Friday, December 12, 2008

Train wrecks continue

Some amusing news lately from the heights of the big-time money business, what's with the guy caught up in Canada pretending to be someone else and then the guy who apparently scammed $50bn, mostly from a bunch of rich people [where else are you gonna be able to scam that kind of money?]. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, writing in Vanity Fair, outlines the twisted path that has led us to this pass, with special lumps for Henry Paulson and especially for Alan Greenspan, whose reputation has slid faster than the DJIA. Stiglitz writes
What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were made at every fork in the road—we had what engineers call a “system failure,” when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions produce a tragic result. …

Read all here. I hope the anti-labor undertone I hear in some of the talk on TV isn't an indication that the plutocrats are going for the coup de grace, hoping to finish off the beat-up remnants of what was once the finest working class in the world. The oligarchs might be surprised if they push the theme of class warfare too hard and actually get some class warfare instead of the cowed acquiescence that they've had for twenty or thirty years.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Right arm, bro. The mean seed in the auto-bailout fiasco is the cynical attempt to bash the auto unions, decreeing one-world wages there as exist in the non-unionized south. No such attempt is made in the $700 billion bailout of the white-collar elites, whose parachutes of gold and platinum salaries are not mentioned...

Anonymous said...

So I assume since he scammed only "rich people" it is okay? Typical socialist attitude.

Anonymous said...

Damn straight. As a hard-scrabble folksinger once intoned, "Eat the rich." With a nice chianti...

The Loon said...

and some fava beans. Then burn their bones for boiler fuel … green but we'll hope not too renewable.
Geez: You're funny.