I’m just an ordinary man who does not have what it takes to be a tycoon

  I always wanted to be a big business tycoon, but I was never good with numbers.

  I did all right on tests, but I realized at an early age I’d never be a Wall Street wizard. I mean, not just anyone can run a multibillion-dollar corporation, right?

  Take General Motors, for instance. It’s America’s great automobile behemoth with few rivals in the world. Or at least it was until it was tripped up in the recession. Since then its fall has been shadowed in the press only because there are so many other stories of business calamity boiling. General Motors, king of car kings, is begging for $16.6 billion in addition federal bailout dollars and is dumping subsidiary brands  -- like Hummer, for instance -- it should have scrapped years ago. In December, GM signed up for $13.4 billion in loan guarantees.

  It turns out the brain trust at GM didn’t see high gas prices coming, didn’t see sporty changes in design coming, didn’t see the rise of green technology coming, didn’t see global warming as a political hot potato coming, didn’t even see America’s pig-faced international reputation coming.

  GM, like its cohorts in the U.S. car business, was living in denial, fattening up its management and whining that the unions were hurting the big fat bottom line. It was joined in the chorus by Chrysler, which these days is seeking an additional $5 billion to go with the $4 billion in loans it scooped up in 2008.

  Between the two companies, 50,000 jobs have been cut in recent months.

  But it’s not the jobs at the bottom that little capitalist boys dream of. It’s the ones at the top that make them dizzy. And the ones at the top remain surprisingly secure with fat salaries and benefits and platinum parachutes and absolutely no chance of the CEO’s job or Vice President of Air Filters position going to a Mexican guy with a superior work ethic and one-tenth the labor costs. Funny how that works.

  If I’d had any real business acumen, I might have grown up to be a Texas billionaire like Robert Allen Stanford. The name just drips trust and confidence, doesn’t it? According to one biographical note, Stanford is fond of cricket and owned Stanford International Bank of Antigua.

  According to Forbes, Stanford’s net worth is $2 billion – and that’s just his own money.

  That doesn’t include the $8 billion the stammering calculator-punchers at the Securities and Exchange Commission contend Stanford stole through a complex matrix of deception associated with his bank. This news is sure to shift the balance of unabashedly gushing stories about Stanford that popped up in recent years in the nation’s business press.

  And speaking of trouble in the publicity department, casino mogul and billionaire celebrity Donald Trump has once again abandoned ship as Trump Entertainment Resorts filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the third time. Trump makes no secret of his business brilliance – he’s published several books under his own name espousing his consummate savvy in the art of the deal – and in recent years has still had time to star in his own television show.

  But whether it’s the learned men at Bank of America, who accepted $45 billion in bailout money, or the sage suits at Well’s Fargo, who cut us a break by only grabbing $25 billion, the bottom line is these incredible captains of American industry are undoubtedly as smart as their most ingratiating biographers would have us believe.

  They have so much, and are in line for more, for the simple fact that they had so much before.

  To the billionaires go the billions while the squares go to the poor house.

  At least I know my place. I know I don’t have the stuff it takes to be a big business tycoon.

  Beyond lacking their keen intellect and business acumen, I blush much too easily.