Time Magazine's 25 people to blame for the financial crisis

[Seen the light]

Angelo Mozilo (co-founder of Countrywide)
Former Senator Phil Gramm
Alan Greenspan
Chris Cox (former Chairman of the SEC)
American Consumers
Henry Paulson
Joe Cassano (co-founder of AIG's financial-products unit, Cassano)
Ian McCarthy (CEO of Beazer Homes)
Frank Raines (former CEO of Fannie Mae)
Kathleen Corbet (former head of Standard & Poor's)
Dick Fuld (CEO of Lehman Brothers until Lehman's collapse)
Marion and Herb Sandler (former heads of Sandlers' World Savings Bank)
Bill Clinton
George W. Bush
Stan O'Neal (former CEO of Merrill Lynch)
Premier of the People's Republic of China Wen Jiabao\
David Lereah (Chief economist at the National Association of Realtors)
John Devaney (hedge-fund manager)
Bernie Madoff
Lew Ranieri (Salomon trader)
Burton Jablin (programming czar at Scripps Networks)
Fred Goodwin (former head of Royal Bank of Scotland)
Sandy Weill (former Chairman of Citigroup)
David Oddsson (former Prime Minister of Iceland)
Jimmy Cayne (former CEO of Bear Stearns)

Reasons for each one in the link:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,1877351,00.html

Is that a fair list or not?

[tularetom]

1. I'd include Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand

Who basically taught a lot of the assholes on that list that greed was OK and selfishness a virtue.

[Warpy]

2. Madoff is a pretty small fish compared to Gramm and Mozillo

and the weasel who came up with the idea of CDS. However, he's been rated up because he has name recognition.

Clinton is getting off easy, IMO, because he failed to fight Gramm on the gutting of Glass-Steagall. Gramm might have been able to ram it through past a veto, but there's a bigger chance it would have failed. Clinton let this country down that time.

[swag]

3. Nice list, but I'd put Wendy Gramm right in there with hubby Phil.

[PM Martin]

4. Bernie Madoff is pig swine.

but ponzi schemes are nothing new. His was largest than any other and was only discovered after the economy began it's slide last year.
The rest of them do share the blame to one extent or more.

[FKA MNChimpH8R]

5. Get to the bottom of it

David Stockman
Arthur Laffer (was anyone more appropriately and ironically named?)
Ronald Reagan

Without these nitwits, the ball would have never been set in motion. Everything about this meltdown can be traced straight back to Reagan and the plutocrats who backed him and created him. Sorry, Ron (the progressive one), your dad was a moron, but i think you know that.

SuperChimp, Paulson, Clinton (yes, Bill Clinton, who SIGNED all of the crap that made this shitstorm possible and inevitable), Greenspan and Gramm all belong in the starting lineup of blame allocation for this gigantic shart, too.

The American Consumer does not belong on this list. No ordinary Tom, Dick or Mary dreamed up the insane mortgages that were marketed so maniacally, nor dreamed up the completely insane notion of "mortgage backed derivatives" and sold them around the world to make/steal insane amounts of money. That was the pig-fucking, parasitic greedheads on Wall Street. The shitbags who came up with that idea should be hanging from phone poles along with their mistresses, a la Mussolini, and their families should be sold into slavery in Saudi Arabia as domestic help.

Yes, I am pissed off and not ready to take prisoners when there are so many criminals left to be given the justice Nicolae Ceaucescu so deservedly and promptly received.

[catnhatnh]

7. You beat me to it....that "and everyone else too" nonsense gets tired. N/T

[catnhatnh]

6. Well, if you took out "american consumers" and possibly Bill Clinton...

Then yes, executing the balance would be a service to society.

And I HATE that American consumers horseshit.....yeah great list...24 econopaths and then,just to round it off 250 million other Americans? No editors, we, misguided or not, do not deserve to be on that list. We did nothing to destroy this country for profit or in support of the ruling classes.

[norepubsin08]

8. I'd include the entire fucking GOP!!!!!!!

[Maine-ah]

9. Raygun and Bushie Sr

should also be on the list.

[surrealAmerican]

10. "American Consumers" ought not be on this list.

Ronald Regan and GHW Bush should be.

[Uncle Joe]

11. What about Time Magazine and the owners of the corporate media, shouldn't

they be on the list?

If anyone has put the American Citizens or as Time prefers to think of them "consumers" to sleep over the past couple of decades regarding inconvenient truths and their harsh consequences, it is the corporate media.

It was the corporate media that myopically focused on and magnified the import of sensationalist "news" giving it daily and nightly preeminence while at best giving short shrift to or ignoring all together serious national and global topics of substance because that might be boring, thus dumbing down or brain washing the American People in to a false and dangerous sense of complacency.

In this case I'm referring to economical effects but the same holds true for global warming climate change; which was ignored long after the scientific community warned of that looming catastrophe, reasons for and coverage of war, coverage of the American People's most critical deliberative decision that being of candidates for elective office; particularly the Presidency, health care and the effects of corporate supremacy over the people's government, the illogical, non-sensical "War Against Drugs"; aka War Against The American People's Freedom and Privacy and the adverse effects created against our society by that insanity, turning what should be a medical, personal privacy and or educational issue in to a criminal one coupled with a private industry that literally profits from imprisoning the American People, etc. etc.