News comes from Rome that the Pope has named five new saints this week. At least somebody’s hiring in this economy. Maybe the recession is over. Of course all of them are dead. That helps keep the payroll expenses in line.
If you didn’t get your application in because the openings for new saints weren’t posted on Monster.com, don’t feel too bad. These jobs always go to people with connections on the hiring committee. It’s also a pretty tough standard to pull off. In addition to three miracles, you have to have been dead for 100 years. That’s quite a disincentive for most job seekers. You might be able to pad the resume with phony degrees from big-name schools, and the standard for miracles has slipped over time, but it’s hard to fake being dead for 100 years during the interview.
The new saints are from Spain, Poland, and France. But what makes the story interesting locally is that one of the new hires, a Belgium-born guy who did most of his work in a leper colony (it’s politically incorrect to say “leper” anymore, but nobody knows what “Hansen’s disease colony” is) in Hawaii. Father Damien worked on the island of Molokai for many years. He’s supposed to be the new go-to guy for “disoriented youth,” among other troubles. That would truly take the patience of a saint.
But things may be a little awkward on the first day on the job. It turns out that there may be some items missing from the background check. Father Damien, the Catholic priest, appears to have been baptized a Mormon in 1983 in Los Angeles. He had been dead for 90 years by then, but these things happen. My sources at the Vatican tell me that the Pope was more puzzled than angry at the situation. They had to bring in a couple of local missionaries to explain the situation. The two young men from Bountiful called on the Pope and asked, “What do you know about the Mormon Church and would you like to know more?”
In the classic way that a bad new hire begins to unravel, there were even more problems. Not only is Father Damien a Mormon but, according to reports in the Salt Lake Tribune, it turns out he is married, too. Records show that he got hitched back in 2000 in the Jordan River Temple down there in Salt Lake right off I-15. Well, I bet that didn’t come up in the interview. “Tell me about your family” just isn’t one of those questions that the Pope asks a celibate priest when considering him for a promotion. But the process for firing a saint is pretty rough. They have a strong union. There are review committees and a lot of politics involved. They fired St. Christopher years ago, but he still has a big, loyal following.
But it’s a safe bet that St. Damien won’t be getting much of a bonus this year.
Meanwhile, on Wall Street, the bonus bonanza is back in full swing. Goldman Sachs made a zillion dollars this year, including a big chunk of the AIG bailout money that ended up at Goldman because AIG owed them whole lot of cash. I think the figure for their average bonuses worked out to something on the order of $740,000 per employee. Not that the file clerks will be sharing in that. The guys at the top will be rewarded with multiple million-dollar bonus checks. So the whole discussion of compensation is back in the docket.
Goldman’s argument is that if they don’t pay obscene bonuses to their top employees, they will go elsewhere. They will get disgruntled, lose motivation, and end up taking jobs as clerks at 7-Eleven. Since that cash would otherwise be going to the shareholders, it’s a mystery why the shareholders aren’t in open revolt. But it’s awfully hard to see how somebody could pack in $10 or even $100 million a year and feel like he had done anything to earn that. It would be impossible to spend that kind of cash.
It becomes so large that it really loses meaning. If you have 100 times what you need to support even the most lavish of lifestyles, is there any impact of having that increased to 110 times, or reduced to only 95 times what you are capable of spending? All that matters is that yours is bigger than what that putz across the hall got. It would be a full-time job for several people just to burn through that kind of cash. You surely couldn’t spend it alone while holding down the job at Goldman.
Congress is wringing its hands, trying to figure out what to do about it. Here’s an idea: Remember back when the top income-tax bracket was 96 percent?
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.