To End This Financial Crisis, Americans Are Going to Have to Get Angry

[NicholeW.]

To End This Financial Crisis, Americans Are Going to Have to Get Angry
By Steve Fraser, Tomdispatch.com. Posted February 11, 2009.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/126325/

Editor's note: Sometimes it's the small gesture that defines the end of an age. Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, the single financial firm the Bush administration allowed to collapse into bankruptcy in what may someday be thought of as the slow-motion Crash of '09, made one of those gestures recently. Just to be clear, we're talking about a man who, between 1993 and 2007, took home a tidy $466 million in pay. ... Then, in 2008, the year his firm would collapse, Fuld was awarded another $22 million in what was called "retirement pay."

It helps, of course, to have a memory. I mean a real memory, a deep sense of what happened once upon a time. Steve Fraser... knows that this country went through such a moment with just such a set of tin-eared former titans once before. And while the two moments, 1929 and 2009, differ in striking ways, it's instructive to know how it all fell out for the Richard Fulds of another age.

[lisagurl]

It would be an end to the American aristocracy if the maximum anyone could inherit was one million dollars.

We would also have to close all the loopholes such as gifts, trusts etc.

[tekla]

Apparently it never occurs to those who utter such perverse statements about rewarding the "best people," or "the best men," that we'd all have been better off, and saved some serious money, if they had hired the worst men. After all, based on the recent record, who could possibly have done more damage than the "best" Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, Wamu, Citigroup, A.I.G., Bank of America, and so many other top financial crews had to offer?

[RebeccaFog]

It would be an end to the American aristocracy if the maximum anyone could inherit was one million dollars.

We would also have to close all the loopholes such as gifts, trusts etc.

I think it should be 5 million per year.  This would provide them with enough cash to buy some nice things like expensive cars, horses, art, and electronic gadgets, plus pay for the schooling of their children if they don't like public schools. 

This would put some flowing funds back into the economy and help keep people motivated while providing the traditional support jobs that people do for these people like gardening.

Let's face it, in this world, one million dollars is nothing.