New job requires a daily commute on the Metra. Went to buy my monthly pass and discovered a notice posted on the ticket window informing all patrons that credit cards will be accepted at the train stations in the spring of 2010.
It's cash or check until then...
Ten years into the new millennium, credit cards will FINALLY be accepted at Chicago's metra train system.
Nice way to reinforce the antiquated nature of this mode of transport...
Nice press release includes few pertinent details. Would love to know if this means the 30,000+ employees not affected by this plan now get bigger bonuses.
After all, Goldman's $17 billion bonus stash needs to be distributed to the many thousands of deserving employees, right?
In the press release, Lloyd Blankfein offers up this quotable nugget:
"The measures that we are announcing today reflect the compensation principles that we articulated at our shareholders' meeting in May. We believe our compensation policies are the strongest in our industry and ensure that compensation accurately reflects the firm's performance and incentivizes behavior that is in the public’s and our shareholders’ best interests.
"In addition, by subjecting our compensation principles and executive compensation to a shareholder advisory vote, we are further strengthening our dialogue with shareholders on the important issue of compensation.”
Strengthening the dialogue, perhaps, but giving the shareholders no real say in the matter, according to the press release.
"Shareholders will have an advisory vote on the firm’s compensation principles and the compensation of its named executive officers at the firm’s Annual Meeting of Shareholders in 2010."
Was not aware that shareholders needed Goldman Sachs to grant them "advisory" status on this issue. Seems like the shareholders have not been shy about offering their advice on this topic already.
Goldmans "news" provides valuable PR spin. But let's be realistic. Putting a limit on bonuses for 30 people in a company with 30,000 employees will hardly change a thing.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, a day filled with symbols of our great American mythology. Our founders, the European settlers, yearned for a new life free from the restrictions of Europe, so they got on those rickety boats and crossed an ocean to reach an unknown land.
The Pilgrims, in their quest for religious freedom, sought Nirvana far from home. The place they landed on was harsh, unforgiving, a landscape that required skill and knowledge in order to survive.
And instrumental to their survival, according to the American mythology, were the inhabitants of the "New World." As we all know, the Pilgrims shared a harvest feast with the Wampanoag Indians in 1621. The modern American Thanksgiving dinner not only gives us the opportunity to give thanks for our blessings, but commemorates the cooperation between Native Americans and foreign born visitors who sought new life in a new world.
Of course, cooperation turned into warfare not long after. Another component of American story is the "cowboys versus Indians" mythology, in which cowboys wrested the land from violent, scalp-taking Indians.
Which brings me to The Searchers, a classic western made by John Ford in 1956.
For me, The Searchers ranks up there as one of the definitive American movies. Our mythology, particularly our Western mythology, focuses on our independence from others. Our heroes seem to need no one. They are self-contained and powerful. They save us from the evils that exist beyond the pale.
With The Searchers, Ford shows us the reality behind the myth. Ethan Edwards, for whatever reason, shunned love, rejected the home. Those early scenes in the film are so powerfully eloquent in visually expressing his love for Martha, and her love for him.
A 47 second scene from early in the movie that visually shows the relationship between Ethan and his sister-in-law:
We'll never know why they never married, but I believe it is because Ethan was not a settled man. Walls could not contain him. And so Martha settled for Ethan's brother.
With this film, did Ford and Wayne endorse Western racism or regret it? To me, it seems clear. The racist shoots people in the back. He's angry. He wants to kill his niece because the Comanches have defiled her. He's nasty to the young man who trails around the west with him in search of the lost white girl. There is far more than regret in John Wayne's portrayal of Ethan - there is condemnation too. It is Marty, tainted with that drop of Indian blood, provides the moral center of the film. The man not fully white, the man without blood relatives, is the one man in the story who truly understands the value of protecting one's kin.
In a 2001 review of the film, Roger Ebert says, "in The Searchers I think Ford was trying, imperfectly, even nervously, to depict racism that justified genocide."
I disagree. To me, watching John Wayne's extraordinary performance, it was clear that this is a sharply defined portrait of the internal destruction that comes from living under a twisted moral code. Wayne exposes the myth for what it is, a sham. "What do want me to do, draw you a picture?" he screams at Lucy's fiance, when he finally has to reveal what happened to Lucy. The violence he's witnessed has destroyed him.
In The Searchers, we see that the Western hero is not impervious to grief and sorrow, as the myth would lead you to believe. The Western hero is isolated by independence, shut out from the soft, warm intimacies of family life. Is there any other Western that is so framed by the home? Those iconographic opening and closing images of the film are startling - the great, expansive beauty of the west, framed and enclosed by the love of family. Even at the end, Ethan rejects the comfort of love. His love is the land. But his independence is obtained at a very high price.
It is rare that I see a movie that affects me like this one. And while I admire John Wayne for accepting the challenge of playing Ethan Edwards, I do not admire Ethan. He is ambiguous and twisted. His courage is not necessarily the same as heroism. For me, the one flaw of the film is that in the end, his decision to save Debbie instead of kill her is completely unmotivated. The real Ethan Edwards would have shot her.
In a year that has seen unemployment spike to its highest levels in decades and government debt reach record levels, Goldman Sachs is on track to pay out its highest employee bonuses ever in the firm's history.
All part of "God's work," Lloyd Blankfein suggested in a recent interview with the London Times.
Here's the intro from that story:
"Number 85 Broad Street, a dull, rust-coloured office block in lower Manhattan, doesn’t look like a place to stop and stare, and that’s just the way the people who work there like it. The men and women who arrive in the watery dawn sunshine, dressed in Wall Street black, clutching black briefcases and BlackBerrys, are very, very private. They walk quickly from their black Lincoln town cars to the lobby, past, well, nothing, really. There’s no name plate on the building, no sign on the front desk and the armed policeman stationed outside isn’t saying who works there.
There’s a good reason for the secrecy. Number 85 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004, is where the money is. All of it.
It’s the site of the best cash-making machine that global capitalism has ever produced, and, some say, a political force more powerful than governments. The people who work behind the brass-trim glass doors make more money than some countries do. They are the rainmakers’ rainmakers, the biggest swinging dicks in the financial jungle."
Not sure which God Blankfein prays to, but it's the rare God that places high value on owning "the biggest swinging dick in the financial jungle." In my Bible, the excessive acquisition of wealth is generally frowned upon. And in the Gospel of Luke, the wealthy end up in hell, actually.
But in Blankfein's mind, the acquisition of record-breaking bonuses is God's work indeed. In fact, as he told the Times, "everyone should be happy."
But they're not - all those many people outside of Number 85 Broad Street. Congress isn't happy. Main Street isn't happy. And now Goldman Sachs shareholders aren't happy.
“We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret,” Blankfein, 55, said at a conference in New York hosted by the Directorship magazine. “We apologize.”
A bizarre public relations move from a man usually more on top of his game.
But not to worry. The apology is not going to get in the way of the bonus payout. Because as the Goldman Sachs spinmeisters have told us repeatedly over the year, the best and brightest, the brilliant minds who "participated in things that were clearly wrong," will leave Goldman Sachs if they do not get their bonus.
Making some consumers feel like the economy is being held hostage by people who want astronomical sums for screwing up, then maximizing profit to be made from the government's generosity.
There'd be no Goldman Sachs today if not for the government bailout of the financial sector, a bailout that cost billions and added to the nation's debt.
But God works in mysterious ways. The bankers who survived the collapse of the financial sector - not because of their brilliance - but because the feds bailed them out, will be richly rewarded in this year of high unemployment and record government debt.
Yes I quibble with Eliot, whose most famous poem, The Wasteland, began with the most famous disparagement of the month of April.
November is the cruelest month in the calendar, bringing with it dead skies, the hint of winter and two of the most vivid memorials to our war dead... Veterans Day and the anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg address.
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the day we now know as Veteran's Day, we honor those who sacrificed their lives for the sake of the greater ideal of honor, courage and country.
And on November 19th, 1863, Abraham Lincoln uttered less than 300 words in one of the most famous speeches ever given to honor those who died for their country.
Let us always remember that neither Veteran's Day nor Lincoln's famous speech would have happened were it not for the incredible sacrifices of our soldiers.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust... said Eliot in The Wasteland, a poem both famous and obscure of meaning.
I can only imagine the fear of those men slaughtered at Gettysburg. I can only imagine the fear of our soldiers who are now fighting today in the name of honor, virtue and passionate dedication to our country.
To me, Lincoln was a more gifted poet than Eliot. So I end with his words, said in honor of our soldiers...
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate...we can not consecrate...we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Our nation has been consecrated by the blood of all those who've died to protect it. We need to remember their sacrifice - we need to make sure that this American ground was not hallowed in vain.
My name is Anne Ward and I live just off "Main Street" in a little town north of Chicago.
I began this blog with the intention of focusing on marketing campaigns, interesting news stories, books and movies that caught my eye.
The Crash of 2008 has diverted my attention and instead I find I'm using this blog to learn more about why the American economy went on life support a year ago.
With each post, I offer my musings from Main Street....
