If you weren't mad already about the bailouts of financial firms, this guest Op-Ed by David Krasne in the New York Times will get your juices flowing. Kranse explores why institutions that begged for taxpayer aid to stave off bankruptcy would make fat bonus packages for bad bankers their first order of business. This rewarding of failure, he says, defies logic and will likely result in loads of litigation. "Honestly," Kranse writes, "I’m not sure if I should be more offended as a taxpayer or as a shareholder of Merrill Lynch." Then he points out that they've basically become the same thing.Bob Herbert also brings up bailouts. He devotes his column, as usual, to bashing Republicans. This time it's for handing out all the big bucks to fat cats. Only at the end of the column, as an aside, does Herbert note that Congress was under Democratic control when the firts wave of bailout money was handed out. Way to be post-partisan, there Bob.
David Brooks ruminates on the meaning of cultural institutions. He believes that successful people often define themselves by what they owe the past, rather than what the present owes them.
Caterpillar didn't have to cut all those jobs, says Real Clear Markets. Free trade agreements would have helped. "Contrary to populist doggerel," free trade is "a net job creator, not a job-killer." Free trade kills foreign government tariffs on American goods and enables companies like Caterpillar, hard-hit by them, to sell more abroad.
Benicio del Toro walked out of an interview promoting his new movie about Cuban revolutionary, and hipster t-shirt fodder, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. After fielding hard questions from the Washington Times about director Stephen Soderbergh's sympathetic portrayal of Guevara, Del Torro said, "I'm done. I'm done, I hope you write whatever you want. I don't give a damn," and walked away.
In the film, Guevara, accused of murdering hundreds and imprisoning thousands more in deadly work camps, is shown telling a reporter that the most important thing for a revolutionary is to have "el amor," love.
Soderbergh and Del Torro must have missed the part in Che's 1967 Message to the Tricontinental, when he championed "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine."
