typed billion.