Calling the Goldman Sachs $500 million small business initiative "philanthropy" or "lending" is like saying that frosted Pop Tarts are made with "real fruit filling."

Thankfully most media types called it for what it was: BS, BS, and more BS. But it got me thinking about my career in PR… I know two people who work at Goldman in PR. Both of whom are very smart and talented. One of whom actually has a conscience.

After my last in-house gig, I just couldn't take working in financial PR anymore and opted for a poorer but more low-key life of writing. ("Scrivnering" for those who insist on verbifying everything.)  And as I was walking home from work one sunny, breezy day in San Francisco, I was cursing my decision.

A place like Goldman was the next step for me. I had even interviewed with the hedge fund arm of Citigroup in its heyday and walked away before the talking really started. (It would have been great money, even if it was a soul killer.)

On that sunny, breezy walk home I imagined that my life would have been much much easier (financially) had I just stepped up that one last rung on the ladder. The people I know at Goldman are probably making $400K a year, maybe even $500K or more. Cushy perks. Great benies. What a life.

But the PR debacle of the "loan" initiative, made me realize that I'm just not cut out for it. And all you PR students and wannabes listen up, because that initiative on its own should capsize any illusions you have about being "the conscience of the  corporation" as PRSA blowhard chairman Cherenson put it.

IMAGINE… ALL THE MEETINGS, CLOGGING UP YOUR WORLD…

I imagined sitting in a meeting with senior Goldman executives trying to explain why the $500 million boondoggle wouldn't fool anyone and was just a total waste of 1/8 of the CEO's bonus money…

"We're going to give a million dollars to charity," says one.

"Brilliant idea," says another. "But better make it $5 million. Sounds more generous."

"I have it!" shouts another. "$500 million!! It will knock their socks off. Take all the heat off us. Make us look like we care. We've got to give til it hurts to show them that we're serious. We need to make it serious money!"

Eyes are popping. Hands are shaking. Smiles are beaming all around the room. I'd probably be sitting there with my head in my hands.

"Gentlemen, let me play devil's advocate here for a minute. $500 million isn't squat. From a PR perspective, it's dangerous. It's cynical. It looks like a payoff on the cheap. Especially since after the tax benefit it will only cost us $150 million. You might as well hunker down and keep all the bonus money because that piddling amount will NOT get you the absolution you're looking for. It will just engender more resentment."

Angry glares.

"Well, snot nose… how much should we give?"

I'd say: "All of it."

"ALL OF IT!?!?!?!"

"Yes all of it… The whole $20 billion… At the very least… half of it."

"HALF OF IT!?!?!?!! But that's OUR money!"

"Again… I say this as a devil's advocate gentlemen… not at all as a Goldman  communications officer (though some might say they are the same thing)…

"Aren't you people rich enough already? Can't you forgo your bonus for ONE year??? Especially as MILLIONS of people and businesses are on the brink of financial extinction? Can't your… excuse me… OUR… exorbitant base-pay suffice for just ONE year? Just ONE year. That's all I am suggesting.

"Next year we can all go back to business as usual making (and keeping) trillions of dollars and say we've done our part. And the money will buy you, literally, DECADES of goodwill, not to mention the Secretary of the Treasury slot for all of eternity."

Imagine all the open-mouth stares.

"Gentlemen… seriously. This is a bad idea. If a wholesale change in perception is what you're looking for, it will only come from a wholesale departure from business as usual. This is not change. If anything it reinforces the perception of Goldman a bunch of greedy, manipulative shysters.

"Plus, you are ensuring that the next Secretary of the Treasury will come from… <gasp>… a community bank… or worse… <fainting>… ACADEMIA!"

AND THE AWARD GOES TO…

I wouldn't last 5 minutes at Goldman Sachs. I barely lasted the 20 years I did spend in PR, and I have very little of my tongue left… from biting on it all the time.

The Goldman initiative is pure, unadulterated bullshit. But what's most galling about it is that they really thought (or why else would they have done it), that it would buy them some goodwill. And my smart, talented friend in Goldman's PR department (the one with a conscience), probably just sat there… with a bleeding tongue. The one without a conscience probably thought it would be a good career move to champion the idea, no matter how bad it was, because the senior executives wanted it.

And you know what… in reality, championing a rotten idea because the C-Suite wants it is often the best career move in PR. Sad but true.

But it still doesn't make a rotten idea into a good one.

And so Goldman Sachs… for your corporate arrogance, your cynicism, your anachronistic faith in propaganda, and your outright shamelessness, we grant you the BS of the Month Award, for November 2009.

Use it liberally. Use it often. But just remember that it won't fool anybody, because it still…

As the new movie The Dark Knight is breaking box office records and capturing the popular imagination, it’s only fitting to riff on the theme for this month’s award… and yes, it’s only the 5th of the month, but I can’t imagine that anyone will top this one in the next few weks (political surrogates aside).

A NYT article today calls out Freddie Mac CEO Richard Syron for a sin that’s been all too common among the insider set in Washington D.C. over the past 7 years: not listening to anyone except your political dark angels.

It got us into a war. It’s what put us over a barrel (literally), on energy. It’s what busted the budget. The current Administration has left dozens of bodies in its wake. Smart, dedicated people who were pushed out of their jobs because they did not toe the line. (Remember Paul O’Neil… anyone?)

Ideology got in the way of rational policy and now… all you have to do is pick up a newspaper any day of the week to see the consequences.

HOLY SUBPRIME BATMAN… THAT TALKING POINT IS SUB-PAR!

What Syron told the Times is quite astonishing in its brazenness:

“If I had better foresight, maybe I could have improved things a little bit,” he said. “But frankly, if I had perfect foresight, I would never have taken this job in the first place.” [Emphasis added.]

Come again? It’s the job’s fault?!?!?!

YOUR $38-MILLION JOB?

Oh yes, it was the job that was a runaway train. You just happened to be on it… in the caboose of course, not at the controls.

The clear implication here is that Syron now believes he was a condemned man from the start, and he wants your sympathy.

It was a lost cause; the job is thankless and undoable. He’s just the fall guy. That’s the reason he was paid $38 million in just under five years, because it’s the worst job in the world… a helluva lot worse than:

gutting fish

working in a steel mill

being a dairy cow midwife

digging wells

cleaning dump trucks

or even inseminating turkeys…

and a whole lot of other dirty jobs.

Poor Mr. Syron.

Just Plain Batty

A Freddie Mac spokesman said in a written statement:

“There is little to nothing that Freddie Mac could have done to prevent the losses that it is now incurring. You’ve got the worst housing crisis in U.S. recorded history, and we’re the largest housing finance company in the country, so when one goes down, the other goes with it.”

Um… reality check. The housing market would not be “going down” if is had not GONE UP so much in the first place. And what enabled the run up (i.e., bubble)?

Cheap, easy money lent to people who could not afford it, at terms that posed a future risk of default, on properties that were overvalued.

Exactly the kind of risky practice Syron was warned about.

And for this bubble we can thank Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae… and let’s not forget Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs, which made a killing selling more than $100 billion in crappy CMOs (collateralized mortgage obligations) and then making another killing when it shorted mortgage securities in 2007 while dumping the rest of its CMO portfolio.

BLAM!! … Pow!!… ZAP!… ZOWIE!!

So now it seems that underlings tried to convince Mr. Syron to be more cautious… screaming “The bridge is out! The bridge is out!” as he directed engineers to toss more wood onto the fire… all from the comfort of his cozy caboose.

In response he claims:

“This company has to answer to shareholders, to our regulator and to Congress, and those groups often demand completely contradictory things.”

Yet the Times quotes his defiant refusal when he was told to raise capital; he said to a group of investors:

“This company will bow to no one.”

Wow!… That was pretty damned forceful! Why couldn’t he be that damned forceful when pushed to compromise underwriting and risk management standards?

Now there’s an interesting riddle…

Riddle Me This MacMan… Whom do you answer to?

So he many not “bow” to anyone, but whom does he serve? Could it be Capitol Hill?

Prior to the 2006 midterm elections, Mr. Syron gave almost exclusively to Republican candidates, presumably because they were in charge.

But since late 2006 he has given (he & his wife) almost exclusively to democrats: $22,500 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and just shy of $14,000 to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT). As well as another $20,000 to FREDDIE PAC, his company’s political action committee, which splits its donations about evenly between Dems and GOPers. (Stats provided by Open Secrets.)

So, we know he gives to those in power… a total of about $46,000 to the Democrats in charge, just in the last year and a half. But what else did he give?

It seems he defied common sense fiscal practice and gave open access to the coffers of Freddie Mac, to achieve a political goal of supporting the housing market… er, bubble… which made a lot of people look really really good… for a relatively short period of time… at a very very high price to the nation, and great profit to himself.

The New Supervillain Weapon: Hyperbolic Hypocrisy

Syron claims that he had no warning, no insight, and no control. Whoah! That’s some super-duper cloaking weapon he’s got. Makes him invisible and removes all responsibility for everything.

According to the article:

Others, however, dismiss [Syron's] explanation. “Sure, it’s hard to deal with the pressures of Congress and shareholders and regulators,” said a former high-ranking Freddie Mac executive. “But that’s why executives get paid so much. It’s not acceptable to blame those pressures for making bad choices.”

BLAM! Take that! Your super-weapon talking points have no power here!

Get Thee To A… Batcave!

So we honor his impeccable performance as a two-faced villain: the powerful, heavyweight, money-slinging CEO when times are good; and a lame, evasive, dog-ate-my-homework 8-year old when times are bad.

And he now has the honor of writing a new chapter in the long Freddie Mac legacy of irresponsibility… adding to the $5 billion accounting scam, and political fund raising scandal with the destruction of $80 billion in (admittedly inflated) shareholder value and a potential taxpayer bailout as icing on the cake.

So we offer Richard Syron this month’s BS AWARD: a bat cave of his very own, where he can sit and ponder his role in the biggest taxpayer swindle since, well, since the S&L fiasco of the 1980s.

We hope you spend the rest of your days ankle-deep in guano, praying that some light will one day enter your cave… the light you refused to see when it really mattered.    

Second Runner Up… Harper Collins’ Children, Birthed by Stepford Wives

When criticized recently for product placements in children’s books, Susan Katz, publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books, responded:

“If you look at Web sites, general media or television, corporate sponsorship or some sort of advertising is totally embedded in the world that tweens live in,” Ms. Katz said. “It gives us another opportunity for authenticity.”

Like totally… wow! But isn’t “sponsorship,” like, um, acknowledged publicly, like when you brand a sports stadium with a sign big enough to be seen from space? Or when you, like, name a whole children’s emergency medicine department after a totally barfy but way popular clothing line? (Clothes like the t-shirts for teen girls that say “With These, Who Needs Brains?” and “Do I Make You Look Fat?”)

Hiding brand names in story books for piles of cash is a lot little less honest than openly promoting bulimia and boob jobs for teen girls — and then funding an entire hospital wing dedicated to “children’s health.”

More troubling, however, is the attitude of the authors. One showcased her “authentic”genius this way:

Wells [marketer and aspiring author] said she would not change a brand that she felt was at the core of a particular character’s identity merely to cement a marketing partnership.

Like, totally wow… again. So really the concept of “authenticity” is really all about stealth marketing? Wait I don’t get it, are you saying that the core of “authentic” identity for every teen girl in the world is… a brand aspiration. So that makes it OK?

It makes one wish that somehow Edelman had been able to trademark the term “authenticity,” if only to keep it out of the hands of dimwits like Wells and Katz. But maybe it’s me, maybe I am being like so totally blond and not getting it…

First Runner Up… Dana Perino, a Walking Talking Product Placement?

It makes you wonder what these young identity-challenged girls might grow up to be. It makes me think of White House press secretary Dana “What-was-the-Cuban-Missile-Crisis?” Perino.

The spokesperson for the Leaderofthefreeworld recently admitted that she knew nothing about one of the most important moments in modern American History: the only time since the end of World War II when an American president actually had his finger on the BIG RED BUTTON. To be forgiven though… it probably wasn’t her shade of red.

And then there is her recent dismissal of the idea that Pres. Bush might boycott the opening Olympic ceremonies over the Chinese crackdown in Tibet. Because?…

“This should be about the athletes and not necessarily about politics.“

We are spending approximately three quarters of a billion dollars every day in Iraq for the cause of democracy and freedom.

But in Tibet, where you’ve got millions of people living under a brutal Chinese dictatorship since the country was forcibly annexed in 1959 — millions of people actually rising up and demanding their freedom — you turn a deaf ear, refusing them even your rhetorical support? Words are cheap Dana… c’mon, you can spare a few. No?

Maybe it’s not “authentic” enough. How about if it had a corporate sponsor?

We could make it the “Abercrombie Revolution” — tube tops, short-shorts, and belly-button piercings for everybody! Sounds like totally super-cute… right?

And The Winner!… Bear Stearns CEO Al Schwartz (please never take your daughter to work)

If women do end up someday being equals to men in business, let us all pray that the girls of the Aber-zombie generation are at least a bit less dangerous than the men currently in charge. (Even if it looks like they will be just as ignorant of their own failings.)

Which brings us to Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz (let’s also hope he’s always been too busy to participate in “take your daughter to work” day). In a recent internal meeting to discuss the spectacular failure of the investment bank he ran, Mr. Schwartz made the following, stupefyingly moronic pronouncement:

“We here are a collective victim of violence,” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s natural to be angry, and you’re not sure who to be angry at. But we have to put it behind us.”

“Victim?”… “Not sure who [sic] to be angry at?”…

Anyone got a mirror handy?

Sanity and Reason Have Left the Building

I have been working in financial services for almost two decades now. (I have updated my bio page with a list of former clients, in case you’re curious... “Who Is Me?” under the About section.) And I have never ceased to be amazed at the combination of hubris and emotional immaturity of the titans of finance.

Most of them are personable enough, a good bunch for an after work brew, but truth be told their unique form of egotism can make them very dangerous. As a financial analyst at one of the big asset management houses told me recently, the current financial calamity rocking Wall Street was all the result of “greed without fear.”

On a less conceptual plane, Lyle Gramley, a former Federal Reserve governor and now an analyst with Stanford Financial Group, recently told the Associated Press:

“This problem begins with the fact that we underwrote mortgages sloppily, which means no one really knows what those assets are worth.”

A character flaw deep in the heart of the industry — in the people at the top of the industry — has cracked open once again into a yawning chasm of incompetence that threatens millions. But the good old boys at Bear don’t see it that way.

Ask them, and they will tell you that they’re the victims. Some of them are even ballsy enough to be demanding compensation! One Bear Stearns executive attacked the CEO of JPMorgan, which bought Bear, saying:

“In this room are people who have built this firm and lost a lot, our fortunes,” one Bear executive said to Mr. Dimon with anger in his voice. “What will you do to make us whole?”

Sometimes Spin is Blind

We in PR can get pretty cynical about the crap the passes for “authentic” communication. But in many cases — and I think these three qualify — these people really believe the “S” their spouting.

That is a big problem. Is there anything we can do about it?

The “authenticity” of communications is often blinded and compromised by commercial, political, and quite often personal psychological imperatives. Sometimes the best we can do is to be gimlet-eyed about it and try to push our charges toward “living up to the claims” of authenticity “in reality,” as Heather Yaxley writes.

The biggest challenge of “authenticity,” which Yaxley says must be “trustworthy, genuine and [having] sincerity of intention,” is the first one: trustworthy. All these people have sincere intention. All are genuine, within their own unique corporate/political/psychological realms.

Trustworthy? Hardly. The way they see the events is so obviously compromised by personal agenda that their vision cannot be trusted. And they are so ignorant of context that they cannot even see how stoopit they look when spouting this garbage.

So here is the prize for BS of the Month Award, let’s hope it can help them set their “authentic” worldviews right-side up.

Earlier in Feb., the NAM filed suit to block a federal disclosure law that would require naming all donors who contribute more than $5,000 to finance lobbying efforts. The NAM suit alleges that the new law threatens members’ First Amendment rights. Free speech rights! How… quaint.

Double Super Secret Conversations

The nation’s biggest telecom companies can hook up a firehose to their switchboxes and pump all of our private conversations and internet chats directly to John Poindexter’s secret desk in the basement of the NSA (and bribe Congress to give them immunity)… but big corporations scream bloody murder that disclosing federal lobbying money is a violation of their privacy. Harumph!… Their spin is that the law,

“substantially burdens the exercise of core First Amendment rights by the NAM, its members and similar organizations.”

Oh, sometimes one is infinitely grateful for the invention of descriptive profanity, such as “bullshit.”

First off, the claim makes no sense. They claim the law violates their privacy by making them go public. But also that it limits their 1st Amendment rights, which guarantee a right to speak freely in public. So what exactly do they want: privacy, or the right to speak publicly? What it sounds like they want is a Constitutional right to anonymity. Go figure.

Second, how does it “burden” them? By making them bribe Congress in the light of day instead of a back alley (or pricey steakhouse) in the dead of night? Hey, if our privacy is not a concern for the government, then what’s good for the goose…

Terror! Terror! Liberal Terror!!

According to the NAM press statement, having to go on the public record will scare these poor, vulnerable shrinking violets to death! They will cower and shudder in a corner, terrified of “expressing” themselves financially, which will make this blessed Christian nation all the morally poorer. Well, those weren’t their EXACT words.

It’s hard to fathom exactly what’s the “threat” to free “speech” here, but the key worry of the NAM seems to be that most heinous of horrors: “harassment.”

“For example, anti-globalization forces are increasingly resorting to violent means to oppose both political leaders and officials in the private sector who support trans-national economic development. Similar consequences can result from being identified as actively opposing the core positions of organized labor. Taking policy positions that are unpopular with other groups may lead to boycotts, political pressure, shareholder suits, or other forms of harassment. Some areas of advocacy could even make member companies the target of litigation.”

Oooooh… the “litigation” boogey man again! As the “tort reform” movement led by the U.S. Chamber is about is about to take away all our rights to sue any corporation for anything, that hardly seems a worry.

Anti-globalization forces!! We all know just how effective these commies are in stymying the will of multi-national corporations. That threat is clear.

But the “harassment” potential from “boycotts, political pressure, shareholder suits,” now there is the really fearsome beast. We should dump this law because corporations don’t have nearly enough protection from whinging protesters.

The Truth Will Out

Read any press announcement closely enough and either in the lines — or between them — you will find the truth. In this case, the truth of the matter is that this fowl has caught a whiff of the brewing stewpot:

“Many of them will curtail their membership in trade associations. The effect will be to compromise their First Amendment right to express their opinions in the legislative process, and also undermine trade associations which play a critical role in the development of public policy by government.”

Read: we’re scared we won’t be able to raise hundreds of millions of $$ we get for lobbying.

Here Is Your Prize

In the end though, we really have to feel sorry for the NAM, to be so threatened and so scared. Those folks are in desperate need of help; that much is clear.

What they really need is a double super-scret direct communications channel with Congress… a way to yank on the earlobe of power in private… to shout their demands without being overheard.

Well here you go, it may not be much, but it’s a start. What the NAM suit is really saying is:

But wait… on upon closer inspection… is that a “Made in China” label I see?    

Rove, the poster boy for a rhetorical disease we can only call “Texas Trenchmouth,” opened his beastly maw and disgorged a hideous stinking lie – that Congress pushed HRH George W. Bush into attacking Iraq. As soon as he said it, as fully documented by PBS, a new circle of Hell was created to be his personal province.

So, Rove almost wins for B.S. of the Month. But when you really think about it, aren’t his most recent comments just a continuation of the one-big-long-lie that he has been telling for years? He’s been a near-constant diarrheal fount for his entire career, gurgling out enough bowel-pudding to fill Lee Atwater’s grave several million times over.

If he is barred from winning on a technicality, however, then it’s fitting that we pick a winner who takes a page directly from Rove’s playbook, though this winner is merely a pretender, a poseur, a wannabe. Where Rove’s doo-doo is often formidable in size and odiferousness, this one looks positively hamster-like – a farcical, beady little attempt at a momentous excretion.

To wit: earlier this month, “luxury home builder” Toll Bros. issued a statement wherein the CEO – one Robert I. Toll – blamed poor housing sales on…. THE MEDIA! That’s right. He tried to pull a Rovian “blame the media” trick out of his hindquarters.

It appears that Mr. $50 Million CEO has developed a bad case of Texas Trenchmouth of his own. He’s decided that the best way to face down a potentially global economic meltdown is to spit gobs of fecal froth onto horrified onlookers. The equivalent of a two-year-old messing in his diaper and then slinging it angrily a his mother.

And this, after she gave him such nice presents. Consider the quarter-billion dollar cashout. Yes, Mr. Toll cashed out $244 million in his company’s stock even as he was extolling the strength of the housing markets. (Much self-serving PR?) All totaled, his executive team cashed out $600 million in insider stock sales before the luxury-level share price got sucked down the imported Venetian marble commode.

As the market continued to slide, he predicted a soft landing and that the market would quickly “rebound” by mid 2006. With feigned humility, he said he believed it would be strong “bounce back.”

And PR people wonder why our profession has such a bad reputation. Come on people! The facts were plain to see. Even CBS news got it right! And check out the hundreds and hundreds of clips compiled at Patrick.net – taken from newspapers all over the country, all year long in 2006, chronicling the housing debacle as it was unfolding. And folks… this is NOT prescience, it’s called being realistic. Seeing things for what they are as they are happening!

(For the most – alarming, hysterical, maddening, distressing – illustration of bad PR spin at work, check out Money Blue Book. They pair quotes from the Nat’l Assoc. of Realtors with the reality on the ground and the result is… well… a spectacular spectacle. See for yourself here.)

In 2006, as Mr. Toll was trying to keep the spin positive, reality had too much negative momentum for him to get away with it. And in hindsight is it any wonder? He was shoveling shit against a tidal wave of bad news that hasn’t even crested yet, and it’s now more than a year later. The scope of the crisis is staggering…

Since August 2006, the Fed has pumped $200 billion in emergency short-term credit into markets to keep them afloat

Even the EUROPEANS had to pump $150 billion into their markets!

Deutsche Bank is predicting $400 billion in credit losses on subprime borrowing

Goldman Sachs is postulating $2 trillion in credit contraction

The financial services sector is in meltdown with Citi, Merrill, Morgan, HSBC, and others losing tens of billions (with tens of billions more to go)

Potentially 2 million residential foreclosures – maybe even 3 million before it’s over

The dollar continues to hit new lows, but the Fed can’t defend the dollar and the economy at the same time

The smoking gun: at then end of 2006, the Fed was concerned about inflation and hinted that rates would remain flat throughout 2007 – oooops!!!

That strategy was chucked in short order when credit markets threatened wholesale collapse — the Fed cut rates twice in 2007 — they say no more cuts…. do you believe them?

Recession is looming… consumers are broke…. yadda yadda… blah blah blah

Here is the real truth (disaster?): homebuilders exploited cheap undocumented labor to put up shoddy houses in overbuilt areas; they sold the houses at inflated prices to people who could not afford them, using mortgage vehicles that were pretty much designed to blow up as soon as artificially low interest rates shot up, or prices started dropping, or the homeowner’s equity was chewed up by loans, or all three.

The housing market has gone bust. The chickens have come home to roost, and poop, on just about everyone. Mr. Toll, you got your quarter-billion, have the decency to be honest about the state of things. You can at least afford to be generous with that, can’t you?

Housing prices won’t likely see any meaningful recovery until 2010. And neither will the sales market across most of this country — see Patrick.net for a bitch-slap of a reality check.

So, Mr. Toll, here is your B.S. of the Month Award.

Shove a sock in it!

Either keep your mouth shut or say something credible. And whoever your PR person is… fire her. Karl Rove needs her back in Texas!