A Few Bad Apples

I must mention something that I am becoming concerned about- the hurricane of outrage against the AIG bonus babies and Bernard Madoff.

Don't get me wrong- I think these people are all thieves and belong in jail for a long time. What concerns me is that this whole uproar seems to me to be playing into a scenario similar to the Bush Administration's response to the Abu Ghraib revelations- that it was all the fault of a few bad apples.

In fact this orgy of greed and theft was totally made possible by deregulation and other policies which formed the centerpiece of Conservative economic ideology. Of course, there are crooked people in this world that care nothing about anybody but themselves, and will do anything they can get away with to further their own self interest, no matter what the cost to others. Regulations existed to protect us from that sort of person. It was inevitable that, when Reagan and the Bushes let the rats out of the cage, they were going to chew up the furniture. Anyone with any sense must have understood that this was inevitable (I certainly did, when Reagan set this all in motion, and I'm no expert.)

Let's see that, in our outrage at these criminals, the real big-time criminals aren't let off the hook, or this scenario will just happen again.

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