For the last three years, The Daily has opened my eyes to the plight of the forgotten and downtrodden. From the struggles of indie musicians trying to promote their shitty – um, unique – musical stylings to the gritty lives of the legions of Montreal cyclists whose commutes are so gruelling that they can’t be asked to learn how the traffic laws work. Well no more Daily. Now it’s my turn to open your eyes to a small group of people currently being hurt by The Man (copyright 1984).
The largest financial meltdown in the world, and possibly the universe, has left literally hundreds of CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and VPs with nothing left to live for. Where will Johnson Fitzgerald Jr. IV Esquire get the money to pay for his third mansion in the Hamptons? How will he pay for his kid’s new car? A scant 12 months ago, Fitzgerald was a hard-working CEO who had grown up on the tough streets of the Upper East Side with nothing but upper class parents supporting him throughout his life.
He once owned four mansions – four! – but now he’s in danger of losing one. Worse, his diet of cocaine binges, blue sturgeon caviar, and Petrus wine has been downgraded to more casual nose candy fun and regular caviar on Johnny Walker Blue, all to dull the pain. He even considered cancelling his daughter’s Centurion Card because he doesn’t think he can afford the $250,000 minimum annual spending requirement any longer.
Times like these call for heroes, and we need a hero now, more than ever. Heroes like U.S. Treasury Secretary (and former CEO of Goldman Sachs) Henry Paulson, who is literally putting his entire country’s finances at risk by asking the American taxpayer to pony up a $700-billion bailout package in order to save the asses of the unfortunate few. Truly, he is the man that John F. Kennedy was thinking of when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
Unfortunately, Paulson is only one man and $700-billion is only a 12 digit number. In past humanitarian crises – like the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami that almost took the life of hot supermodel Petra Nemcova – the international community has stepped up its efforts to help out those in need. Well world, as global citizens this is one of those times but now, the United States richest 0.00001 per cent is Petra Nemcova and the tsunami is the sub-prime mortgage crisis. With a simple call to your preferred country club and a minimum donation of $5,400 – less than the average Canadian tuition – you can help make sure that CEOs all over the world will be kept warm while facing those cool autumn nights on their luxury yachts floating somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean.
It is time for us to help out those who cannot help themselves and pull them out of their self-created gutters like they have helped us out of ours so many times in the past with trickle-down economics. Now, somewhere out there wanders a group of confused CEOs wandering the streets of New York City wondering, “How could this have happened?” and somewhere out there in the vast expanse of time and space, Winston Churchill is reminding us whenever the wind blows, “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”
Duong Pham is a U3 Economics student. He’d like you, our valued readers, to know he’s being completely serious right now.