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You are an excellent performer? A perfectionist, perhaps?

That's what is wrong with you! If you care to shovel real dough into your coffers, you might do well if you are dumb enough and an enormous loser.

Robert Rubin, former Treasury secretary and former Goldman-Sachs co-chairman, makes a living as a senior counselor and director at Citigroup Inc. these days. While Citigroup's stock has lost 70% in value, good ol' uncle Bob cashed in measly $115 million in pay--excluding stock options--since 1999. Over the past 12 months you, the tax payer, stuffed more than $45 billion dollars up his hapless employer's bottom, and I think that's awfully nice of you.

According to The Wall Street Journal (Nov. 29th, 2008), Rubin claims his role was "peripheral to the bank's main operations." Peripheral to the bank's main operations means he is kinda like selling cigars in the men's room and that's why he is one of the highest paid officials on the street. Rubin didn't want to run any of Citigroup's businesses, and he told colleagues he wanted "more time for activities such as fly fishing." What has he accomplished in his opinion? "It's a funny way to think about it. I think I've been a very constructive part of the Citigroup environment. I have been very involved."

How about you?

Are you involved and a constructive part of your company's environment? Are you blind, deaf, and mute enough to not know what's going on around you? Do you need more time for fly fishing? Can you lie sufficiently to deny responsibility for decisions you have made? Have you actively helped destroy 70% of your employer's assets? Grandpa Robert, for example, was indeed involved in a decision in late 2004 and early 2005 to grow Citigroup's CDO holdings (Collateral Debt Obligations), while the mortgage market was clearly heading South.

See, unlike most of my fellow citizens, I love people like Robert Rubin! I do not begrudge him the $245,000 he made per week for 9 years straight while pissing away his shareholder's savings as sufficiently as he could. And you ought to celebrate this man, as well.

Why?

Because he is living proof that life is unfair. And how is that a good thing? Freedom, Baby, freedom. Freedom EXCLUDES fairness. You can have one or the other, but you cannot have both simultaneously.

The miserable existence of a professional bungler and dumbass like Bob Rubin is an expression of YOUR freedom: the freedom from being equal and from having to share your candy bar with everybody else. Your freedom to earn more money than your neighbor and by Zeus, you do not need to feel guilty about it.

Putz Rubin shows you dollar for dollar that nobody gets paid according to his performance. At least real money has absolutely zero correlation with the quantity or the quality of your output. In other words, you are not only free TO succeed, you are also free FROM succeeding. You may mess up things royally and you still have a chance to end up in the money. Plenty of it, as in Bobby's case.

I don't suggest for you to become an old snake and a quack like Citi-Bob. Maybe you don't find it appealing to lie a lot and to dumb yourself down to shitty Bob's gutter standards. But before you are getting worked up over the Robert Rubins in the world and the sizable chunks of money that is foisted upon these poor guys apparently undeservedly, think again: we don't get in life what we deserve.

You do have options. You may be angry at some people over their salaries or ball your eyes out in mommy's lap and wallow in sadness that you don't have that many chips to play with. Or, you understand Robert Rubin as an inspiration and learn from him that the verb 'to deserve' deserves to be scratched out of your dillweed new age vocabulary. There are individuals who deserve to get knighted by the Queen, but they get gout instead. Huh, well.

I won't have people like Robert Rubin as my friends, and he would never choose to be near me. But his salary and the pathetic ways he "earned" it cannot enrage me. Not at all!

On the contrary, I am ecstatic that money works sort of like God--in mysterious ways--and defies all logic, rational thought, and meticulous calculation. We are addicted to discover the rules and laws our monetary affairs may be based upon, and then Robert-I-screw-you-and-Rub-it-in grins at us from the front page of our favorite rag. Jerks like Rubin are not role models your brats should adore as heroes and yet, they point into the right direction.

If money followed reliable patterns or universal laws, your freedom to make it would be limited. As scary as it doubtlessly is for you and me: we are free to try new things, and the new things are free to develop both ways.

Where there is no guarantee, there is freedom. A whole shitload of it!

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: Now go in peace and buy my damn book already: 'How to Better Hate Your Job.' What the hell are you waiting for?