Boom Bust

Boom...Bust Remember the 80s

By Roy D. Follendore III

June 29, 2002

Remember in the 80's when everyone went to Universities and everyone wanted technology and business management careers? Well the baby boom is over and these graduates have decided it is time to retire rich. As a result, what has taken place is the economic rape of the economy by the MBAs from the 80's. Money gives people the ability to affect other people's lives. But when people do not earn their wealth, they feel they have no responsibility for others. That is what makes the very rich so vulnerable and why they hurt so many people. It feels OK for them to cheat, to lie and to steal from others. After all, they think that everyone expects it and they deserve it. Exactly how do you deserve $100,000,000.00?

The stock market boom of the 90's was not about producing a product of value. In fact it was not about producing anything of value. Many people who felt we had something of value to contribute were rejected because we might produce something valuable. It is not as easy to divide up something of value among thieves.

The 90's investment boom was about selling a shell of a technology that was of little value, to businesses who felt they could not do without it. It was not about making technology work. It was about demonstrating how important executives became in that process and it was about showing how important we now are by how much money we came away with. It was not about making our country stronger. We knew that a stock market adjustment in the investment community would come about sooner than later. When nothing of value is being manufactured, such situations can simply not be sustained. None of us should have been surprised.

Cooking the corporate books was just the next step. That is also what we are seeing with the recent flux of scandals like Enron and now WorldCom. It is easy for the Federal Government to declare war on cancer, drugs, drunk driving, teenage sex and violence, tobacco, and terrorism. Every time that we see our leaders they are declaring war on something or another. I do not see them throwing the book at the filthy rich bastards that destroy the national security of this country by wrecking our infrastructure and stealing the welfare of thousands of American families.

There were a lot more of them than the few top guys that have been put up for show. But we have to do a lot more than prosecution. We need to change the American value system that we let fall to ruin. The Boom and Bust we have just experienced was about the same things that brought the Roman Empire to their knees. Like then, todays bust is about our failure to recognize the reasons for the signs that our investments were failing. It is about the fact that honest businessmen were tossed aside for the yuppie double speaking clones. It is about the fact that the purpose of the business plan became the act of theft through clouded lies and subjective expectations. It is about the fact that the creation of value takes very hard work and long years of dedication by creative individuals and such things do not pop up overnight.

Our society allowed this corruption to happen because we did simply did not place enough value on the honesty of individuals that say things like, "I don't know" or "we must invest work to succeed and find out." Instead, they listened to those with leadership instead of knowledge. We bought into the media hype of image. We wanted indistructiable icons at the helm who "looked all knowing" and like they were always in control, rather than those who were sometimes failable and constantly searching for control. We delegated the responsibilities of the decisions of investment to these con men who rose to the occasion and we poisoned the decision makers in the process. We allowed the middlemen to make the final economic decisions based on what they got out of the deal.

When we remember the boom and bust we need to remember the 80's, when the generation of the Vietnam war transitioned from disillusioned to became ambitious and then greedy.

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