When the Prick of Conscience Fails Turn Instead to Strategies Suited to Pricks Without Conscience

The bazillionaire financial fraudsters simply cannot be shamed into better behavior. For anybody for whom that is not now clear it will never be clear. Market fundamentalists wipe their asses with sternly worded letters from the Administration (such as the one promised between the lines here), rather like Republicans wipe their asses with the Constitution whenever it's ready to hand. It's well past time to throw the worst offenders into jail, make the perps walk like pageant queens in a delirious spray of slow-mo flash-bulbs. As America's Senator Bernie Sanders has repeatedly and pithily declared we must make too big to fail too big to exist, and everybody knows by now we must obliterate conflicts of interest for those tasked with oversight responsibilities over these scam artists who to this day imagine themselves to be Masters of the Universe. And it is high time to tax the super-rich back to the stone age to get back the money they stole with their stone age behavior. Heck, I don't even think we need necessarily return to the steeply progressive tax rates in play in the Republican Eisenhower Administration, so often evoked as a Golden Age of American Capitalism, to repair the damage done by the catastrophically failed market fundamentalist ideology of the neoliberal generation (which seems to me to have begun with Democrat Carter before Republican Reagan made a ruinous crusade out of it and to have been quite as decisively consolidated by Democrat Clinton as by the killer clowns of the Republican Bushes, so my point is hardly reductively partisan).