THE WILE E. COYOTES OF WALL STREET

Now that our new President, Ernst Stavro Blohard, has chosen his Cabinet, advisors, Supreme Court nominee, and major policy initiatives, the curtain has been pulled back to fully reveal the corporate marionette strings controlling his administrations true agenda. Who could possibly still believe Mr. Trumps friend-of-the-working-man spiel except for well, the very people who voted for a county fair huckster to be their President in the first place? Thats why its up to grass roots organizations like Indivisible Groups including mine in Sherman Oaks, California to ride Congress, the one branch of government we can control, until we can retake it on behalf of the majority of Americans. In a way, were protecting some of the most powerless Americans from themselves as well as from the Powers That Be.

But in another way, were also protecting some of the most powerful from themselves, too. Because the fact is, the Powers That Be be pretty damn dumb.

Ayn Rand, the Joan of Arc of the right-wing, got it half right in her unreadable 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. The world is dominated by a relative handful of high-achieving business titans. The part she got wrong is that theyre mostly a bunch of idiots. Not idiots in the sense of not knowing how to cheat on their companys taxes or screw over a subcontractor or outmaneuver a government regulator or bullshit their shareholders. Idiots in the Big Picture sense, in the sense of not being able to see the forest for the trees cut down to print their Quarterly Corporate Earnings Reports. Masters Of The Universe theyre not unless there was a He-Man character named Superficialtor.

Im a middle-class kid from Alabama who managed to become a mid-level TV writer. Now if Id been in the insurance or freight or oil business, Id have been lucky to meet the CEO for a 2 second handshake once a year at the office Christmas party. But the guys who run gigantic media companies love to hang out with the wacky creative types who work for them, probably in the hope of gathering show biz stories to impress the CEOs of relatively boring insurance-freight-oil-tech-finance-pharma businesses as they all suck down $100 tequila shots in a Staples Center skybox. Anyway, as a result, Ive spent hours in rooms with major movers and shakers, pretending to think they were smart while secretly wondering: This clown is [fill in the blank power player]?

Trust me. These were not people youd want to hear give a TED talk. What would they talk about? How to spell TED?

How is this phenomenon possible? Wrong question.

How is it not?

You know the Peter Principle: In any organization, workers tend to rise to the level of their incompetence. And Parkinsons Law: Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. Consider this then Andys Axiom: The people who get to the top of corporations have one and only one common skill: getting to the top of corporations.

Those who most expediently climb the corporate ladder are often geniuses when it comes to Backslapping, Backstabbing, Ass Kissing, Underling Bullying, Family Ignoring, Taking Credit for Other Peoples Successes, Ducking Responsibility for Their Own Failures, and Pretending to be Friends with People Theyll Dump As Soon As They Find Someone More Useful. Consider your own history as an employee. If youve worked for a big company, was it usually the smartest, most talented, hardest-working co-workers who moved up? Ill bet you and your peers spent a lot of time saying, He got the promotion? or They gave that position to her? before heading back to your cubicles to redo your resumes and then hitting Chilis for Happy Hour. So why would we assume these Sammy-Glicks-on-steroids are somehow found out and dismissed before they reach the top rung? In fact, its those very characteristics that lead them to their empyrean heights. And then, Wile E. Coyote-style, send them windmilling into thin air

Because once theyve reached the top, they cant climb over people anymore; they have to actually do something. Like run a major business about which they know surprisingly little because theyve spent their careers doing what they do best. Getting to where theyve gotten. And so there they perch, making incredibly stupid decisions until they finally pull the ripcord of their golden parachute, and the next arachnid of empty ambition scuttles into that 63rd floor corner office.

So if, just if, Andys Axiom is right, it might explain

The 2007 Great Recession. Which occurred despite being fairly predictable to any average bank officer who knows how to assess a prospective mortgage applicant, or anyone who can guess that real estate values will not keep rising at a 20% rate forever. Meanwhile, the number of Wile E. Coyotes of Wall Street who got it right? Lets see um, none?

The American automobile industrys decline. Maybe it had less to do with the right-wing trope of the UAWs comparatively high wages and benefits than with thick-witted upper-level management decisions. Like oh, say, relentlessly continuing to design, greenlight and build gas-guzzlers long after the 1970s oil embargo signaled that Japanese economy cars were the wave of the future? The word duh comes to mind.

The shrinking middle class. Henry Ford, hardly a liberal, paid his factory workers a higher wage than his competitors for a logical reason: so they could afford to buy the Model Ts he was selling. But many brainiacs of the modern business world, as exemplified by Trumps laughably-inappropriate choice for Secretary of Labor Andrew Puzder, proudly underpay their employees until they cant afford to buy each others companys products! Well played, gentlemen!

The lunacy of the movie business. Pixar is by far the most successful studio in the history of Hollywood (since 1995: 16 blockbuster hits, 1 flop). Its also the only studio run by the storytellers who actually know how to make the product the studio sells. Applying the perceived wisdom of the Free Market, every other studio shouldve followed their lead and put actual filmmakers in power rather than corporate functionaries. Yet how many have? Zip.

The current President of the United States.

What do all these scenarios have in common? People in charge making really really stupid decisions. Because theyre hopelessly unqualified to be in the high station they occupy.

So as comfortable as it is for the Left to embrace the conceit of being victimized by masterful, Machiavellian super-villains, its likely, I think, that the Trump-Bannon-Miller troika and their corporate co-conspirators are actually as dumb as they look. Theyve just been working way harder than we have.

Time for us to do more than out-think them. Join an Indivisible Group and get to work.