Enough Already!

It seems that all that is in the news lately are stories about the deepening financial crisis, the increasing number of foreclosures and declining home values. ENOUGH already! We’ve heard all of that. What we don’t hear a lot about are the 93 - 94% of home owners who aren’t behind on their payment s and who aren’t losing their homes. Those folks are sitting at home watching the debacle unfold on Wall Street and in Washington and just shaking their heads. How could people be so foolish, they ask? How could such sophisticated and supposedly smart people on Wall Street, which is often billed as attracting our brightest minds out of college, make such fundamentally stupid decisions?

As I’ve opined here before, the answer lies in human nature, which has an unbelievable tendency to trump intelligence. A combination of arrogance and greed, two of the more powerful elements of human nature, was able to cloud the minds of these supposedly intelligent people and lead them into the abyss. Now being served mainly by arrogance, in the form of chutzpa, these same “intelligent” people are begging for a bailout. Save me and my multi-million dollar golden parachute, they plead. And across America the response has been overwhelming that the people on Main Street want to see some pain.

The American people want to see the equivalent of the “perp walk” that took place after Enron and Adelphia and WorldComm. It’s not enough to se some poor little guys with his box of stuff from his desk on Wall Street. The people wan to see some CEO’s being evicted from their Long Island mansions and maybe even a few going off to jail. What they’d really like to see is some judges taking back the $100 Million golden parachute payments and using it to help the little guys. It won’t happen, of course, but that’s what’s in the imaginations of many Americans.

We are now far more civil than the days of dragging the old, disposed king out and beheading them in the public square, but somehow we still need that to get past the sins that have been committed. We are a forgiving people, but only after a good public flogging of someone that we can blame. Maybe the deaths of several Wall Street firms and a few banks will suffice; however, we’ve yet to see that now destitute former CEO being interviewed on TV. Maybe the fact that he has to give up a week in Aspen this year will be enough suffering. Maybe the TV reporters can interview his crying wife who will be lamenting having to give up the weekly pedicure for Foo Foo, her Shtzu. Oh, the pain!