What happens if we can't trust anyone?

A very rich, very well-respected man killed himself today, another of the victims in Bernard Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme that has victimized some of the wealthiest, most influential people in the world.

Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, whose family name is among those listed on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, apparently opened his veins with a box cutter and took sleeping pills in his office. He didn't leave a note, but the word is that his investment decisions that put his clients into Madoff's scheme will result in a 10-figure loss.

I don't know why he killed himself, whether it was because he was ruined financially and would no longer be rich or that he felt a sense of dishonor over what his decisions had cost his clients, among whom are Liliane Bettencourt, the world's wealthiest woman.

One of the hardest hit investors in Madoff's scheme is hedge fund Fairfield Greenwich Group, which reportedly lost $7.5 billion. FGG is being sued for failing to protect its investors.

Now $50 billion seems like a lot of money, and I'm sure that if you or I squandered $50 billion, we probably would lose sleep over it. But in the overall scheme of things -- mostly meaning numbers so large they're beyond our comprehension -- it's a drop in the proverbial bucket.

Really. A recent study by Oliver Wyman, the management-consulting firm that’s part of Marsh & McLennan, total wealth held by the world’s financial millionaires is $50 trillion.

That's right, with a "t," and those are just the millionaires. So even if $50 billion with a "b" has vanished from their accounts, that's one-tenth of one percent of their wealth. It means that of every million these guys have, they lost $1,000.

Of course that's ridiculous. A lot of really rich people didn't have any money invested with Madoff, so a lot of people who couldn't afford to lose money probably lost some through their 401(k) accounts or other investments.

That's not the biggest problem here, though.

The biggest problem is that the last 30 years of Reagans, Bushes and Clintons have cost us so much of our regulatory safety net that an awful lot of Americans have to be wondering where -- if anywhere -- they can put their money and feel safe about it.

I was invested relatively conservatively in my 401(k), but I've lost almost a third of its value this year. And that's with a reputable company.

Our economy is tanking, but half the stories about the money the Bush Administration is using to bail out the financial sector are about how much of it is going to year-end bonuses and other perks for executives. There's little or no federal oversight of the bailout; Bush has so hollowed out the federal government that it barely works anymore.

I don't know what's going to happen if people completely lose faith, if they start putting their money into their mattresses instead of their retirement accounts. There really is still a chance that our entire economy could implode.

I'll tell you what would really hurt. If Madoff winds up with a short sentence in some country-club jail and still gets to keep some of the money he stole, we are going to see riots in the streets.

Too bad he didn't have the decency to kill himself.

It's looking like a devilish future

"What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing.

"He will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance ... Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen."

-- AARON ALTMAN, "Broadcast News," 1987


A report out of Denver says that Dean Singleton, who owns the Denver Post, is taking advantage of the woes of the competing Rocky Mountain News to tell his unions that he needs to cut $20 million in operating expenses to remain competitive.

Here's what it means:

Within the next 2-3 years, Denver may just become the first major American city without a metropolitan daily newspaper.

The Rocky has been losing money for a long time and may not survive. Many newspaper owners would be happy to lose their competition, but that isn't enough for Singleton. He's using the weakness of his competitor to go after his own employees.

I was one of those employees for more than eight years at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, and I saw Singleton and his minions cut our staff from one that was doing an outstanding job covering its own area as well as reaching out to do important projects to one that almost disappeared as a force in its coverage area.

In 1999, we had two columnists, excellent Hollywood coverage and a strong sports department as well as top-flight local coverage. Our owner, Donrey Media, wasn't known for paying well, but we still managed to have a good, experienced staff.

Within five years, our staff had been cut by half and we were sharing coverages with the San Bernardino Sun, which previously had been our most bitter competitor. This is vintage Singleton. He combines all his papers in a region to save money. That means seven or eight papers in Los Angeles all use the same reporter to cover the Dodgers, or the Lakers, or USC football.

It also means less regional, national and international coverage, with the Associated Press picking up most of the slack.

It means less talk about getting the story or covering the news and more about "servicing our customers."

In Southern California, Singleton's people just announced that six different newspapers -- the Sun, the Daily Bulletin, the Redlands Daily Facts, the Whittier News, the Pasadena Star-News and the San Gabriel Valley Tribune -- are going to share a copy desk at San Gabriel.

It's "more efficient," which of course means fewer copy editors doing more work, and it will certainly mean editors who may never even have visited Redlands or San Bernardino editing stories about those cities.

Lower standards, bit by bit.

Flash over substance.

Several years ago, Singleton's minion who is in charge of all those papers gave us a speech about why the railroads vanished. They thought they were in the railroad business, when they were really in the transportation business.

He said we needed to be aware that we're not in the newspaper business, we're in the information business.

So if newspapers disappear in favor of Blackberries, laptop computers or PDAs, it's really no big deal as long as the folks who own the newspapers can still make money off them.

Sound like someone has been taking lessons from the Devil?

It isn't about covering the news, or holding out for the truth, or forcing government to be responsive to its citizens.

Nope, it's about keeping that revenue stream coming.

My old friend and editorial cartoonist Gordon Campbell says the current media is vanishing and the future will all be about "citizen journalists" blogging and posting the news on the Web.

God help us. How will anyone ever be able to tell the difference between truth and lies, gold and pyrite, silk and straw? Without responsibility for what they publish, folks can put anything out there and half the people in the country will believe it.

"Rush Limbaugh sodomized by amorous rhino"

I posted that in a satirical piece a couple of weeks ago, making very clear that it had never happened. But I would be willing to bet I could go almost that far with an outrageous lie and plenty of folks would believe me.

I've always wondered why newspapers are run for profit anyway. Why shouldn't they be not-for-profit, semi-public enterprises dedicated to the truth above and beyond the balance sheet?

Riddle me this: What other for-profit business has Constitutional protections?

If newspapers are going to survive in this country -- heck, maybe if telling truth to power is going to survive -- we need to get rid of the Singletons and force newspapers to be run for some reason other than lining people's pockets.

It isn't too late, but it's getting there.

Immigrant shows us best of being American

Most of us can only dream of handling tragedy with as much grace as Dong Yun Yoon, the San Diego man who lost his entire family when an out-of-control F/A-18D Hornet fighter on a training mission crashed into his home Monday.

The plane crashed after the pilot ejected to save his own life, but the South Korean immigrant's words for the Marine flier were only kind.

"I heard the pilot is safe. Please pray for him not to suffer from this accident. I know he is one of our treasures for our country. I don't blame him. I don't have any hard feelings. I know he did everything he could."

Actually, he blamed himself and told the press of his father-in-law, who was on the way from Korea to grieve for his lost wife, his daughter and his granddaughters.

"I don't know what to tell him. I don't know how he'll ever forgive me."



There has been a lot of talk this year about greatness, and millions of Americans believe that we have elected a great man to be our next president. I believe that's yet to be seen, although I like Barack Obama and have high hopes for his presidency.

But there is one thing I do know.

Dong Yun Yoon is a great man.

A great American.

Amazing baby has flown the coop

Our three weeks with my lovely granddaughter Madison Kastner, aka the Amazing Baby, ended Saturday when her parents took her north to Seattle for three weeks with the other grandparents.

They'll be there through Christmas before returning home to Beijing in time for Maddie's first New Years Eve.

While they were here, my mother and my brother came out for the baby's baptism, and one picture was taken of baby, mother Pauline, grandmother Nicole and great-grandmother Yvonne. I haven't got that picture readily available, but here's one that cuts out the middle two generations and shows Maddie with her great-grandmother.

It's sad to realize we won't see the Amazing Baby till next summer, but we're happy to have had this time with her.

Au revoir, Madison.

There are many roads to Damascus

When I was much younger and far more callow -- I believe it was during the Nixon administration -- a friend and I shared a common hobby.

We made up lists of people who would be taken out and shot if we ruled the world, which is a pretty ridiculous hobby. Our lists weren't based on political opposition or good and evil, but mostly on people who offended our sensibilities. For example, we thought the Osmond Brothers were a pale imitation of the Jackson Five, so Donny and his siblings would have been on the list..

Ditto for people who brought 11 items into the 10-item line at the supermarket or folks who parked their cars across two spaces at the mall.

At any rate, with sunshine coming to Washington in the form of the Obama administration, I've heard people reviving my old game -- but with lesser penalties. Rush Limbaugh seems to be on a lot of those lists, and I can certainly understand why. The Fat Man has been a thorn in the side of decency for a long time now, and there are few messages more downright tacky than his unrestricted free-market drivel.

But as a Christian and an optimist, I'd rather see Rush change.

Not that it wouldn't sort of a hoot to hear one morning that Rush had slipped and fallen into the rhino cage at the zoo, leading to an amorous rhino deciding that the corpulent Mr. L looked like a pretty attractive mate.

"Limbaugh sodomized by amorous rhino"

Yes, there's a definite beauty to that headline, especially if we were to learn that he was with child, er, rhino. But I would be the first to admit how callow those thoughts are. I would much rather see Rush really read the Bible and realize there are few things Christ cared more about than doing right by the poor.

Imagine Rush telling his audience they ought to be contributing both time and money to help reduce poverty in America.

Now you and I both know that's never going to happen. Limbaugh isn't making $35-40 million a year to do anything other than stir up the yokels so that they don't realize how badly they're being sodomized by the rich.

But we can hope, and we can certainly try to change hearts and minds as we finally approach the end of the Bush years in Washington.

It's worth the effort.

Black Friday tragedy hits close to home

A lot of people are going to write a lot of nasty things about what happened at the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., yesterday morning when shoppers trying to be first into the store at 5 a.m. for Black Friday specials knocked an employee down and trampled him to death.

We're going to hear how horrible our consumer society is, and how screwed up people's values are.

We might even hear mean stuff about the kind of people who shop at Wal-Mart.

Sorry, but none of that is the real story to me. This is the first year in the last eight that I wasn't out as a reporter Friday morning covering the pre-dawn rushes to get incredible bargains at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.

I've talked to people who waited in line 15, 20, even 30 hours to get things they could never come close to affording otherwise. And let me tell you, those lines are getting longer every year and it's not because the deals are getting better.

Yes, there's something in the air in those early-morning lines, and contrary to what you might think, it isn't greed.

It's desperation.

For the last six years in George W. Bush's America, people are working harder and harder for less and less money. Statistics I saw recently said productivity is up something like 20 percent over that time, while real wages are down between 1-2 percent.

Good old George Dubya accomplished what Ronnie Reagan only dreamed of; we're now the ultimate trickle-down society. Folks at the top get rich, and when they mess up they get bailed out. The rest of us stay up all night trying to get decent Christmas gifts for our kids.

I guarantee you there wasn't one person in line for those 50-inch plasma TV sets at $798 just to get a bargain. Everyone in line for one was there because it was the only way they could even dream of buying one.

I don't know what the other bargains were, but there are way too many of us now who can't afford the so-called "good life." Maybe that's a good thing and we'll eventually transition to a society based less on possessions and more on values.

Maybe.

But I guarantee you one thing: Before that happens, a lot more people are going to get trampled.

Time's perspective not always a comfort

It has been 10 months since one man brought my journalism career to a premature end, at least for now. And while I wrote recently about how this man and others in the company were without honor, I think there may actually be more to it.

I think for the last couple of years of my 29 years in the business, I might have been working for a man who was losing his mind.

I really don't know any other way to put it. So many of the things this man did were only borderline rational, and although I always wrote off his aggressiveness and his mood swings to "short man's syndrome," there might have been more to it.

I still remember the way he ranted at me again and again about how he was my boss when he called me in essentially to fire me, even though he extended it over a weekend. And he was completely infuriated when I refused to beg for my job during the second interview when he finished the task.

And when my last four words to him were "Steve, I forgive you," I honestly thought he wanted to hit me.

But the capper on it all came four weeks later. He had confiscated a piece of my personal property -- a Rolodex filled with phone numbers -- and I had asked that he return the Rolodex, even if he wanted to keep all the phone numbers.

My Rolodex came to me via UPS in an unmarked box -- broken into 15 or 16 pieces.

When it happened, I laughed at the thought that a vice president of a major media corporation had been so angered by the fact that I told him I forgave him that he felt the need to completely destroy my property.

But it's actually fairly creepy to realize someone hates you that much, and I'll admit I've had nightmares about it that have recurred time and again this year. I'm sure he would be happy to know that.

But I still forgive him. I've had a very relaxing year, and I've spent a lot more time with my lovely wife than I could when I was commuting 86 miles a day. My blood pressure is back to normal for the first time in a few years, which is also good. I'm pretty sure that's a direct result of not working for him anymore.

I do still have friends there, though, and I worry for them. I'm sure he isn't getting any better, and as the economy has turned down, he probably is feeling a lot more pressure.

I hope he can get some help.

I may be going back to work soon. I don't need to work, but I hate to see all my years in the newspaper business end on that note. If I do accept a job, though, I'm going to make sure of two things.

The people I work for need to be honorable -- and sane.