Open House at the Hoosegow

Why isn’t Allen Stanford eating beans off a tin plate in a Virginia jail? And why isn’t Bernie Madoff sitting next to him?
Why aren’t those bank CEOs singing close harmony in the calaboose? Why is Dick the Torch Cheney still wearing dark suits and blue ties instead of stripes?
I know, I know: in America, you’re innocent until proven guilty.(Dick Cheney doesn’t believe that, except when it comes to him.) But how can these guys be walking around free when smaller fry are clapped in irons for far less egregious offenses?
It seems to me that this whole financial forest fire we’re in was started by a bunch of arsonists: men who lit matches by doing what they must have known was wrong.
Somebody in the banks must have realized that buying a bagful of bad mortgages would lead to trouble some day. Somebody must have approved the second and third and fourth mortgages the birddogs were peddling/
What enrages me about this whole mess is that the talking heads on television imply that it all just mysteriously happened. Well, not the talking heads on Fox, who blame it all on some poor schnook who bought a house and then found out he had cancer and couldn’t pay both the mortgage and the medical bills. Or else Bill Clinton.
I sense a building anger among the people who are footing the bills for all this: the people whose IRAs are in the tank; who can’t afford a new car or a full tank of gas for the old one. We’re mad as hell—but we’re taking it, because we don’t know what to do.
We know that Allen Stanford, who stole eight billion dollars, and Bernie Madoff, who stole 50 billion, and the bank CEOs, who demonstrated their incompetence and greed so blatantly, and Dick Cheney, who gave the nod to torture, and the predatory lenders who conned poor saps into not reading the teeny-tiny fine print, and who knows how many other crooks, are walking around free as Spring robins.
If a few of them were clapped in irons, maybe the rest of us would feel more confident about the future.
And isn’t that what the stimulus program is all about? Confidence?