Joe Klein just doesn’t get it:
Again, I’ll repeat: the important distinction here is between the business community, which should be encouraged to create more jobs, and the financial community, which should be shamed for its casino-gaming shenanigans and kept away from the inner circles of economic policy-making.
You can’t shame the shameless. You just can’t. How do you shame people who write shit like this? How do you shame people who have their salaries tripled during a depression and whine about not getting a Christmas bonus? How do you shame Rick Santelli, who a week after the markets are showered with hundreds of billions pitched a fit about a few billion to help homeowners? How do you shame Jim Cramer, who is absolutely destroyed by Jon Stewart but still engages in the same bullshit every day on his show?
Shaming these people is impossible. You want them to change their behavior, you start putting the pricks in jail, seizing their assets, fining them, and then making sure they never work in finance again.
Teri
My Dad (the life long Democrat) asked me if I thought the retiring politicians are some of the 2000 bank accounts that are going to be exposed by wikileaks? Hmmm….makes you wonder?
Zam
But they are in the Private Sector! Therefore what they do is infinitely more valuable than those lazy teachers and their unions.
BGinCHI
Shame is what working class people do, which is how your collar gets blue.
freelancer
Aimai could have told you that much, and probably without the rise in blood pressure.
If you haven’t listened to the This American Life episode “Crybabies“, you’re in for a jaw-dropping listen.
Kryptik
Again, Economic Calvinism. They’re rich because they’re chosen by God, and the poor proles below them simply aren’t loved enough by God, otherwise they’d be rich. What use is shame if you honestly think that people are only rich if they deserve to be, and poor if they deserve to be?
kdaug
That Joke Line doesn’t get it is unremarkable.
That you believe the government is going to go after its’ paymasters is.
Per @Teri:, the Wikileaks exposure might provide some impetus, but without some good old-fashioned pitchforks and torches nothing is going to happen.
licensed to kill time
__
Expect a knock on your door from the Civility Police, Señor Cole. You have been forewarned. o_O
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Softy. The wingers aren’t willing to wait for one, why should you?
c u n d gulag
Shooting them is too kind.
Take their money away. Nothing for the family.
Then, draw and quarter them on TV, and then leave their heads in the sun to bake and fester, until only their grinning skulls are left as reminders to the rest of the greedy bastards.
And even this it far tooooooooo gentle for these souless creatures in human form.
Either that, of stuff them with rich food like geese on TV until their livers explode. Then, see the above…
Calouste
I’ll take a Jokeline shaming attempt in exchange for $100 million. Heck, I’ll even admit to be ashamed if there’s another $50 million on the table.
Thing is that the rewards are too big to not game the cas1no. Even if you do get caught and get your assests stripped, if you have done things ok, you’ve moved enough money to your family to be secure for the rest of your life. Even if that only means buying your kids a private education and an Ivy League degree. And that is if the judges lawyers you can afford can’t keep you from getting convicted in the first place, or get you off with a token sentence.
Shooting them, if you can get them convicted, is really the only deterrent. It’s the one area where I think outsourcing to China is a good thing.
david mizner
Careful, JC. When someone finally goes off half-cocked an kills a banskter, this post will be cited as a cause.
MikeBoyScout
It is called JUSTICE, and it is past due.
Martin
@licensed to kill time: What? Do it in Utah where firing squad is still part of the capital punishment standard.
Cole hasn’t suggested anything that is actually illegal in this country.
scav
Definitely take away all the money. Dress them in last years Walmart cast-offs with visible brands. Chain them to the curb outside fashionable restaurants and night-clubs with little tin cups to rattle in order to earn their snacks.
Southern Beale
Yes, well, that would be … impolite. And inconvenient … and uncivil …
HeartlandLiberal
Oh dear, oh dear.
Apparently the toning down of the rhetoric part has not sunk in yet??
Of course now the Reich Wing can point at this post by John and suddenly all evil of the LEFT is explained, and all equivalencies are, well, equivalent.
licensed to kill time
@Martin: You know that, and I know that but we also know that nuance/context does not appear to be in the Civility Police vocabulary.
Anyway, it was just a gentle tease, and a chance to use the term Civility Police. I’m on board with the Cole Solution.
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
Wait. People still read Swampland? I didn’t even know Time was still publishing it.
.
Bret
I’ll allow a trial only if they’re limited to public defenders.
Teri
@kdaug: Only if you can get enough people to pay attention and not get distracted by American Idol
Svensker
Amen. Sing it, Mr. Cole.
TBogg
I guess this means that I will be handing over my Moore Award tiara to you next year at the Sully’s Ceremony
HyperIon
Cole wrote:
I wish you wouldn’t write stuff like that.
It accomplishes nothing positive.
It’s not funny.
dollared
How about warrantless wiretaps, rendition to Egypt and military commissions? They are citizens, after all.
John Cole
Fine, I removed it. Who knew the death penalty after a trial was so controversial!
PeakVT
the important distinction here is between the business community … and the financial community
Another thing that Joke Line isn’t getting is that the CEOs that run non-financial businesses just aren’t all that different from the banksters. Just look at pre-bailout GM. Red-Ink Rick survived for years while GM’s market share cratered. The incentive structure for all of them is screwed up.
Bret
@John Cole: Fuck that. Put it back. These people are literally ruining our society and they aren’t accountable to anyone.
General Stuck
@John Cole:
I always go with “public hangings” for this type metaphor. It has a more legal smeagle sound to it. Kind of like “trollop” for forbidden words, that has taken some getting used to, but works just danday.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
I would prefer a fair trial followed by serious prison time.
But they’re really pushing for a “Come the revolution, they’re first against the wall” response.
Starfish
After the state dinner for Hu Jintao, I looked at pictures of the attendees. Had I been invited, I do not know who I would prefer to throw up on out of Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, and Tom Friedman. My husband told me that this is why I am not invited to state dinners.
My mom mentioned the rumor in comment 1 when the names of people who had the Swiss bank accounts were going to be released. She was under the impression that they were not released because some of our political leaders were on the list.
General Stuck
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
I don’t think banksters get serious prison time. More like an extended Midnight at The Oasis.
Ash Can
Hell, just taking away their damned bonuses and cutting their salaries would get the job done — in other words, running the damned banks the way every other business in the nation (that wants to stay in business) runs itself.
dollared
No, don’t shoot them. Just raise the top marginal rate to 50% and tax the carry as ordinary income. I’ve been told that this would mark the End of Civilization.
JWL
Klein gets it. He knows the score.
He draws a paycheck from a corporation under stipulation that he bamboozle and bullshit. Thus, he expresses wide-eyed virgin innocence at the goings on in the big bad world. It’s his schtick. Not every catspaw can be a Glenn Beck or Chris Wallace.
goblue72
@John Cole: I’m completely with you on this one. I have personally, on more than one occassion, suggested to friends that we should literally burn down the houses of the Wall Street investment bankers and hedge fund managers. Even suggested once in these parts. I was roundly excoriated for being uncivil.
War isn’t pretty. Its war. And we have been in the middle of a class war in this country for quite some time. Today in the National Journal, Jim Tankersley has this completely clueless long form report up about how “the 2000s didn’t create any jobs, the jobs are all gone, no one knows why the economy hasn’t created any real jobs in the last 15 years while corporate America grows richers, hoocoodanode, yadda yadda”. As if it all just happened by magic.
We’ve been skivved, shysted, hoisted, gutted and skinned. Last time this happened at the beginnings of the LAST century our labor forebears had the good sense to organize and grab brickbats and monkey wrenches.
The rich don’t have any shame, but they do know fear. There’s a reason almost none of them volunteer to serve in the Armed Forces. Its time the rest of us reminded them.
dollared
@goblue72: This. Again and again until it actually sinks in.
stickler
goblue is right: fear of the working class was what made the 1930s different than today.
Well, that and Joe Stalin’s USSR. FDR could say to the rich, “Well, it’s either this New Deal, or the plebes might want to try Bolshevism.”
The industrialists and banksters knew damn good and well what had happened to the plutocrats and aristocrats of Russia.
Obama’s Justice Department has sure been quiet when it comes to financial fraud. Crying shame, that.
SensesFail
Excellent post, John!
piratedan
well part of the issue is how the damn game has been rigged. People putting short term profits and investor dividends as having more innate value than companies that actually make stuff and develop the capacity to do more. So that the guys that game the system and set the rules see no reason not to profit from that said same advantage and then applaud themselves for having the foresight to take advantage of their own benefits.
These guys have no appreciation for anybody else and equate their abilities to play the system as being some sort of moral superiority. People are just numbers of jobs that take up overhead, its better for the company to cut those people free for the sake of profit.
Nick
even then, they’ll just use their last millions to elect a friendly government to pardon them.
You don’t get them by shaming them, or by putting them in jail. You bankrupt them.
Captain C
@stickler:
Eric Holder is by far the lowest profile Attorney General that I can remember, and I can remember AGs back to Meese.
Tax Analyst
@Starfish:
He’s right, ya’ know.
Tax Analyst
I went to that “Wall Street Oasis” link. I just loved this part:
Ooh, I’m so afraid!
Jeeheeheezus! Without their spending all we’ll have to subsist on will be the fumes from their noxious air of entitlement.
Julie
How does Joe Klein ignore the fact that GE Capital was the biggest winner at the TARP casino?
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062802955.html