xmlns:og='http://ogp.me/ns#'. The Digibandit: Nov 8, 2007

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Us Corporate Failures Should Consider Suicide

BEIJING (Reuters) - The boss of a Chinese toy manufacturing company involved in a Mattel recall after its products were found to contain excessive lead levels has hanged himself, Chinese media reported on Monday.

Zhang Shuhong, a Hong Kong businessman in his 50s and boss of the Lida Toy Company in the southern province of Guangdong, was found dead in his factory workshop on Saturday, the semi-official Southern Metropolitan Daily said.

About 1.5 million preschool toys made by Lida Toy, a Foshan-based contract manufacturer for Mattel Inc.'s Fisher-Price unit, were recalled across the globe by the U.S. company last week.

Zhang is my kind of guy! No excuses and no one hundred million payout deal for fucking up. He saves the wife and kids years of listening to his recriminations and crybaby crapola - the stock holders save a huge pile of money; and the public and his financial cronies get an object lesson in real old fashioned accountability.

Hey -- Roman generals fell on their swords and Samurai warriors opened up their guts with a knife! --The least that those pampered failures at Enron or Citigroup or those Savings and Loan guys could do is follow the wonderful and ballsy example of Zhang Shuhong and go out and hang themselves.

And it should be mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission that every board room of the fortune five hundred companies and all Hedge Fund executive offices have a picture prominently displayed on their wall of Zhang Shuhong swinging in the breeze. (that is, of course, until we build up a domestic rogues gallery of corporate swingers (pun))

Which one of you guys wants to be first? -- C'mon - Go out in style!

My Idea To Save The Writers and The Entertainment Industry

There are now thousands of people walking picket lines and sitting in bars - creatively bullshitting one another -- who are usually busy bullshitting the rest of us -- putting down the words and phrases that keep us all from having to think about our shitty jobs –wives –responsibilities and fears and inadequacies -- death and dying - rejection and insecurities -- starving children in Dar-fur and getting a poisoned ball bearing in your guts and your legs blown into Hoboken by some illiterate moron trying to get into heaven.

Their bosses and financiers who control the entertainment distribution pipelines are like any other greedy businessman out to screw the little guy; only in this case the little guy can turn his energies into escapist comedy and tragedy instead of cleaning out a bedpan or driving a truck –so he gets more attention from us. (Karl Marx didn’t like that)

The way to deal with the networks is NOT to deal with them!

The writers should begin by creating a bunch of “Writer Blogs” -on which they can create a 24/7 parade of funny and dramatic programming (like one big SNL show) that encompasses the whole spectrum of entertainment programming.

Create synergy with You Tube ( and the whole UGC universe) for visual support and Current TV for news coverage and -- the whole collaboration could become :

“The Peoples Television Network”

And when it gets a billion hits worldwide –which it most certainly would - in come the advertisers. Then project expands into separate programs by entertainment genre across the Internet -- and the decline of the network dinosaurs will be accelerated by about a decade.

The hedge fund monsters will pour financing in -and actors and directors and all the necessary support folks will eventually follow the bucks and flock to the enterprise. Hell –there’s enough creative and production folks out of work at any given time in Hollywood to staff a dozen networks at a moments notice.

And the suits and bean counters at the networks will all be sitting around in shock wondering what they used to do – and why --and what the fuck went wrong?.

So start doing what you Writers do --Write! --entertain us - and laugh all the way to the bank.

And then YOU can start exploiting the NEW little guys -- it's the American way.