I think we've played this game before...

From Louis Lapham, "By the rivers of Babylon," Harper's Jan 09:

The looting of the U.S. Treasury is never an easy trick, but to carry off more than $1 trillion in broad daylight while the members of Congress stand around applauding the exit strategy as one certain to guarantee the health and happiness of the American people is a wonder of entrepreneurial enterprise that surely deserves some sort of tip of the hat. happiness of the American people is a wonder of entrepreneurial enterprise that surely deserves some sort of tip of the hat. When the James gang robbed the Kansas City Fair in the fall of 1872, the local paper acknowledged the achievement as “so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators,” and I would have thought that our own easily awestruck news media might have found a few words of respect and esteem for the perps who knocked over the Wall Street fairgrounds last year. How not at least revere the scale of the undertaking—nine banks emptied of more than $500 billion in capital, as much as $8 trillion withdrawn from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, $2 trillion from the country’s pension and retirement accounts.

...

Even more touching than Thomas Friedman’s laying of a wreath on the grave of Cotton Mather was the sight of Alan Greenspan sitting down by the rivers of Babylon, his harp hung upon the willows, silent in a strange land. During his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve (1987–2006) Greenspan had believed it his duty to irrigate the fruited plain of the American economy with the flow of easy money, his policy to supply the banks with the abundant credit, at low cost and presumably risk-free, that enabled the floating of both the Internet bubble (1995–2000) and the housing bubble (2003–2006). For his efforts he was accorded the title of “maestro,” his word on the country’s finances trading at parity with the word of God. When it was suggested (as long ago as 1994) that the newborn market in derivatives demanded some sort of government supervision, Greenspan discounted the suggestion as insulting to the integrity of the public-spirited Wall Street gentlemen laboring on behalf of the common good; when on October 23 of last year he appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to explain what had gone wrong with the making of something out of nothing, his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

To think that the Wall Street financial institutions seek to protect the equity of their customers in preference to their own is to think that at the Las Vegas poker tables the dealers seek to protect the chips stacked in front of the sweet old lady in the blue baseball cap playing a system drawn from the book of Revelation.

...

The eighteenth-century New England privateers flew the American flag as a flag of convenience, not as a declaration of their allegiance to a cause but as a license to seize the wealth stored in the hulls of wooden ships. Their twenty-first- century heirs and assigns employ the semblance of a government in Washington as an investment vehicle permitting them to seize the wealth stored in the labor of the American people. The Republican and Democratic parties compete for the brokerage business, between them putting up $2.4 billion for last year’s presidential campaigns—i.e., for the speculative ventures that bundle junk slogans into collateralized-debt obligations, which, when it comes time to off-load the boodle, transform the upside into private property, the downside into the good news that poverty replenishes the soul.