This is a rant, complete with substantial profanity. It's not my normal mode in any way, but times have changed. If you're of a squeamish sort, please stop reading now and don't bother commenting. I don't want to hear about it.
What prompted this was being treated recently to that severely misguided rant courtesy of Rick Santelli of CNBC, that fellator of Jeffrey Immelt, his paymaster and the CEO of GE. But this is not about him. His meme is already dead.
Rage does not begin to describe how I feel.
I'll tell you one way to give Wall Street some certainty, and to restore confidence in the American financial markets. Start arresting some of these amoral motherfuckers and trying them for securities fraud.
To establish my thesis, I still could not say it better than Frank Rich:
...The genuine populist rage in the country — aimed at greedy C.E.O.’s, not at the busted homeowners mocked as "losers" by Santelli — cannot be ignored or finessed. Though Obama was crystal clear on Tuesday that there can be "no real recovery unless we clean up the credit crisis," it was telling that he got fuzzy when he came to what he might do about it. He waited two days to drop that shoe in his budget: a potential $750 billion in banking "asset purchases" on top of the previous $700 billion bailout.
Therein lies the Catch-22 that could bring the recovery down. As Obama said, we can’t move forward without a functioning financial system. But voters of both parties will demand that their congressmen reject another costly rescue of it. Americans still don’t understand why many Wall Street malefactors remain in place or why the administration’s dithering banking policy lacks the boldness and clarity of Obama’s rhetoric.
To wit:
Why isn't Charles Prince of Citi in jail awaiting trial? He presided over the terminal risk-taking culture that pervaded the Frankenstein's Monster of a financial company assembled by Sanford Weill, his predecessor. (Oh, that's right. Sanford Weill was CEO till April 2006. There's another scumbag who needs looking at...)
Why isn't Kerry Killinger of Wamu in jail awaiting trial? He took the largest S&L in the country and turned it into a reckless risk-taking enterprise, complete with a fatally isolated upper management whose primary goal was fat bonuses; this is a poltroon whom I've also written about here....
Why isn't Stanley O'Neal, the disgraced former CEO of Merrill, in jail awaiting trial? After all, he took Merrill and steered it directly towards asset securitization and other risky investment strategies that wound up wrecking the company. The strategies had one big advantage: ginormous bonuses for everyone involved. That is, until the music stopped. (Except for his successor, the now infamous John Thain.)
How about Dick Fuld, the disgraced head of Lehman Brothers? He took a leading, aggressive role in securitizing the mortgage industry. He was once the most feared man on Wall Street. Where is his jail cell?
Oh, yeah. Let's not forget John "Antique Toilet" Thain, who connived with Kenneth Lewis, the BofA exec who bought the foundering Merrill Lynch, to shovel out $3.6 BILLION to his cronies at Merrill before the acquisition went through? He walks around a free man, a poster boy for entitled cupidity, rivalling Dennis Kozlowski for naked insane greed and arrogance (not to mention bad taste), a man whose presence in the 7th Circle of Dante's Hell is a certainty.
Why are none of the executives running the bank holding companies that took bailout money, staying in the Greybar Hotel awaiting trial? Instead, they're still partying.
Well, Mr. Obama?
For these people, accountability does not exist. For them, accountability is something to laugh at, while stonewalling state Attorneys General and Cingressmen. "Market populism," by the way, amounts to telling anyone who has the nerve to ask for help to fuck off. You're a loser if you ask for help. You're a loser if you lose your job. You're a loser if you lose your home through no fault of your own, and you and your kids are thrown out on the streets. Once you're laid off, or your company shuts down, you cross the Rubicon to the Land of Loserdom.
God forbid you should EVER ask for fucking help.
My company shut down a month ago. Now, I face the very real chance of losing my home in six months should I fall behind in my payments. I played by the Goddamn rules. Unlike Mr. Killinger and Mr. Prince and all the other men I've named. I played by all the rules and sacrificed proximity to my job base to get a reasonably affordable home by inflated California standards. Now, I've lost my entire down payment on my house and face a second revaluation that will probably put my home $40,000-$50,000 in value below the amount of my loan, according to my discussion with the county assessor. (I am not asking for sympathy. I'm stating my personal situation as an illustration of what's going on out there, to disprove the "blame the homebuyer" meme.)
At very best, I might be able to stay in my home. I was smart, you see. I got a good 30-year fixed. But I'm in the same boat as everyone else. My unemployment is still not enough to cover the mortgage plus tax assessments. So I'm scrambling. I'm busier than I was when I was working!
Meanwhile, partying bankers refuse to face the music. This entire class of people in the American business community has severe entitlement issues. Sponsoring a golf tournament and paying Boomer rock bands whose best days are long behind them (Yes, I'm talking about YOU, Chicago; and YOU, Earth Wind and Fire, and YOU, Sheryl Crow!) a HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS for an appearance? From OUR bailout money?
American financial capitalists really suck. Give 'em ten years of free play in the sandbox (roughly from when Gramm-Leach-Bliley was signed by Clinton in 1999) and look what happens. Massive Ponzi schemes. Trillions of dollars in fraudulent real estate securities investments. Ignorant regulatory institutions. Bond rating companies who deserve to be nationalized. America became Leverage Nation because of these people, and exported it across the world! The amoral American MBA class is an entire wasted generation of two-bit pseudo-educated shills represented by second-rate Seton Hall grads like Mr. Santelli (or wherever the Hell he's from - certainly not a "good" school).
Not that the "good" school matters. The Harvard, Yale, Duke, Brown and Stanford MBA classes (and everyone else from the top 50 business schools) who people the investment and commercial banking communities are no better. These are the people to whom American banks pay inflated salaries to ensure they "get the best talent." I got news for ya, geniuses. That fancy fuckin' piece of paper does not protect you from the tar and feather suit many of you are going to get if the economy continues to crash.
You can't foreclose on everybody, you bastards.
The officers of all the big bank holding companies and bank executives like Mr. Killinger, Mr. O'Neal, Mr. Fuld and Mr. Prince, and all their second-level executives who orchestrated this crap, are quite arguably all guilty of securities fraud and bank fraud.
Mr. Holder, Mr. U.S Attorney General, why is it that none of these men are being indicted for securities fraud?
Mr. Holder, is it because of the paperwork? The eight years of accumulated evil detritus from the Bush Administration? What? What does all that have to do with these greedy thugs who still walk around as free men? What's the Goddamn problem?
The evidence of securities fraud and investment fraud is all around us. Pretty much the entire class of banking executives and securities originators in this country are guilty of massive fraud. Swap every pot smoker in prison for one of these fuckheads, and that would barely be a start.
Mr. President, when are some of these people going to start going to jail?
Mr. U.S. Attorney, I know you've only been on the job three weeks. If that.
But it only takes ten minutes to send the men in suits over to these guys' houses and haul them off to jail. Until that happens, I can't take seriously any promises of financial reform. Reform with big, sharp, nasty teeth is the only answer. Reform without stiff enforcement is a bad joke.
I want to see perp walks every night on the news channels. I want to see the talking heads on CNBC explode with rage as they see their avatars of greed and destruction frog-marched to an 8x8 cell. I want to see Mozilo, Fuld, Blankfein, Killinger and the rest get what they so richly deserve. Now.
These guys (and the entire class of MBAs backing them up) have stopped fearing the power of government. It's time to make them fear us. People like Rick Santelli do not fear us. It's time to change that. By any means necessary.
They do not fear you, Mr. President.
They do not fear you, Mr. Holder.
It's time to change that. Now would be a good time to start.
Shit, even Bush's Justice Department made damn sure that the Enron scumbags (and Bernie Ebbers of MCI) got the book seriously thrown at them. Jeff Skilling got 25 years!
As much as I appreciate Obama and am so glad he's President, I also want to see some of these guys start getting indicted and frog-marched stat. Until then, it's just talk. It's bullshit, no matter how good Obama's speech was. Americans will not accept another TARP fund. Not unless, at a minimum, some of these bastards atart getting hammered.
That's the kind of Goddamn change I can believe in.