In the past fifty years, but particularly in the last thirty, American corporations have essentially stopped competing for excellence in favor of competing for profit alone, and when such contemptuous money-grubbing invariably threatens to lead to lost business, they take the money they might have spent on R&D, say, and spend it on lawyers and lobbyists instead, so they can legally buy out the competition and game the rules to allow them to charge even more more for even less.   Seemingly every day another story appears of how some current “Master of the Universe” got so rich by selling some garbage that turned out to be defective, dangerous, and/or fraudulent, and the media noddingly agree that it was good while it lasted, and these things happen.  ”Have you thought about running for office?” usually comes next.

We once tended to think of such flagrant frauds and shysters as being mostly confined to the “solutions” industry, i.e, FIRE, who just take peoples’ money with utterly no intention of giving anything in return, as they always have.  But lately, this ethic, as it were, has spread to companies that used to visibly, if lackadaisically, provide something, however inadequate, for the money they demanded from all present: utilities, telecoms, newspapers, none of whom could possibly exist anymore without their government-enabled monopolies, all operate on the principle of offering the crappiest possible product at the most absurd and escalating price, because once you’re the only game in town, that’s what the “market” will bear.   Heads I win, and all that.

What’s worse, and in the end could prove even more damaging, will be when the dirty and odious task of actually “doing” anything is, as a result of this attitude, done here so notoriously poorly that “Made in America” will go from mere anachronistic oddity to outright laughingstock, rendering what remains of our productive economy a dim and fading memory.  This already happened locally about ten years ago, when the demi-monopoly “engineered” wood products company, Louisiana Pacific, itself a spinoff of broken-up monopoly Georgia Pacific, got busted for selling a shockingly cheesy and dreadful but nonetheless popular fake wood exterior siding that grew mushrooms in a few years and had to be expensively replaced, leading to a lot of homeowner annoyance, as you could well imagine.  But because “profits” had skyrocketed over the years that this inferior product all but captured the national market, CEO Harry Merlo lived like Ken Lay, with nearly as many airplanes and a growing multi-acre estate in the West Hills, which he “rented” from the company, for a little more than I paid for my apartment at the time.  I worked on another mansion the company bought for him next door, so they could redraw the property lines and resell the place so Harry would have more room for his peacocks and such.  After all, he did boost the economy, if you count the millions spent replacing his crummy products and the money LP saved by turning down the oxygen on the guys that worked in the resin vats, so why not give him the expanded estate, a golden parachute, and send him on his way when it all went shithouse?  Keep your plane privileges too, Harry.  That’s the “free market” at work.

Today I was reading a story in the NYT which felt eerily like the Merlo/LP debacle, though by now so unsurprising and redundant that had my bus not been stuck in traffic I’d have skipped it.  It seems that a pipe manufacturer, JM Eagle, which is one of many hell spawn descended from the asbestos lawsuit escapee,  Johns Manville, has been “succesfully” selling PVC pipe to municipalities all over the country that tends to explode, often monthly, which is not the best performance for a supposed 50-year product.  And, it’s also peskily inconvenient and expensive for the company’s customers because this garbage is pawned off not just to homeowners but also to goverment agencies as something suitable for WATER MAINS.  The story was of a whistle blower who worked for the company and was told to tell the thousands of distraught people complaining that the sinkholes, accidents, and shutdowns were all due to incorrect installation, but eventually he couldn’t believe such a thing after a while, said something, and was of course fired.  If you can believe it, the CEO of that company was also a widely revered and indulgently compensated cost-cutter, and still is.  Better yet, he started at the company at the top, at 25, thanks to his Dad, and made a big splash by firing everybody over 40, especially the expensive and uppity kind that knew how to make pipe.  This kind of guy could probably rouse Ayn Rand from the grave for a roll in the hay;  he has shown himself so clever at pillaging and killing the rabble for money.  I find myself hoping so.

These are the people that are always threatening to decamp if they are ever taxed or regulated.  I say, find a place that will take you; let your “market” decide.  I’m guessing we’ll be stuck with you and your peacocks for quite a while.

The mountain looks so pretty when it's 12 degrees...

UPDATED BELOW:

A few years ago, I noticed that actually selling something that could be quantified, like a shoe or a car wash, had become hopelessly anachronistic in the “new” economy; we were told to pay good money for something far less tangible, “solutions.”   To what, pray tell?  Everything, as it turned out.

Any plugged-in business from housecleaning to accountancy just stopped selling what they once sold, which in the old days were something straightforward that could be easily measured in dust bunnies or IRS audits, and the preferable absence thereof, to something else entirely.  The advertising industry finally and unexpectedly just came out of the closet about its time-honored formula:  This product you never suspected you needed will solve a “problem” we just invented to sell it.  You’re not buying, say, that deodorant, mouthwash, sports car, and unusually expensive booze, you’re buying a “solution” to the not getting laid “problem.”  That problem and the “solutions” sold in its honor probably accounted for a large percentage of our fabled national wealth during the “American Century.”  The only trouble was, the “solutions” sold never solved the problem, even as Arpege and Aqua Velva sailed off the shelves, for most people the not getting laid problem, among others, was never adequately solved.  Better yet, the disappointed customers, probably rightly, blamed themselves for this unfortunate coincidence, rather than the shills that sold them whichever bill of goods.

Naturally, when any respectable Madison Avenue type spots a trend like that, you can bet it’ll be off to the races for the whole lot of them.  I mean, once it has clearly been scientifically proven that people will not only spend more than they can afford on products which offer “solutions” that never seem to materialize, but that their invariable response to each predictable failure is to seek out another potentially profitable, for its creator, anyway, “solution,” the sky is the limit.  Kind of makes shooting fish in a barrel look hard.    Given all that, there was something of a an almost unseemly pile-on.  When it became apparent that virtually every part of our “service” economy that had replaced what lay before, back in the “thing” days, was pure air, why should anyone sell anything that couldn’t creatively be described as a “solution?”  Once copier repairmen, loan sharks, and real estate agents stopped doing what they were supposed to do, and marketed themselves selling solutions instead, could hookers and drug dealers be far behind?  They, after all, sell solutions, too. The main difference is that their clients almost always get their problem, at least temporarily, “solved,” a contrast that might be unflattering to, say, mortgage brokers.

Fearing such degrading of the “solutions” brand, and the dire results it could have for such formerly trusted names as, say Blackwater or Halliburton, I am proud to report the first international conglomerate that decided to try to beat the competition by daringly selling something more obviously more substantive than tired old airy-fairy “solutions.” Siemens, the German conglomerate, must have a better ad agency than most; in addition to blanketing liberal talk with commercials about its “50,000 Americans” making America a better place and laying in a striking and controversial background ad that eclipses Daily Kos, it has blanketed the blogosphere, and probably elsewhere, with big, big news.

Wait for it….  It’s selling “answers.”  You know, those totally new things which are a lot more valuable than those crappy old solutions…..

Hookers take note.

UPDATE: A bank in Overland Park, Kansas folded yesterday.  Its name?  SolutionsBank.