Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Can't Congress make bankers sweat?
From the RoundTable blog
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Roland Lazenby
Lazenby teaches journalism at Virginia Tech. He is writing a biography of basketball legend Jerry West for Random House.
I understand that it makes great television to have the auto industry executives come begging before Congress. And those same executives make a great piñata so that seemingly everyone can subsequently bash them because they failed to offer a "business plan" for what they would do with the $25 billion they wanted from the government to keep that portion of American manufacturing afloat.
Can you fathom the stupidity of these auto executive types? Just because our lame-duck president and lame-brained Congress and dithering Treasury secretary want to hand over billions to criminal bankers without so much as a public whisper, these auto types assumed they were going to get the same fat deal.
Imagine that.
What I don't understand is why these bankers don't have to come sweat individually in front of Congress. Where are the jerks from AIG? What about the criminals from Citi? I know this isn't the French Revolution. We don't get to send them to the guillotine. But couldn't they squirm and beg and play a role in this drama? If not, what do we get for our money?
My gosh, when I think of what all of our brilliant congressional minds did to those blue-collar types from the auto industry, it makes me ask: What could we do to some dastardly banker crook types? Admittedly, it's comical to watch Hank Paulson dance and dart nervously and keep glancing at the president like some repentant school boy every time they hold a joint press conference. Maybe he's trying to do the act for the entire industry. But that's a small-change return. If we're gonna spend billions, we need to get some entertainment in return. If no blood, at least a little sweat.
Getting some kind of show going with these Wall Streeters would seem so much more satisfying than these fender bangers from the auto industry. We might even wind up with a few heads on pikes. (Oh, how we wish.) After all, the auto industry folks at least made an honest living building cars. Their big crime was asking $75 an hour to do it. The audacity of them.
And Citi Bank? Well, I remember reading Mike Hudson's excellent reporting in a publication from the Southern Poverty Law Center titled "Banking On Misery." This must have been at least eight years ago. Even then it was perfectly obvious that Citi, this supposedly great American bank, was making a growth industry out of preying on working-class poor with impossibly dense and devious auto and home loans. That was just the spark, the primer, of the whole thing. That gave the rest of these morons their big idea -- if Citi can make all this money by qualifying, then taking down, these poor folks, imagine what we can do with absolutely no rules at all.
Come to think of it, the guillotine is too quick. The Indians along the Ohio River in the 18th century who were trying to fend off the advances of Virginians into that wilderness that would become West Virginia perfected this slow roasting technique. They cooked up more than their share of pioneers, even a colonel or two. It was much superior to the European guillotine, especially as a public relations tool. You hear about "slow roasting" and suddenly your pioneering urges diminish.
We Americans come from a human culture that has long made a habit of dealing brutally with petty thieves. Cut off hands. Rip out tongues. Tar and feather.
But we failed as a culture to address white-collar crime with any sort of fearful repercussion. Heck, even the few we've convicted over the decades have gone to country club federal prisons. Not even a decent night in the holding cell in the city jail. So there's never been any disincentive. And now this.
How do they transfer those public billions to Citi and AIG? I'm sure it's a fairly painless electronic process. Let's not embarrass them. They're all members of the club. Bless their hearts.
If we could only bless their heads too.
