My feedback on ‘the defense of marketing’

I read this article and got very frustrated.

Here’s my response:

So … you want your cake and you want to eat it too?

I read this and realized you’re not really defending marketing.  You’re trying to justify giving my cash to someone else when they haven’t earned it.

As a taxpayer, the question is ‘why’.  Why did these companies get so far down into the abyss without doing a little self-inspection?

Why did the CEOs of the ‘big 3’ go to Washington, cap in hand, looking for taxpayer money, only to fly home in their Gulfstreams weeping about how badly they got screwed by being told they’d have to have a plan for the cash?

Why is it that we, as taxpayers, are being asked to pay for misuse of funds, corruption up the ying-yang and decadence beyond belief when people are in the streets starving?

Why are we told to manage our own budgets and keep our own houses in order when the ‘brightest’ and ‘best’ on the planet are completely incapable of balancing their books?

Why should we have a separate set of rules for them?

When delinquents are running these companies and grinding them into the ground, why should we be asked to lift them up?

Why should we save the ego of a bunch of macho morons who one day are the Masters of the Universe debt/derivatives traders and the next are whining about how they broke their machine and they need daddy (or Uncle Sam) to fix it?

That’s not capitalism:  it’s stupidity.

You’re damn right I should have a right to expect restrictions or conditions on loans.  These people aren’t leaders.  They’re like monkeys playing with dynamite.

This market isn’t free.  It never has been.  Our ‘business leaders’ have been so focused on lobbying, monopoly and the concentration of power that they forgot about the people that buy their products.  They’ve focused on making the 30-year fridge a 3-year fridge.  Who cares about the landfills?  Canada’s a big country.  They’ve concentrated on how to minimize the number of full-time jobs there are in the country.  They’ve told us that there’s nothing to see here when people starve because of killer GM seeds.  They’ve convinced us that the financial system needs fixing, but by the same people that have ruined Latin America and Africa.  They’ve turned Iraq and the rest of the Middle East into a cess pool all so that they can maximize their ‘disaster capitalist’ strategy.  More retirement money disappeared yesterday because they told us that Bell would sell for $42 and today it’s trading at $26 because of ‘some concerns’ about the accounting.  They told us that deficits were bad and now that they’re in power, deficits are inevitable.

I argue that we should save our money, stop the bailouts and let the whole lot of them fail and see how they like waiting in line at a soup kitchen behind someone who smells like a latrine.

Maybe they’ll finally learn a thing or two that their business schools clearly didn’t teach:  Ethics, morality and a genuine sense of social responsibility.