Involuntary Servitude for the Financial Industry?

It was wonderful to see CNN's Situation Room do a short clip Oct. 23 featuring Dennis Kucinich, who wants to launch new legislation preventing those banks who were helped in the bailouts from granting bonuses to key executives. CNN interviewed some asshole economics professor who said that leading financial barons needed to be provided some sort of incentives to stay at distressed banks, or they'd go work for hedge funds or sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). Well, that's assuming that we don't place them in a position of involuntary servitude.

Why not modify the Thirteenth Amendment to say that slavery is abhorrent except when applied to key investment-banking executives, hedge-fund managers, and Nobel laureates in mathematics who work in the financial field? We lock in the financial services industry today, forcing everyone currently working in the industry to remain in place, working for minimum wage. They will be forbidden to switch to SWFs or hedges. Their $40 million apartments on the Upper West Side will be provided rent-free to community non-profits, and they will be given seedy apartments in Alphabet City, which they will be forced to travel to using mass transit. Weekend chain gangs will be led, not by Ben Bernanke, but by Saint Greenspan himself, for continuing to hew to the Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman school, while giving only the mildest of mea culpas. Time for slavery! And no reparations in a century for financial robber barons!

Good Money After Bad

Ben Bernanke seemed to violate the first rule of bad-example debtors when the Federal Reserve announced March 11 it would create a $200 billion fund for the banks and securities institutions who found themselves in liquidity crises for doing very stupid things with other people's money. But before I worked up my sense of moral outrage, I wondered if maybe there were bad credit-card purchases for which I could seek forgiveness by taking out a small loan from the Fed. Oh sure, dumb music and over-hyped vacations, but nothing compared to a Countrywide Financial Corp. ski trip to Colorado.

But wait a minute, there are certainly formerly squeaky-clean state governors who could use some help! And Eliot Spitzer already has a working relationship with Bernanke for all the corporate crime he's fought! C'mon, Ben, don't trips to the Emperor's Club deserve some liquidity forgiveness? Eliot sure looks like he could use a break.