Pool Party at the Stein's!!!

Ben Stein can feel the social fabric tearing, but he is struggling to understand what is causing it:

From Harvey Road to Crescent Drive, Something Changed, by Ben Stein, Commentary, NY Times: Thanks to some fine reporting at The Wall Street Journal, we now know that right after 9/11, as the crushed bodies of heroic firemen were still being pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center, and the nation was in deep, bone-chilling mourning, the smart people who run some of America’s biggest and most powerful corporations may have already figured out An Angle.

Certain officers and directors at companies including UnitedHealth, Merrill Lynch, Teradyne, Black & Decker and Home Depot knew that their stock was way down because of panic about the attacks and whether more were coming. They also knew that their long-term prospects were excellent and that their stocks were a bargain. And right after the attacks, they quickly awarded themselves options priced to strike at the super-low prices their stocks reached when the fires at the Pentagon were still smoldering. In many cases, they went on to make serious money from those options. ...

This — as I see it — went beyond war profiteering. This was actual “death profiteering,” as my friend, the writer Marina Malenic, put it. Now, to be sure, such actions are not illegal. ... there is no law that says insiders cannot gather together to make an unseemly profit off a national catastrophe. But it’s sickening in its breach of faith, and its breach of trust with the society at large. (Some of the companies that granted 9/11 options are also part of an investigation into the backdating of options — a practice that in some cases could be illegal.) ...

As I thought about it all, I picked up Philip Roth’s magnificent “American Pastoral” and began to read it, thinking as I did: “How the hell did everything go so wrong in this country? How did we stop giving a damn about our neighbors and viewing this ... brief wink between eternity and eternity (to paraphrase the great Hart Crane), as mostly a chance to make money off a nameless, faceless Other?” And as I read Roth’s incredibly potent words about America in the 1940’s and 50’s, the America I was born into and grew up into, I thought about the Sculls.

On Harvey Road, our little dead-end street in Silver Spring, Md., ... there were about 30 homes and families. Every family knew every other family, and every mom would take of care of anyone’s kid sent home sick from school.

In about 1955, one family in the neighborhood, and one family only, built an in-ground swimming pool. That family was the Sculls... When the Sculls built their pool, they made a schedule and passed it around the neighborhood. There was a set of times so that every family on the street could use the pool every week of the summer.

That is, in the America that had banded together to win World War II, the America bursting with togetherness, community spirit, and the feeling that anything could happen if we all pulled together, the Sculls shared their pool with every single family in the neighborhood as if we all owned it. It was a small, unheated pool, but how we all loved it, and what splash fights and free-style races and underwater breath-holding contests we had there in the wild cathedral afternoons of summertime youth. ...

Then something happened. Maybe it was the explosion of individualism. Maybe it was new kinds of people who did not speak the language or who seemed different and threatening coming into our towns. Maybe it was just the life cycle of empires. But now life is different.

Now, in 2006, on my street in Beverly Hills, every home has a pool, as far as I know. Many of them are spectacular and all are heated. But we all have high walls around our homes. I have lived on my street in my house for eight years and know only one neighbor...

If our son got sick at school and my wife or I were not home, the school nurse would just have to keep him until we could be found. There is not one neighbor on the street who would take him in, or who even knows him...

As I said, something happened. It happened not only in neighborhoods, but also in corporate America, where the only meaningful units to management are the manager himself and his wealth. The workers are just the most easily varied input of costs, not people to whom you feel any obligation, or by whom you want to be viewed as a kind and decent person. There is certainly no community between workers and management at most companies. ...

And the nation as a whole, under siege by terrorists and militants who are very sure of their values? It’s just a mass of strangers you have to be nice to when you want them to invest in your company or when you want them to go off to war to save you while you are making money off of a national tragedy. Otherwise, they’re just strangers and you certainly would not want them inside your walls or in your pool. It’s nothing personal, as they say in “The Godfather,” “It’s just business.” ...

I’ll say it again. Something happened.

Some have a very romanticized memory of the 1940s and 1950s, but not everyone shared in the America he remembers and not everyone would want to return to those times. Some hard fought social battles were still to come.

Comments

says...

Maybe he has hit on something. I went to med school at UCLA, and the hospital there had (and probably still has) two floors set aside for the rich, mostly movie stars and politicians. One of the things I noticed (and other med students noticed it as well) was that these people seemed to be more miserable than the patients on the regular floors. Maybe it was that they expected too much out of life and so sickness and death was harder for them to take. But I think a lot of it was loneliness. They had rooms filled to bursting with flowers and gifts, but not many visitors and not much family. Obviously this is just one guy's memory, maybe befogged by time. But I didn't envy them then. I still don't.

[donna]

Maybe Ben moved to the wring neighborhood. I know all my neighbors, was more than happy to watch some of them when they needed it, and we even picked up one's kids from the police station one night when he was busted at the high school dance with drugs. ;^)

But then, I only have a little 1300 square foot house, not a mansion in Beverly Hills. Oh well. If I did have a mansion with a pool, I'd probably find some kids to bus in to use the pool, just to piss off the neighbors.

[No Name]

Some neighborhoods are better then others, but I think its true most people know a smaller group of people then they did years ago.

But as for companies buying their stock after the attacks, who was to tell the stocks werent going down further?

Does it look bad, yes. It is, should it be, illegal.. no.

says...

"I don't know. But I've watched them here for twenty years and I've seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape. They don't look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They smile too much, but it's an ugly kind of smiling: it's not joy, it's pleading. I don't know what it is that's happening to the world."

Quote from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

Now we're just smiling, being nice, talking politically not to disturb the boss who may lay us off, to keep a job to make mortgage payments, to put the kid through college. The meaning is lost. Is this really freedom?

says...

"I have lived on my street in my house for eight years and know only one neighbor..."

Ben, have you even TRIED to get to know your neighbors?

[hj]

Ben has a mansion in Beverly Hills with a wall around it and a heated pool inside? But, hey, didn't Ben just tell us recently that he was only "upper middle class?"

[save_the_rustbelt]

Ben should have written two columns, he mixed two stories (although the stories are somewhat related social commentary).

Those neighborhoods do exist, although the continuity is harder to maintain. My grandparents lived in a homestead that had been in the family for 100+ years, but of 22 grandchildren 20 have left that town.

Our neighborhood recently had a crisis (one of the children who grew up here had a little trouble with his motorcycle), the neighbors met in the middle of the street, helped the family load up and leave for the hospital, made arrangements to watch the house and care for the pets, and we made a agreement not to talk to reporters on the record. I don't know if that would happen everywhere.

As for the CEOs and their stock options, they are vile scum, and there is no way to sugar coat that.

[Bruce Webb]

"But as for companies buying their stock after the attacks, who was to tell the stocks werent going down further?

Does it look bad, yes. It is, should it be, illegal.. no."

But that is not what happened. They were not buying on the dip, that would have not only been perfectly legal but under the circumstances downright acts of patriotism. But what these clowns were doing was issuing themselves options with articifically suppressed strike prices. There was no downside, if the stock did slide further they could just issue a new round of options. All of the bias in this scheme is to the upside, and it all comes at a cost of diluting the overall stock holdings and so is theft from every stockholder who doesn't get the same deal.

Executives exist to enrich firms, firms don't exist to enrich executives. A lot of corporate suites have totally lost sight of that basic fact. Whether this was actually prosecutable is one question, but there is no question at all that it is morally theft from every other holder of the stock. It was theft by dilution.

[Bruce Webb]

On Ben's point and he does have one. Here is a simple test for you.

As you walk around your neighborhood is the nice face of the fence on the inside? Or the outside?

I live in an older neighborhood in a middle class town and generally the nicer face of the fence faces out - the cross members and fence posts are on the inside, the finished boards are on the outside for neighbors and passerbys to see. In newer and more upper class neighborhoods you see an increasing tendency to reverse this. Who cares if your neighbor sees the supports and the unfinished boards, your patio sure looks nice.

In my just previous job I issued building permits and this and related issues came up all the time. Can my neighbor just build a hideous looking fence on my property line? Can he put up an enormous two-story steel building that blocks my view? Well unless you live in a gated community or some sea-side town with strict view regulations your neighbor probably can, and will and in a lot of cases simply not care.

Now I am sure there are a lot of places just as idyllic as Ben imagines his cul-de-sac was, this is not a universal phenomena. But the next time you are out and about in a newer yuppier neighborhood try applying the fence test. Is the fence designed to showcase the house? Or to cloister it?

[spencer]

This is just one of a series of articles by Stein as he is comming to realize that his party has been hijacked and no long practices the Americanism that he believes in.

[Blissex]

«Executives exist to enrich firms, firms don't exist to enrich executives. A lot of corporate suites have totally lost sight of that basic fact.»

This is *ridiculous*. It is not a fact, it is a mere social convention and which way it goes depends *solely* on bargaining power between the two groups involved.

As to bargaining power, this particular ''fact'' also runs against the grain of thousands of years of precedent whereby absentee landlords have (nearly) always been dispossessed by their estate managers/sharecroppers.

As someone said. ''possession is nine tenths of the law'', and a CEO-in-possession is a sight to behold.

[Blissex]

«Maybe Ben moved to the wring neighborhood. I know all my neighbors, was more than happy to watch some of them when they needed it, and we even picked up one's kids from the police [ ... ] But then, I only have a little 1300 square foot house, not a mansion in Beverly Hills.»

Well, what I read in Ben Stein's story is that he used to live in a working class or middle class 'hood «On Harvey Road, our little dead-end street in Silver Spring, Md.» which went through a period of decay (see Wikipedia pointer below), and then became quite wealthy and moved to an upper class ''nouveau riche'' 'hood in Beverly Hills.

He attributes the change in attitudes to the passage of time and the evolution of culture, not to the rather drastically different type of people he now mixes (or not) with.

http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Spring,_Maryland
«By the late 1980s, the downtown area was in decline, and the Hecht Company, the last remaining department store, closed as a new store in Wheaton opened. In addition, Hecht's added a covenant forbidding another department store to rent its old spot in Silver Spring. City Place, a multi-level mall, was established in the old Hecht Company building in 1992, but it had trouble attracting quality anchor stores and gained a reputation as a budget mall.»

«Ben has a mansion in Beverly Hills with a wall around it and a heated pool inside? But, hey, didn't Ben just tell us recently that he was only "upper middle class?"»

Ben Stein is a ''noveau riche'' and a publicist writing for popular papers, and he probably is a bit shy about admitting that he is not probably well into the top 1%.

Also, I have discovered long ago that many people have a very skewed idea of what ''middle class'' is, especially as $60,000 (per household, not per person) is already in top 20% territory, top 5% begins at $100,000 and top 1% at $200,000.

Suppose one said that ''middle class'' is the middle quintile; that has income per household between $20,000 and $40,000 roughly...

[Joel Dobris]

is stein really saying that if i was prexy of a company and if I moved heaven
and earth to discharge all my corporate and personal duties vis a vis 9/11
(security of employees, charitable contributions of money, goods and
services corporate and personal etc etc etc that at 2 in the morning I
couldnt say "I am a patriotic american and i believe in the usa and its people
have let the mkt fall too low and I am gonna bet some of my pre tax
compensation on it"?

THAT is an interesting question

and then he's complaining (as he should) that some young Michael J. Fox
should have been there to say "I wouldnt go to that party boss. it looks
like a lotta fun but if i were you i'd give it a miss."

i may not believe what i've written here but i bet he never thought of it

or i could be wrong

to me ben stein is a siren on the rocks appealing to weekend readers who want to think they're thoughtful

or i could be wrong

[d'orly]

Ben Stein doesn't make sense.

[d'orly]

Ben Stein is irrational. Ever seen him wax nostalgically about his years with Nixon? He turns into a blithering mass of goo, pining for the good old days of that last Imperial Presidency.