[quanticle]

The problem isn't with the wealthy. Wealthy and powerful people have been behaving badly behind closed doors since at least the Roman Empire, and probably before then as well. The problem is with us. Why don't we hold them accountable for their misdeeds? Why do we buy into their rhetoric that they are the job creators? Why do we give equal time to their views that they are being persecuted like Jews during Kristallnacht, when the events of the last few years have show that, if anything the opposite is true?

I think articles like this, honestly, are a disservice. They're comfortable. They're easy. They put the blame on the wealthy -- "Oh look, those billionaires and plutocrats are at it again!" -- without asking the real question: what systemic changes can we work towards today to ensure that people like Vikram Pandit, Dick Fuld and Jimmy Cayne can't wreak the same kind of havoc that they did in 2007? What can we do to ensure that people appreciate the impact that obscure financial regulations have on their everyday lives?

[RodericDay]

It's funny, I think exactly the opposite of this. Something along the lines about how a sham democracy is worse than no democracy at all, because people keep blaming themselves although they are being oppressed by plutocrats in ways not really unlike violent threats in terms of control.

Instead of being starved, the threat is to get fired. Instead of lack of education, people are blasted with advertisement. I think to say that the fault is "within us" is a platitude about as banal as "the answer is somewhere in the middle".

[quanticle]

Our founders said that the legitimacy of government comes from the consent of the governed. Vox populi est vox dei. So why do we continue to consent to a government that sets up an economic system that ensures that plutocrats can behave badly and get away with it? I'm talking about cases like Dick Fuld, where he drove his firm into bankruptcy, nearly upended the entire American investment banking system, and still walked away with millions upon millions of dollars. I'm talking about cases like Jon Corzine's, where there was outright fraud -- M. F. Global was mixing its own proprietary money with its customers', which is fraudulent -- and nobody went to jail.

I'm not even talking about solutions. I think talking about solutions is entirely premature at this point. We haven't even identified the problem yet. Why do a significant fraction of Americans vote against their own economic best interests, even when they know that their vote is harming them?

[ItendToDisagree]

Identifying the problem is actually pretty easy and you mention it in your first sentence in the parent. It has been going on since at least the Romans.

Money begets power, power protects money.

There really doesn't seem to be much you can do about it... If you 'throw the bums out' you get a whole new set of bums. Its a terrible thing but also a possible fact of life.

One thing I would like to see though... Those who get caught actually getting punished... Even if it is just for 'revenge among kings' purposes. The fact that no one really gets in any serious trouble, for doing the sorts of things you mentioned, shows the system is really broken, rather than the things happening (because they will regardless).

[skyshine]

There is a common misconception that humans are in control of society. We are not. It is an emergent phenomena. Perhaps we can influence it, but to do so we have to understand what its purpose is. Many would say its purpose is to serve humans. I disagree. There is a wealth of evidence that all systems (from atoms to cells to solar systems to society etc) exist for one simple reason : they enable energy to be converted from states of low entropy to states of high entropy more rapidly than if that system did not exist.

The systems come about and develop by many methods, such as the physical forces in the case of atoms or biological evolution in the case of animals. But in every case they succeed at being better generators of entropy.

If we want to make society work for us then we have to understand how society can generate more entropy - and at the same time create roles for us (its component parts) that we want to live. Free market democracy has succeeded precisely because it does this exceptionally well. It creates a framework in which innovation is embraced and people are encouraged to work and consume (creating a very efficient dynamic for entropy production - literally turning resources into shit.)

If you want a socio-economic system that is less corrupt then you have to work out how to create one that has the benefits of the free market, but without the downsides. That is a hard problem to solve. But I think it is solvable, and so I have spent the last few years working on a new economic platform called Babbling Brook. http://babblingbrook.net

It is not a new economic system in itself. It is a protocol for social networking activity, that is based on an understanding of emergently complex non equilibrium thermodynamics. Which is essentially means it is an open ended platform with built in feedback loops that allow for increasingly complex systems of exchange to emerge.

[kelvin0]

If only Ayn Rand could see what her 'job creators' were up to these days ... LOL

[mariodiana]

If you were at all familiar with her works, I think you would realize that the "Bailout King" and his colleagues would be counted among the villains of her novels -- the "looters."

[quanticle]

I'm not sure that anything in Ayn Rand's novels actually corresponds to the realities of corporate capitalism. I'll take one illustrative example: the discovery of Rearden Metal. In Atlas Shrugged, Rearden Metal is depicted as the product of the lone genius of Hank Rearden, who defied his own corporate scientists and a made a metal that everyone else considered impossible. At the time, Hank Rearden was not a lone inventor working in his garage. He was already a plutocrat, with multiple millions to his name, and a large corporation backing him.

Can you actually think of a case in the real world where that's happened? Where the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation has personally made a breakthrough discovery in his or her field? Of course not. Billion+ dollar companies are crazy complex machines, and our hypothetical CEO has far too much to be doing to be merely mucking around in the lab like a lowly research scientist. He (and I use the masculine deliberately) has a corporation to run. He has decisions to make!

No, the closest thing I can think of to Hank Rearden is Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. Genius CEOs of multi-billion dollar corporations who, by virtue of their sheer brilliance come up with discoveries that all their trained underlings miss, despite having far less time to devote to the topic at hand. And, for that reason, I find Ayn Rand's scenarios to be deeply irrelevant. Her characters, plot, and morality are more suited to comic books than novels. There is no ambivalence, no ambiguity in any of her characters or her situations, and her books turn into thousand page morality plays that one reads without gaining any insight into how one should actually behave in the real world.

To say that a living person corresponds to a character in an Ayn Rand novel is akin to saying that a living oak tree corresponds to a page in a notebook. You can argue that there are commonalities. But the commonalities between living wood and dead paper do more to obscure than clarify. It is the same with comparisons to Ayn Rand characters. At this point, I'm ready to just throw out Ayn Rand analogies altogether in my rhetoric, for they seem to add more heat to the discussion than light.

[kelvin0]

I read Atlas Shrugged, completely. Hated every page. The lack of nuance of her characters, all the good/bad/looter/enlightened. It read like a child's fairytale book, in my opinion ...

[na85]

>Why don't we hold them accountable for their misdeeds?

Because they control public opinion via the media, the politicians via lobbying, and based on the disproportionate sentencing that gets reported (bank laundering cartel money gets nothing, woman gets jailed for not returning a rented movie), I'm inclined to wonder whether they control the justice system too.

[digitalengineer]

By a (former) NY Judge: "an institutional shift toward prosecuting companies rather than individuals. This has yielded some enormous monetary settlements but has, Judge Rakoff writes, “led to some lax and dubious behavior on the part of prosecutors, with deleterious results.”

The fear of prison concentrates the mind in a way the prospect of writing a check on a corporate account does not. “And from a moral standpoint,” Judge Rakoff writes, “punishing a company and its many innocent employees and shareholders for the crimes committed by some unprosecuted individuals seems contrary to elementary notions of moral responsibility.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/us/judge-raises-questions-...

[josephlord]

It makes sense to do both. Corporate punishments prevent senior people setting the environment such that junior ones break the law and take the fall while the company profits and individual punishments remind people of their own personal responsibility for their own actions and provides the personal fear. Neither replaces the other, both are necessary.

[opminion]

I think articles like this, honestly, are a disservice

The article does not explicitly blame them for the financial crisis. It describes a party and makes judgements on the participants based on the contrast between their role in society and their behaviour in the party.

[fit2rule]

What can we do? We can expose their crimes. We can refuse to let them meet in secret and make heinous deals that crash nations. We can - indeed - violate their privacy, when they are using it to oppress us.

And thats exactly why we need more articles like this.

[visakanv]

Yep, greed is a human constant. The structures that we build around ourselves, though, don't necessarily have to reward it.

[Helianthus]

It seems to me this doesn't actually contradict parent; it almost just rephrases quanticle succinctly.

(To the extent that I'm actually unsure of your intent.)

[jmnicolas]

So if I follow your logic, rape is to blame on the victims too ?

The (really) wealthy owns the governments, how do you make them accountable ?

[jmngomes]

Work on holding the government accountable for being (too) corruptible? You know, like in http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/13/business/ukraine-protests-...

[jmnicolas]

Yeah ... how is it working for them ?

[jmngomes]

It's a hard and long struggle, like most significant things in life. But they're going for it, instead of just complaining that no one opposes the government on their behalf.