Paul Krugman posted an interesting op-ed piece the other day … "Partying Like It's 1929" (at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/opinion/21krugman.html, amongst other places). In it, he correctly reminded us that the Wall Street crash of 1929 was not the harbinger of the Great Depression (instead, a bunch of gamblers got busted for taking too many risks with their money). The Great Depression began in 1930 and deepened in 1931 when frightened people attempted to pull their savings from banks and the banks did not have the capital reserves to honor their promise to depositors. Others (fiscal conservatives) say the bank runs probably would not have happened had not Herbert Hoover intervened and attempted to force markets to hold their value (price controls, tariffs, protections for wheat and cotton, and other efforts to stabilize prices) – there was too much money in the system and bank contractions were necessary to naturally correct for that fact. Periodic bloodbaths are necessary to correct for inflation. This point of view is fine and dandy if the only people hurt by such "natural forces" are the wealthy sobs who caused the problem in the first place. But this generally is not the case, and government of and for the people must act to protect all people. Unfortunately, as we are witnessing today, in 1929 the government first acted to protect those who had the most to lose.

This is why, Krugman goes on to say, that regulations were placed on the banking system to better safeguard savings and to more tightly control lending. Over the years, because big capital chafed at the regulations limiting risk (and simultaneously reducing potential profit), financial institutions developed an underground banking system that avoided the regulations altogether. Now, savers put their money into funds that buy asset-backed commercial paper from special investment vehicles that have purchased collateralized debt obligations created by securitized mortgages – with no safety net and no regulators anywhere in sight.

Big profits ensue (for some). In the same fashion, deregulation of the energy business allowed big capital (and the sleaze merchants guiding it) to manipulate energy futures and to job the market by selling and reselling energy "packages" for increasing profit margins. And, following the same gambit (George Bush and Ken Lay were good friends, mind you), an unregulated (unchecked) President manipulated the data to frighten enough people to give him unrestricted war powers, which he further manipulated by rewarding unbid contracts to his best supporters to transfer huge amounts of the U.S. treasury to private hands.

In my mind, justice must be served. Justice is a pretty simple thing, and it is not always associated with "laws" (especially when the laws have been written by lawyers representing the people who are robbing us blind in order to protect them in their theft … or by representatives in Congress who have been bought and sold just like the lawyers). Here's how it works. Ken Lay may be dead, but he robbed a lot of people. That money he stole needs to be taken from his surviving wife and redistributed amongst the people from whom he stole it. To her … you married the sucker with open eyes, and stayed married to him; your natural consequence for your blindness, stupidity or collusion is that you must surrender your ill-gotten wealth! Every member of the board of Enron and every investor who similarly profited must do the same.

Rather than give Bear Stearns $200 billion to "stablize" it, Bear Stearns needs to be stripped of all its equity (which includes taking money from investors, executive officers and members of the board who have not had to lose a thing in this fiasco) and the money distributed equitably amongst all depositors and/or borrowers who were ripped-off. The CEO of Countrywide Home Loans (Angelo Mozilo, who "earned" a $77 million "buy-out bonus" this year on top of the $656 million – that's more than half a billion dollars, folks – he made between 1998 and 2007) needs to surrender his money to pay back the money he foreclosed on, if not outright purchase all the homes for the people he screwed.

And Dick Cheney and George Bush need to surrender every bit of cash and property they own up to the $3 trillion this war is going to cost the American people for the lies, manipulations, and cover-ups they have perpetrated (if they have anything left over, they are welcome to keep it). They should not be incarcerated (as should the loan sharks and petty thiefs mentioned, above) … instead, they should be left to walk the streets, hopefully penniless, and learn to live off their own talents/skills as well as suffer any abuse given by folks who might recognize them in daily life.