Greetings. I've never flown on a private jet. I assume that they're very nice. I have flown in a small private prop plane once many, many years ago. I felt like I was in an original Volkswagen Bug with wings. I didn't enjoy it.

I also flew several times in Digital Equipment Corp's helicopters eons back, when they had their own gate labeled "digital" at Logan. You'll recall DEC used the choppers to bounce people between their various local facilities. It was fascinating. DEC of course made some bad business decisions and no longer exists (twice removed!)

The news channels are all abuzz about how the banks who received the bailout billions are still paying and perking their execs like happy days are here again, and their fleets of corporate jets are still crisscrossing the skies. Meanwhile, many in Congress wanted the auto companies to file chapter 11 -- as if most people would buy a car from a company that had done so -- fat chance. Today we hear that the Japanese auto firms, which Congress kept pointing to as their example of doing things right, are also in trouble. Darn it, there goes that talking point, Congressman Blather.

For those of us who live hand to mouth, for whom a trip to Target or Walmart is a somewhat special treat, and just keeping the utilities running is a continuing nightmare, the attitudes of the "privileged class" with their limos and chauffeurs are as far removed from our daily existence as Alpha Centauri.

Don't get me wrong. If someone has earned their money in a useful way they should be free to spend it in any legal manner that they wish. If they want to buy a 767 and convert it into a flying techno-party platform, more power to them. Their money, their choices.

But it's a different story when corporate funds are involved, especially at companies who are not doing well, not to mention firms who have had to beg the taxpayers to keep them from drowning in the muck of their own bad decisions.

The behavior of the banking industry in the current financial crisis, in league with Treasury and Congress, is perhaps the best recent example of how a certain class of persons feel that they have special positions of entitlement, that they're just better than the hoi polloi with whom they mix as little as possible. Particularly noteworthy are the excuses made that even as their very existence has come to depend on the government bailout, these firms are still flying their jets, claiming that "security requirements" make that necessary for their execs.

Of course in most cases that's a flat out lie. They simply don't want to rub shoulders with the unwashed masses in overloaded security lines, cramped terminals, and commercial jets. At least be honest about it, for goodness sake! And if you can't stand flying with the ordinary folks, at least use your personal money to escalate into the private jet regime. Now we, the taxpayers, are paying for those private flights for the banking elite -- and don't buy for a split second their new excuse that they're using "different money" for the planes.

The spending of corporate monies in such wasteful manners is difficult to condone even in good times. It's impossible to condone in "ordinary" bad times. And in times like today, it's simply criminal.

We need to convert some "perk talk" into "perp walks" ...

--Lauren--