Wall Street went down, down, down, down

As I am sitting here, the stock market is dipping and dipping. I don't even want to know what my 401K is doing, but hopefully my hypocrisy investments in "Natural Resources" are keeping it afloat. Despite the pain it will inflict on the economy, I am glad the government did not bail out Lehman Brothers, and I hope they tell the auto companies to "Suck it," too. What? The more wealthy citizens will finally feel a pinch like the rest of us?

Don't chide me for the loss of jobs, I realize this is a bad thing, but in the last 12 years, we have let M.B.A. salaries skyrocket past those of doctors, physicists, most lawyers – you get the picture. These C.E.O.'s and C.F.O.'s have been paid hundreds of times, sometimes even thousands of times (as in the case of Wal-Mart), the salaries of their lowest paid workers, and most of these salaries aren't even based on performance. They have been allowed to make bad investments, slash the skilled workforce, slash bonus programs for workers, and run the companies into the ground. But they get their parachute bonuses before leaving the companies, and I'm sure they are immediately put into tax shelters.

They are rewarded with golden parachutes of millions if their company is sold during their time as CEO. So what's the best way to get multi-millions without having to work? Simple, get an MBA, become a CEO, run the company into the ground, break it up and sell it off in pieces, then get your golden parachute. This happened to my husband, after 20 years of loyalty to a grocery chain, we watched his management bonus get smaller and smaller, while workers' wages were frozen, and the executives' were paid more and more. Not long after he left to run his own business, the company publicly announced its financial troubles, and was sold off in pieces. The executives were rewarded quite comfortably, while thousands of workers lost their jobs.

I really wish John Edwards had been able to keep his pants zipped, because this is a major example of the two Americas that John McCain doesn't want to acknowledge. To the autoworkers in Detroit – leave now. Go get a job with Toyota, or another car company willing to listen to the consumer, and act responsibly. I never thought I would buy a Japanese car, but if GM and Ford aren't willing to build the efficient cars we want, then we will go elsewhere. The government needs to recognize that bailing them out is just enabling more poor decisions by out-of-touch CEO's. For those CEO's to say that saving their company from their bad decisions is the only way to save the American economy is nothing but offensive. America has prospered through its past tough times with ingenuity and aided with innovations by Academia.

This de-regulated CEO thinking is dinosaur, get-rich-quick thinking, and it's time that a new generation of workers, who are familiar with the business and skilled in management, begin running the companies. Just because you have an MBA from Harvard doesn't mean you know what's best for a hospital or a grocery chain (or being President for that matter). Let Wall Street reel in its bad decisions, let the market slide to where it should be, and maybe next time investments are made, history will be examined before money is blindly invested.

Update: I went into my funds and heavily diversified yesterday. I moved some money around and hopefully, some positive choices I made will leave me with at least as much retirement as I put in.