Mr. Swashbuckling Capitalist

THAT’S CHUCK PRINCE!!!!!!!!!!!!

honorable mention: angelo mozillo

Good toon! Crony capitalism is out of control. The average shareholder has no say about executive pay that it is set by compensation consultants that are bought and paid for by board cronies. Also, big funds control the shares of the average Joe and refuses to step up and buck the system. They get their fees and like the status quo.

It is alll about privatizing gains and socializing losses. The savers and middle income taxpayers foot the bill.

The scary thing is that the solutions now being proposed border on all out socialism. We need to let the creative destruction component of capitalism work.

So I guess all the flower children from the 60’s were absorbed by the establishment and now they look down their bespectacled noses at all the little punks whining about how the establishment fucked everything up.

What we need is a 4 year dictatorship…someone with the power to chop off heads. Someone who will put lawyers back in their box, castrate insurance companies and terminate the family trees of the Pirates O’DaHamptons. Someone with a mop to clean up this porcine clusterfuck of a democracy.

Eliminate the obvious anal rap-ation known as “the fed”, return to the basic tenets of the Constitution. Hell, just grinding up patent and IP lawyers would make a hell of a grease for the wheels of commerce.

Dictatorship?

Isn’t it what we got now? Shareholders with no say, 401k decided by anonymous dimwits riddled with conflicts of interest that disprove the theory that only government waste other people’s money, congresspersons that constantly vote to favor their donors over their voters, financial industry that receive help from the federal go-vermin to PREVENT states to sue the predatory lenders, credit cards companies that basically have the right to deceive, trick and fraud you in any way they wish short of stealing from your bank account, CEOs that risk the corporation and then pull the golden parachute while John and Jane Q. Public is left with the bill?

With a “democracy” like that, who needs a dictatorship?

What we need is one person, one vote with strictly public financing of electoral campaigns, (the Supreme Court be damned! Plus, I want these people to work for me, not for the political donor class) real shareholders rights laws with teeth that can bite when management refuses to listen and obey, 401(k)s that are portable, with NO limit in the choices of investment vehicles, (note to Congress: Stop rubbing the K-Y jelly and bend over every time the MF (as in Mutual Fund) industry wants something; by definition, what they want is bad for us, a nationwide prohibition of election for judges (see “Is Justice for Sale? WSJ) and a slew of other things.

Have we got a long road ahead of us or what?

>> Someone who will put lawyers back in their box,

I’m behind you 100%….But, which ones? Are you referring to the lawyers:
– writing all the arbitration clauses insulating their clients from damages they might cause you,
– drafting the pay packages for corrupt CEO’s, and
– writing/submitting the statutes for Congress to sign off on?

Or the ones:
– who fight for you (and themselves) when every credit card company bilks 100 pennies from 100 million people and knows/expects no single plaintiff would be stupid enough to go after them,
– who get $100 billion from tobacco companies that for half a century turned out misleading research (because it worked!) suggesting smoking wasn’t so bad for you, or
– sue for people suffering from Agent Orange or hundreds of other chemicals some boardroom exec figured would never affect him?

The “anti-lawyer” and “damage caps” memes are part of the self-described “pro-business” agenda/insanity. Drop that one, please. In that area, we need incremental — not revolutionary — change.

This is a little off topic, but I just came back from Anchorage and while I don’t go there often, I gotta say the crowds were really thin, and the purchases in Best Buy were mostly very small ticket items, Home Depot was nearly deserted and Village Inn had a bunch of open tables- quite a change from what I’ve seen in the last few years. And this, on a nice sunny temperate day that should have brought alot of people out. The parking lot in Costco was full, though I didn’t go in. All in all, my micro economic view makes me think that there are some real problems due to surface in the next year or so.

Justin I think you are right but don’t forget the flipside. When the hedge funds get their margin calls and need to sell, stocks will go down no matter what the fed or the fundamentals are saying or doing…

Almost all of the above posts are good thought-provoking points.

I understand and agree with the poster saying we need a good 4-year dictatorship. I understand exactly where he is coming from. Things have moved (~mutated) from a clear black or white (~supervision) into a million shades of gray (~wild-wild-west). As a result, the mechanics of control and management are no longer effective. The Fed had better wind some of this stuff back in and get control of the situation or it will only feed on itself and be even worse during the next crisis.

I hope we are allowed the time needed to correct some of these problems because, it is very likely this Country will be further challenged by more exogenous events in the future.

This cartoon is so true. Executives costs are spiraling with no real justification for their gains.

One has to wonder how the executive pay in the US for the largest companies compare to the execute pay in Europe/Singapore/Japan/China/etc for their largest companies…

I think it’ll be enlightening.

After all, the Reichstag’s Enbabling Law only gave Hitler dictatorial power for four years. After that, he stepped down, Germany returned to democracy, and everyone lived happily ever after…