Ward on Words

2008 was a year for the record books for American businesses. First, the loss leaders: the financial sector, which went belly up last fall. They became the beneficiaries of Paulson's trillion dollar rescue plan. And then after receiving hundreds of billions of dollars from the feds, the bankrupt businesses gave out billions of dollars in bonuses to their employees, rewarding them for God knows what. Next, let's take a look at the profits seen in 2008 - and yes, there were profits to be had - especially if you were in oil. Today, Exxon Mobil reported a record profit of 45.2 billion for last year. That's right, in a year filled with bankruptcy, Exxon broke its own record for profits. Here's what the Associated Press has to say about this bounty: "The extraordinary full-year profit wasn't a surprise given crude's triple-digit price for much of 2008, peaking near an unheard of $150 a barrel in July." Now, however, prices have fallen 70 percen...

I am a writer, not a business person. But in my career, I get to work with business people all the time - executives at Fortune 500 companies, lawyers, trainers, people who run mid-size businesses. That's why my work is so interesting - that's why I love doing what I do. I work with talented people to help them craft particular messages for particular audiences. I am luckiest when I get to work with people who know exactly what their message is, who know exactly what they want the audience to take away from the communication. And I have to say that with most of my jobs, I'm a very lucky person - because most of my clients know what they want to say. I confess I find the people on Wall Street to be utterly bewildering. I keep trying to figure out what they want us to understand about their business, but in all honesty, it is impossible to comprehend what they're trying to tell us - their story is ultimately too perplexing. I grew up in the shadow of Reagan; in...

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris had a fascinating story called "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" in the NY Times the other day. You can find it here . Morris makes his living weaving story to pictures, and in this NY Times story, he takes a look at key photographs taken of Bush during his presidency. Most of the pictures are ones I've seen before - Bush in the classroom at the moment he was informed about the 9/11 terrorist attacks; Bush with the bullhorn on the rubble of the World Trade Center; Bush on the fly-over of New Orleans after disaster struck; What I found absolutely fascinating is the number of pictures where he is vitally engaged with someone else in the frame. This is the president of the United States; usually, presidents are photographed in highly staged photo-ops, staring at the audience as they inform us of key messages. And there are a number of these types of photos in Morris' story - the "Mission Accomplished" photo op on the air cr...

January 20, 2009 A black hand rests lightly on Lincoln's bible. The chief justice stumbles over the word "faithfully." A bright sun fails to bring warmth to the bitingly cold day. An enormous crowd of nearly two million citizens descends onto the capital, chilled by the weather and warmed by the belief that they were witnesses to history. A day filled with startling moments. The Bright Promise A man born into power and privilege peacefully handed the position of president to a man who hails from the south side of Chicago by way of Kansas, Hawaii and Kenya. The new president stood tall. The crowd cheered. The market swooned. The former vice president left his position as a man as crippled as the economy. A day of contrasts in a country full of contradictions. This Moment in History A crisp, cold, bright day, like many other inaugural days. The crowd gathered, but never such a crowd like this. During a time of debate and discussion about the histor...

Martin Luther King, Jr. was 39 years old when he was gunned down in April of 1968. A young man with a young family. A preacher. A man of faith. An American citizen who was jailed for acting on his belief in the equality of all men. A forceful advocate for justice. A man who was murdered during the war on racism. Today is Martin Luther King Day, a day set aside to celebrate the life of a remarkable man. King was a man who cautioned against waiting for time to heal the wounds of slavery and racism. He knew that "time was neutral." He understood that the actions of people determined whether time was used constructively or destructively. And in his short time on this earth, King worked tirelessly toward his dream of freedom and equality. Today, we honor his legacy, his spirit, his dream. Tomorrow, we celebrate the time-honored American tradition of swearing in a new president. The peaceful transition of power from one leader to the next is a hallmark of our v...

In this story in today's Wall Street Journal , the people over at the US Treasury department seem to be borrowing heavily from Bernie Madoff's book of finance. They've decided, those experts over at the Fed, that Bank of America desperately needs billions in federal money to beef up its capital and to fund a guarantee program to limit BofA's future losses. There's just one catch (to quote Joseph Heller) - the TARP money is all accounted for. But no problem - the Senate just approved the next round of federal funds - so they'll give BofA money that already has been allocated to other financial institutions - and we'll just make a note that billions of the new funds have already been spent. Not clear how turning TARP into a Ponzi scheme is going to benefit the economy in the long run. Not clear how tossing money into a clogged system will rescue it. Not clear how TARP is benefiting the nation at all.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama, a man with a reputation as a master of words and rhetoric and the art of oration, will become the next president of the United States of America. His words at the 2004 Democratic Convention - "there is not a Black America and a White America...there is the United States of America"– catapulted him into the national spotlight. His speech on race will be studied for years to come, and his Inaugural Address is highly anticipated. George W. Bush, the man who now exits center stage, was never known to be a master with words; in fact, it was just less than a month ago that Karl Rove alerted Wall Street Journal readers that Bush actually enjoyed the act of reading – especially when a contest was involved. But as we say goodbye to the 43rd president, we have to acknowledge that, like every effective leader, he understood the power words have to influence, to persuade, to shape the actions of people. So here is an examination of some of the influen...

"Economy Made Few gains in Bush Years" is a headline from today's Washington Post. According to the story by Neil Irwin and Dan Eggan, the nation's first president with an MBA (from Harvard, to boot!) "has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades." The story is filled with gloomy statements that define the Bush era as "as a time of little progress on the nation's thorniest fiscal challenges," and as a period that showed "...the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago." The Bush team, with characteristic bravado, claimed pride in their economic accomplishments. Here's what Edward P. Lazear, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, is quoted in the article as having recently said: "It does look like a great eight years, aside from the last quarter, unfortunately. In the long term, things look good. The reason things look good...

According to a story in today's Wall Street Journal , the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) will issue a report today critical of the Troubled Relief Asset Plan's actions to date. TARP was designed by the Treasury Department to "protect and recapitalize our financial system as we work through the stresses in our credit markets." Today's report, says the Wall Street Journal, calls the bailout effort "mismanaged." Mismanaged or not, TARP makes me realize that I want to recharter myself as a bank. For it's as a bank that you become a recipient of the TARP's outstanding generosity. If you look at the organizations that have been granted money from TARP, you see familiar names like Etrade, Goldman Sachs, Capital One, Bank of New York, Northern Trust, Wells Fargo - you can find the list here . I encourage you to check it out. The list of companies is a list of the money guys - the investment companies that paid out huge salaries to people ...

As a resident of Illinois, I have absolutely nothing against Roland Burris. I found him to be an adequate public servant, if lacking in inspiration and vision, when he served as the state's Comptroller and Attorney General. I just don't want him to be my senator. And here, I disagree with august personalities like Senator Diane Feinstein and others who feel that the appointment of Burris is completely legit. Unfortunately, I don't see his appointment as Illinois' junior senator as anything more than a swindle. In fact, the appointment of Roland Burris only makes me think of Bernie Madoff, the $50 billion brains behind the biggest swindle known to man (thus far.) Now I categorically do not believe Roland Burris is a swindler - not by any stretch of the imagination. When I say that this situation reminds me of Madoff, it's because of people like Senator Feinstein, who feel that Governor Rod Blagojevich's capacity to choose should not be questioned merely...

"History takes a long time for us to reach," said George Bush nearly a year ago on a Fox News program. He was referring to the fact that in his mind, there is no way to predict how history will judge his place among presidents. However, historians have already begun the journey to place this president within the context of history. And today's judgement of Bush's place in history is not good. According an " unscientific poll of professional historians ," more than 98 percent of historians polled view the Bush presidency as a failure. And more than 61 percent view Bush as the worst president in the nation's history. Bush likes to point to Truman as why he hopes for a more positive place in history. Truman is, after all, the president who is now known to be not nearly as bad as we thought when he left office. And Bush is right; we have no idea how history will regard the president who turned a budget surplus into an astronomical deficit, who ...

Came across this interesting nugget of info in the January '09 edition of Bloomberg Markets magazine, courtesy of columnist Jonathan Weil: Here's all you need to know to see who lost and who benefitted most at the Five Families of Wall Street, otherwise known as Bear Sterns Cos., Lehman Brothers, Merril Lynch, Goldman and Morgan Stanley. From the start of their 2004 fiscal year through October 20, the big stand-alone investment banks lost about $83 billion of stock market value. During the same period, they reported about $239 billion of employee compensation expense. So for every dollar of shareholder value destroyed, the employees got paid almost three. Interesting that compensation on Wall Street seems in recent years to be completely divorced from actual performance.

Crack open Arthur Schlesinger’s Journals: 1952 – 2000 , and it’s like opening a window on history right as it is being made. In his life, Schlesinger was many things, historian, teacher, speechwriter, friend, father, husband, author and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize (for T he Age of Jackson and A Thousand Days .) His journals showcase the intense curiosity and lively intellect that led him to be one of the nation’s most prolific historians. Journals: 1952 - 2000 was distilled from 6000 pages of notes Schlesinger had left upon his death in 2007. Two of his sons, Andrew and Stephen, were assigned with the task of editing the entries into an abridged version of approximately 1000 pages. The book is lively, conversational, but always one wonders, what has been left out? What nuggets were left on the cutting room floor? Regardless, the book is fascinating. The age of Schlesinger starts with the Eisenhower administration; at the time, Schlesinger was a speechwriter for ...