Madness

Normally I hate to jump on bandwagons, but this whole AIG thing is really pissing me off. I just found out that the nurses union agreed to a wage freeze in an effort to help save money (and stave off layoffs) for the hospital. Meanwhile, those incompetent, unethical bastards at AIG get bonuses for being unable to do their job. And they're getting paid with OUR money. I'm not usually a fan of posses, but I say it's time to break out the pitch forks and torches.

Joel Achenbach, of the Washington Post, really summed it up for me much better than I could, so I'll just quote him. This was following the Cramer-Stewart Smackdown:

Jon Stewart Thwaps Jim Cramer

In exposing Jim Cramer last night, Jon Stewart precisely summarized -- better than anyone I've heard before -- the dark heart of the financial calamity: There was a fake market and a real market. The market we thought we were investing in was a facade for the real market created by, and for the direct benefit of, the money manipulators.

At what point does it become theft? Where are the prosecutions?

The Bernie Madoff case is not truly representative of Wall Street shenanigans (to use Cramer's word), because it was so over the top and outrageous. There was a discussion on the Times site about whether Madoff is the greatest villain in Wall Street history. No: The greatest villain won't get caught. There may not even be a single greatest villain, but rather many people who devoted their intelligence not to helping investors but simply to helping themselves, at whatever downstream cost to the rest of the country and the rest of the world. And I don't want to bail those folks out.

Sure, I think lots of ordinary people got themselves overleveraged and bought too much house and took excessively fancy vacations, etc., but most of them weren't trying to game the system.

It's not clear to me, in principle, why people on Wall Street should make far more money than, say, teachers or nurses. If the answer is they make a lot because they understand finance so well and finance is critical to our economy's health, then it seems they deserve a massive pay cut, if not necessarily, at this point, incarceration.

I was one of the suckers who adherred to the belief that if you worked hard, socked away about 14 percent of your gross income in a 401k, bought and held a few blue-chip stocks well recommended by experts, listened to a financial advisor and put your savings in 529 college accounts, and so on, that over time this conservative and prudent financial plan would reap great rewards. Now I wish I had saved my cash to burn it in my hearth and reduce my heating bills.