Failure Socialism

Robert Reich calls it "lemon socialism," the government takes over the industries that are in trouble.

I think the term is too generous. It is "failure socialism," these very highly paid and coddled clowns ran their industries into the ground by their own bad judgments and we, the taxpayers, have to rescue them.

On one hand, I have no problem with the idea that the government should do something to stave off the New and Improved Great Depression.

On the other hand, I really want to see the clowns who did this suffer, such as the management of banks like WaMu and Countrywide, who really pushed the junk mortgages. (I'd advocate shooting all of the crooked mortgage brokers involved, except that I doubt if there would be enough honest mortgage brokers left to fill a poker table.) I'm not talking about out-and-out crooks like Madoff, he'll go to prison, but the jerks who invented securitized mortgages and credit default swaps and all of the other fraudulent financial shenanigans that have brought the entire planet to the edge of a precipice.

I'm also bringing into this the idiot analysts who rated the stocks of companies so that the only thing that counted were quarterly profits and the large "institutional" investors who bought huge blocks of stocks and pressured the companies to focus on short-term profits, with no concern for the future. It is an open secret that the Japanese carmakers have very long-term plans, but it seems from their actions that our own carmakers aren't thinkinbg past next year's models and that is a result of the pressures from Wall Street to think short-term.

If we do get into the business of really taking heads over this, though, the first two up the stairs to the guillotine should be Alan Greenspan and Phil Gramm.

There should be some real pain meted out to those whose fecklessness brought us to this point.