The Masses Made Me Mess Up!

The don’t-blame-me game is proliferating in the halls of the elite.  Bigwigs scurry like cockroaches under rocks at the hint of light and shout from the shadows, “The masses made me mess up!”

Paul Krugman says as much in his NYT column this morning. If you’ve been doing things as simple as reading the papers or watching the news —even corporate media can’t hide the truth of it— you know that Krugman is exactly right.

“The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.”

It takes cannon-ball sized cojones for Alan Greenspan or Wall Street in general to lecture the people about their profligacy. But guys like Greenspan, Geithner and Bernanke, et al didn’t get where they are by having small, honest testicles. You’ve gotta have more than a little larceny and lust for bucks in the blood to play in their circles.  It’s up to the rest of us to call them out when they’re true to character. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people is supposed to do this.