A day’s diary from a US CEO during the Corona crisis

March 23, 2020

by Ramin Mazaheri exclusive for The Saker Blog

So there I was again on the “Job Creator’s Red-Eye” (NYC to Silicon Valley) – the typical route for us bigwig CEOs – and I got to wondering: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

I’m not prepared for something like this. But after the stock market crashed – the fastest 30% sell-off ever – and I survived my suicide attempt, I decided to bravely take on the challenge.

My psychiatrist said that my suicidal thoughts may diminish if I kept a diary. I decided to publish one day from my diary below, because when the smoke clears and the Mainstream Media decides, correctly, that our nation’s CEOs were the real heroes of this crisis, then such historical documents will prove indispensable for inspiring future little CEOs.

A crisis day among America’s bankocracy – excuse me – vanguard party:

08:00: I always get excited in a crisis – every day

A day’s diary from a US CEO during the Corona crisis

is full of fun! I call in my servants and tell them that to me they are family, but half of them are fired until further notice. That got the blood moving!

08:14 – After my crocodile tears stop (I know: it’s bad form to show emotions in front of the help), I tell my remaining staff to immediately go to the grocery store and buy as much food as possible for me to hoard. I insist they go with the reusable bags, because I’m a responsible citizen.

08:33 – A concerned neighbour has kindly left a care package in my driveway. It’s not a lasagna – it’s profits from stocks unloaded after a heads-up call from Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic senator from California.

08:43 – Check in on three of my kids to make are they are e-learning at home. They insist that e-commerce is the same thing. I agree – they need to learn how to navigate the modern economy in order to spend our money correctly. I don’t know why their mothers – my second and fourth wives – keep telling them I’m a bad father?

09:17 – I make a blog post, because everyone is now, but also because everyone wants to know a CEO’s inner thoughts. I inform the workers in my restaurant corporations that to me they are family, but half of them are fired until further notice. And, no, they cannot take the perishable food as severance pay – that would set a precedent, and it’s all about precedent in English Common Law. We simply must preserve order and law, except in countries with Islamic finance regulations.

10:24 – I contact my mistress and say I’d like to see her and watch a movie together to relax. She says no time for Netflix – she has to quarantine and chill. Ok, but why did she choose my Malibu property to chill at? I don’t want to be stuck in New York City now! Honestly, for the past year she hasn’t required a global pandemic just to find an excuse to avoid seeing me. 

11:03 – How many phone calls are we all making, now that we’re stuck inside? My calls are pretty typical: Fire, sell, fire, sell, sell, fire, wire transfer offshore, etc.

11:37 – My housekeeper shows up for work. What the hell is she doing here, with all the nasty surfaces she touches? As I am pelting her with rocks (imported from Mt. Fuji) while chasing her away she is hollering about her back pay. Her back pay? She’ll be lucky if she gets any front pay, endangering me like that!

12:02 – I feel guilty about all the hoarding.

12:02:04 – Feeling has passed.

12:15 – Feinstein calls me, worried about the loss of tax revenue due to the shutdowns. I tell her: “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” She hangs up, satisfied.

13:59 – CNN ends their news program with a brief clip about the huge spike in unemployment claims. More fake news. Why don’t they give us some news we care about, just for a change?

14:00 – Met with lawyer. He says my idea about suing Trump for negligence over not stopping the spread of a biological disease won’t stand up in court. I ask him: then why did CNN spend the previous 58 minutes talking about it, huh?

16:11 – Thinking about the historical gravity of the situation. The Bubonic Plague – how did European society protect the Medicis and their banker friends? Why haven’t I read about this in The New York Times yet? Surely that report is just getting an extra-good edit….

17:07 – Get a prison call from my good friend Harvey Weinstein – he has corona. That guy just can’t catch a break! This is why I’m not religious: bad things always happening to good people.

17:20 – What a great day! I got on the Job Creators’ Red Eye: in first-class we’re having baked Alaska and winged pheasant under glass (Do some pheasants not have wings? Sounds like poor people’s food.). Pretty appalling cutbacks, sure, but it’s a crisis.

Now normally I go back into coach and chit-chat with one of my workers, Fazlollah. Nobody can pronounce that, much less spell it, so we all just call him “Lefty”.

So imagine my surprise when Lefty had the gall to visit first-class uninvited.

Lefty said: “The pilot has quarantined himself in the cockpit and the stewardesses said they got a text saying they are all laid off. There’s no food back in coach.”

You can imagine my response: “Lefty, you self-centered, obstinate, foolish, degenerate!” I screamed. “In any crisis you do NOT bother first-class with your problems! Get the hell out of here and go fear God!”

These Middle Eastern types (though he could be Pakistani)… they can be so, so overdramatic, eh? Fazlollah immediately executed a standing broad jump of eight feet to within an inch of my chin, in total violation of current social distancing rules (see – he really is self-centered!). He told me that if I ever talked to him like that again I’d have to explain to my fifth wife how his shoe got wedged between my ears.

Fazlollah has big feet. I’d fire him for insubordination, but who’d do the engineering?

He took my winged pheasant – he didn’t even leave me the wings! He said there were kids were hungry back in coach.

What a fool – you’ll never be a good CEO without knowing when to hoard, which is: always. Fearing rioting I had slipped a mickey into the champagne of my other mistress, who was next to me – she was out like a light. The winged pheasant was really tasty.

18:53 – While being chauffeured home from the airport I look out the window and realize: I have never seen so many fat Americans taking a walk. This crisis may reduce health care costs, not raise them!

19:25 – Home for second dinner. What do you think hoarding is?

20:15 – My third kid from my first wife is there. She is having issues with the crisis and wants to talk. My God, this quarantine is a French hell. Sartre said hell is other people, and he wasn’t stuck with a spoiled American teenager for eternity!

21:00 – I call it day on work after my last decision: firing some more of my corporation’s divisions to keep stock prices up. Hey, I’m an economic patriot. It was via the usual method: darts at a dartboard.

22:05 – Leave the house to see mistress #3. Hey, don’t judge me if I break quarantine sometimes – if it’s a good reason it’s ok. Let’s not criminalise normal CEO/French presidential behavior.

23:30 – Reflect on the day. “Basically – it was weird.” Funny, my third kid said the same thing after dinner – she’s more well-spoken than I thought.

23:45 – It occurs to me that tremendous economic damage is being done by the stay-at-home orders. This damage won’t really be done to me – of course, I’ll be made whole by Western central bankers. But it does give a thinking and feeling man pause for concern.

23:46 – Sleeping pill kicked in. Out like a light.

I dreamt that I was Shiva, destroyer of worlds. Abraham was there, puny and pathetic. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter towers over him holding a banner reading “Creative Destruction”. He smiles to me and I am illuminated by his genius. I go flying over America – I can’t tell if the lines are for bread, unemployment or coronavirus tests. After a while I am brought to earth by Oliver Twist, who appears out of nowhere to ask me for more gruel. I tell him to get the hell back to England, as this is the US. I see Bernie Sanders starting a new, third party – the “US Menshevik Party”. Dreams are so hard to understand! My dream, which had now lasted 7 minutes, is interrupted by TV commercials – conditioning/habit, I guess? Alan Dershowitz then tells me whatever a CEO does cannot be illegal because it is in the best interests of the US. More illumination and flying.

Great dream! Who says people are over-stressed now?

But I woke up weeping, worried about this month’s heart surgery of long-time JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Sure he may have helped provoke the Great Recession but he also shepherded the 1% out of it too – we simply must have his leadership should Congress actually pass this socialist, commie, anarchist “people’s QE”. Think of the precedent it could set!

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the upcoming ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’.

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