Words Fail Me

As previously noted, sometimes I read about stories that are so astonishing that beyond the obligatory “Epic Fail!” there just isn’t much to say about them. Acts of stupidity so profound and disgusting, and profoundly disgusting, that it’s hard to come up with my customary 500 words of snarky commentary. One such case occurred yesterday on State Route 101, in Hollywood, California…


You can catch the story on the Orange County Register website if you want, but if you’re not familiar with the Los Angeles freeway system, let me set the scene for you: Highway 101 runs from the San Fernando Valley into Downtown Los Angeles, passing through the Hollywood Hills and through the heart of Hollywood itself. It’s not the most modern roadway you’ve ever seen, and frequently clogs up even before reaching the infamous Four-Level Interchange (one of the most traffic-ridden junctions in North America); even when all lanes are open and there are no accidents or construction sites (which is rarely the case). But it’s still the most direct way to get from the dozens of bedroom communities in the Valley to the commercial district in the heart of the city. Now imagine what would happen if somebody were to deliberately block most of it as a publicity stunt…


This was the case on Tuesday of this week, when a hip-hop band from Orange County decided to block three of the four lanes of the freeway with their touring vehicle and stage an impromptu concert for anyone who might be stuck in the massive traffic jam they had just created. As a native and long-time resident of Los Angeles County, the part of this story that amazes me the most is that they weren’t shot in the resulting mass of road rage. Setting fire to their truck or climbing up and knifing the band members were never serious issues, since that would have meant getting out of your car and exerting physical effort (two things that must never happen on a Los Angeles freeway), but I’ve seen cases where people unleashed deadly force on other motorists for far less cause than this. Of course, in some American cities, the band members would have been assaulted, truck or no truck – and then somebody would have stolen their truck…


I almost put this post on the main blog, since it’s difficult to see this as anything other than a faulty business decision. Any publicity stunt is about business, whether it’s album sales or concert attendance, and it’s not generally advisable to promote your business by means of a stunt that makes hundreds or thousands of people hate you. But in this case there are two subtle points that need to be considered: First, the band is from Orange County, and the traffic disaster they caused is in the neighboring community of Los Angeles, which is widely reviled by OC residents; and Second, hip-hop acts frequently attempt to position themselves as anti-establishment or even counter-culture – in other words, the sort of people who would be expected to “stick it to the Man” by performing a free concert in the middle of a busy freeway…


I’m left wondering if any of the people responsible for this stunt gave any thought to the people they were inconveniencing before they decided to do this. It’s unlikely that anything particularly dramatic happened; that anyone died because they couldn’t reach medical attention in time, or that anyone had their career destroyed because they were unable to get to their job interview on time, or that anyone lost the love of their life because they couldn’t get to the airport of the train station on time, or so on. But the fact remains that any of these things could have happened, and that at the very least these idiots managed to steal several thousand person-hours of time from innocent people who had never done them any harm. Personally, I hope the local authorities throw the book at them, and that a massive class-action lawsuit sues them for all of the lost time…


And if we’ve reached the point where this sort of stunt can even be considered acceptable behavior, then I’d say we’ve also reached the point where we can be racing to the bottom while standing perfectly still…

Profiles in Scumbaggery: BP

Okay, I will admit that this post is a lot like kicking a guy when he’s down; it’s also a lot like shooting fish in a barrel or making “Nixon” jokes. But as I’ve noted elsewhere, I don’t actually have all that much condemnation for British Petroleum regarding the disaster in the Gulf. The fact is, if we had demanded proper environmental accountability from our national government at ANY time in the past fifty years, none of this would be going on, and if we’d made even the most casual efforts at improving fuel economy and energy conservation during the last forty years the price of oil would never have gone high enough to make deep-water drilling economically viable in the first place. The blame for the current disaster has a lot more to do with people who want to leave all of their lights on in empty rooms and use a 7,740-pound SUV to transport one person and one briefcase to and from work everyday than it does with an opportunistic corporation exploiting lax regulations and laughable enforcement in order to make obscene profits. The company’s treatment of their clean-up personnel and insults to our intelligence are another matter, however…


First, you have the issue of BP insisting that the people it is employing to clean up spill-related problems on the ground not wear hazardous materials gear, because it looks bad. It’s hard to keep maintaining that nothing terribly alarming is going on when you have people dressed in white coveralls and respirators (level 2 or 3 hazmat gear, depending on what they’re using) on camera. But if you spend any time in the petroleum business you rapidly find out just how toxic this crap is; I had the Level 1 hazmat training at Unocal, and the stuff in crude oil (let alone gasoline) would turn your hair white it you knew about it. It’s toxic, carcinogenic crap that can literally corrupt the DNA in your genes if you’re not careful with it, and BP is pressuring otherwise innocent people to risk exposure to it simply because it might be bad for their image…

Then there’s the whole business about lying to the press. There have been a lot of stories about this, but here’s one from Yahoo! News in case you need another one. This kind of thing was bad enough when Halliburton did it in Iraq; what BP is doing here is happening on American soil and doesn’t even have the excuse of military security or “encouraging our enemies.” Until such time as the affected beaches declared a State or Federal disaster area and placed under martial law, all that is going on here is a private company preventing members of the public from gaining access to public lands. In other words, they’ve got people giving pious statements for the press about openness and transparency and accountability, while at the same time using hired muscle to restrict information and intimidate anyone who challenges their version of events…

Would any other oil company have behaved better under these circumstances? It’s hard to say for certain; Exxon’s response to the Valdez disaster was blasted by environmentalists and libertarians alike, but I don’t remember anything quite as scummy as what we’re seeing in the Gulf this week. On the other hand, it’s many years later, and things that would have been considered unendurable violations of our civil liberties and way of life even a few decades ago have now become commonplace. Perhaps what we’re seeing along the Gulf Coast is simply the new normal; the level of outrageous and unethical behavior that will become the standard for life in the 21st Century…

In which case it’s time to start investing in interstellar spacecraft, because if this level of scumbaggery becomes the standard, this planet’s days are numbered…

Profiles in Scumbaggery

Of course, no blog about business failures would be complete without an occasional series about the men and women who have brought us these monuments to bad behavior, which I’m going to call Profiles in Scumbaggery because “Profiles in Douchebaggery” was taken. I’m going to try to stick to current events, and scumbags whose bad behavior is relevant to business in some way, but even so I’d expect to see one of these posts pop up every few weeks at the longest. And I can’t imagine a better individual to start off this series than the man whose work almost single-handedly redefined what it means to be a scumbag in America, if indeed not the world in general. The one, the only, Bernard “Bernie” Madoff…


In any time before the era of Internet news and 24 hour satellite channels, Bernie would have used up his 15 minutes of fame and left the stage, but in this twenty-first century it seems no one ever does anymore; consequently I was not really surprised to find an article about the man online this week. In a story from New York Magazine about Madoff in Federal prison, the former con artist is described as being unrepentant, blaming his victims for being rich, greedy, and willfully oblivious to the fact that the “genius” fund manager who claimed to be making them rich was, in fact, actually running one of history’s greatest Ponzi schemes…


I call this article to your attention not because I think there’s much I can add to the reams that have already been written about Madoff and his crimes – enter his name on any search engine you like, and there will be millions of pages of text written by people more capable and more knowledgeable submitted for your consideration – but rather, because this is the only true answer to the question that all of the Madoff victims (and most of the rest of America) have been asking for years now: why did he do it? How is it possible for one man to do that much harm to that many people without actually growing horns and a tail?


Some of it, of course, is simply ego run amok. When Madoff claims to have made a few bogus trades, expecting to make up the difference later, and then never managed to catch up, I think we should believe him. Not that he was blameless, of course; simply that his massive overconfidence led him to believe that he could do as he pleased, without any chance of facing the consequences later. We should also consider that his contempt for the Bush-era SEC is probably warranted; the Commission has always been a little too close to the agencies it is supposed to keep watch over, and has always been far too lax in both investigation and enforcement – because politically, it would be unwise to do anything else. The whole system depended on everyone playing by the rules and not taking the kind of chances that could destroy our economy and way of life, and all it would ever have taken to game the system is one man who knew the rules – and was willing to take insane risks…


If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same kind of lack-of-thought that was responsible for the cozy relationship between third-party auditors and their clients that created the Enron scandal, or the de-clawing of the FAA that make airport security a joke and led directly to the 911 attacks, which we can blame on political maneuvering and lobbying by the airline industry. Years of deregulation and under-emphasis on government oversight following decades of politically emasculated enforcement set up a climate in which millions of people could do whatever they wanted in our financial markets – and it only took one of them to screw things up to the tune of $65 billion…


So if the story of Bernie Madoff disgusts you, let me recommend you take a good look in the mirror before you start telling anyone about it. Because the fact is, we made Bernie what he is today; we may not have lit the match, but there is no doubt about who set the charges. And until such time as we, you and I and every other American, start demanding accountability from our government and requiring that our watchdog agencies start actually enforcing the laws they were created to oversee, there can be no question that it’s only a matter of time before it all happens again…