Managers

Goldman partners mate for life. It is a supremely beautiful symbiotic mating ritual where about 400 men and a few women excise their egos and metamorphose into a seamless hive.

Bernanke, Geithner, Bush VERSUS Hank Paulson and his mates is basically what happened. It was a slaughter by strong minds over weak ones. The collateral damage from this massacre included Bear, Lehman and the American people.

It is NOT against the law to be beaten by the greatest colony of financial manipulators the world has ever seen.

Barofsky speaks furtively for all of us in mourning our punishing, humiliating loss to a superior force. But he is foolish pawn. We were legally beaten by a better team. It is not the American way to change the rules after the fact.

We all wanted Farve to win on Sunday but no American would ever dream of changing NFL rules to allow his team to play next Sunday. But that is what Barfosy is suggesting we do to Goldman - change the rules after our defeat.

The tragedy is that this magnificent pack of predators at Goldman could be leading our country making REAL contributions to our manufacturing base and putting our population to work. But the rewards for being a brilliant arb are vastly superior because the competition for manufacturing are the Chinese, Japanese and Germans. And they are vastly tougher competition than the likes of the green, untested, underpaid civil servants toiling at the Fed and the US Treasury. A pride of lions will always go for the weakest prey.

Our priorities are wrong and our beautiful President and determined Congress can tax money made from trading at the 90% rate and from manufacturing at the 10% rate. They can choose what work to reward and encourage.

What happened to Americans was a financial Pearl Harbor - a surprise, secret attack that has devastated all of us leaving us at first dazed and now angry. OK. So we are not particularly good losers. Time to fight back and focus on the real problem - how do you reward and celebrate our Americans with great managerial skills to focus on building products that really can be used by ALL Americans.

We have been relying on the contributions of 19th century Americans who built that base for too long. A new group needs to build the highways and factories for the 22nd century now.

Skilled managers need to be offered outsized rewards to head us all in the right direction.

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