From Pine View Farm

Making Lemonade (Updated) 0

Robert Reich:

It’s called Lemon Socialism. Taxpayers support the lemons. Capitalism is reserved for the winners.

And the folks who planted the lemon trees are still going home with their pay for performance bonuses and their fancy cans.

Oh.

I forget.

Performance has nothing to do with it.

They get the bonuses because, well, they wear three-piece suits, write good memos emails, and look good in meetings.

They take us for fools.

And we prove them right.

Addendum, the Next Morning:

Polly Toynbee in the Guardian:

Debenhams is a useful paradigm for much that went wrong. Private equity gobbled it up in 2003. Its new owners sold off its property, took £1bn out of the business and put it back on the market with a £1bn debt round its neck. At the height of financial madness, institutional funds were suckered into buying back the now debt-laden company at a higher price than the marauders paid in the first place. It has not done too well.

(snip)

But it’s business as usual for the masters of this failed universe. Who is to stop them? Shareholder democracy was always an empty myth. The government relies on the men who profited in the balloon years to get us out of this, making them ministers in the Lords to oversee their own. No doubt they will regulate the worst, but don’t expect a scintilla of culture change. There is a sense right now that the financial and political worlds still don’t get it. They are like cartoon characters who have run off a precipice, suspended in mid-air before realising how hard they are going to crash.

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