May 21, 2007 5:32 AM

The Return of Gordon Gekko & Bluestar Airlines

There's a scene in Oliver Stone's 1987 epic film Wall Street that sticks in the craw of anyone who watches that movie. As melodramatic violins play, young broker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is shown into a wood-paneled corporate conference room where an assembled group of lawyers and executives are tearing apart Bluestar Airlines. This is the fictional air carrier (not to be confused with the recently launched Greek airline by the same name) Fox's father works at as a mechanic, and which Fox tried to "save" by having his boss Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) buy. But Gekko, a caricature of a corporate barbarian, is too greedy to try to save the airline, and instead tricks Fox into helping him acquire it so that he can destroy it and the lives of its workers - all while clearing a handsome profit for himself. Unfortunately, much the same destructive reverse Robin Hood-ism seems to be happening today at Northwest Airlines. The only difference is that there's no secret trickery - it's all out in the open, with the U.S. Government cheering it all on.

Buried in the 14th paragraph of a USA Today story about the air carrier's bankruptcy proceedings, we get this nugget:

"All of Northwest's large unions objected in court to the executive compensation plan, but their objections were overruled. On Friday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Allan Gropper left intact the plan that could deliver to 400 executives stock in the reorganized company worth $297 million over four years. Northwest CEO Doug Steenland alone could get an estimated $26.6 million. Workers, however, over the next five years will get back 'maybe 20% of what we gave up,' through approved bankruptcy claims against Northwest and a new profit-sharing plan, says Capt. Dave Stevens, head of the Air Line Pilots Association unit at Northwest...Management will see pay that was cut during the bankruptcy restored, will keep raises they received in the interim, plus get bonuses and stock in Northwest...Northwest is saving $100 million a year by freezing workers' defined-benefit pension plans."

In Wall Street, Fox realizes he erred in ever trusting Gekko, and proceeds to heroically trick Gekko into selling off Bluestar Airlines before he destroys it (though he does this by breaking all sorts of SEC laws and eventually ends up in the slammer).

Sadly, this real-life drama isn't going to end with any similar heroic, last-minute save because such heroics are no longer really possible. In the real world, our economy has been rigged by laws and regulations to encourage this kind of unbridled greed. As we see, through bankruptcy courts, Uncle Sam has happily approved the scheme - a government seal of approval to crush workers while enriching the very executives who ran the company into the ground in the first place. And though Northwest may be emerging from bankruptcy, stock analysts say its move to simultaneously enrich executives while shafting workers - and the consequent resentment that comes from such a move among rank-and-file employees - could undercut the company for the long-haul.

The result is a double whammy - ripped off workers and a dysfunctional airline. The only ones who make out well from the deal are the fat cat execs who orchestrated it.