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In the 1970s, Lily Tomlin developed an iconic comic character she named Ernestine--a telephone clerk who took perverse pleasure from hectoring customers. Her character was a perfect portrayal of the arrogance of AT&T, the monopolistic telephone giant of that day. In one skit on on the TV show, Laugh-In, Tomlin had Ernestine delivering a TV pitch for the corporation:

"A gracious hello," she cheerfully began, speaking directly into the camera. "Here at the Phone Company, we handle 84 billion calls a year. So, we realize that every so often, you can't get an operator, or for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order, or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make. We don't care!"

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Name those greedheads!

By Jim Hightower - Mon., 4/6/09

Last month, I asked my radio listeners to come up with new words to describe the abominable sense of self-entitlement that presently afflicts Wall Street bankers. I noted that terms like "greedy," "shameful," and "narcissistic" were way too mild to do the job. Here are a few of their creations (excluding numerous four-letter offerings):

Banksters
Snout-n-troughers
Greasels
Megalomoneyacs
Mammonists
SocioMBApath
Gruppies
Leechengrubbers
Avaricetocrats
Conivoraceous
Amoral rapacious financial terrorists
Sons of syphilitic goats (apparently a severe insult in the Middle East)

Then there's the fellow who proposed an existing term--"psychotic."

Filed Under: Corporate greed, Money, Wealth

July's Lowdown

Big biz wants to own the information superhighway while We the People bump along the backroads