Of course the corporate media moguls are going to keep the spotlight on the Tea Party movement; the more they reinforce the meme that government is the one taking liberty, not protecting it, then that much less attention can be paid to the real issue - the consolidated corporate giants that control the mass market of consumer goods directed at the middle class that so many of these ‘activists’ are freaked out about losing. Don Monkerud writes for Counterpunch, Tea Partiers Should Be Picketing the Corporations That Dominate Our Lives:

Tom Tomorrow

“Those who control our corporations managed an Orwellian achievement to redefine the use of brute corporate force as ‘market forces,’” says Lynn. “We still believe in a consumer utopia, but we have an illusion of choice. Corporate powers manipulate our decision-making and direct us to buy certain goods at certain prices.”

Institutional power shifted to Wall Street and large financial institutions. Today a small elite runs corporations to serve themselves as they concentrate their power. Some Americans are waking up to the reality of their situation, but Congress lacks the will to regulate corporate power.

…Although some Americans worry about the growing power of the government, few understand the real power that controls their everyday lives.

Private monopolies determine the brand of breakfast cereal we eat, the type of car we drive, where we bank, the medical treatment we receive, the fashion of our clothes, and the kind of toothbrush we use, in addition to the beer we drink, the health insurance we buy, and what we feed our pets.

…”People say we have an uncontrolled free market but we have the opposite,” says Barry C. Lynn, senior fellow at the New American Foundation. “What we have today is a laissez faire American version of feudalism; a private government in the form of private corporations run by private individuals who consolidated power to govern entire activities within our political economy.”

…

Kate Moss at Chanel

In the mass publicity frenzy that Fashion Weeks have become, reports on front row celebrity appearances had become just a typical part of the hype machine. And perhaps that’s the problem. Cathy Horyn dares to pierce the veil and share the real behind the scenes dynamics in the New York Times’ Muscling In on the Front Row:

“It’s such an underworld in a way, the celebrity wrangling,” said Vanessa Bismarck, a New York-based fashion publicist whose firm, BPCM, represents labels like Preen and Azzaro. She was referring to the deals, trades and exclusive contracts — first-class airfare, hotel rooms for friends, per diems, designer boutique shopping sprees — that miraculously clear a path to the front row for a busy actress. This is especially the case in Paris and Milan, where budgets and appetites for celebrities are that much bigger.

“Their managers and agents realize fashion shows are a money-making opportunity,” said Roger Padilha, whose firm MAO Public Relations represents a number of fashion brands. “If you see an A-list star at a show, that’s because she’s making $100,000 on the deal.”

No small wonder runway show costs have entered the stratosphere. Can anyone say ‘overhead?’

Yet this season, because of the economy and a general souring on celebrity, many designers are taking a budget approach to V.I.P.’s, paying only for a guest’s outfit for the show and maybe grooming and car-service expenses. A publicist for several New York designers said his clients had been approached by actresses in Los Angeles willing to grace their front rows — provided travel expenses were covered. The designers said no thanks. “Nobody has the money,” the publicist said.

But these big name designers backed by big name corporate conglomerates could get their hands on said money… if the return on investment were there. Apparently that seems to be waning.

Maybe the blunt mercantile aspects of celebrity — your frock for my recognizable face — have turned off the taste-makers. On Wednesday, Mr. Jacobs’s business partner, Robert Duffy, told Style.com that no celebrities were being invited to the designer’s show on Monday, a reversal of years of packing rappers in with famous artists and actors. Mr. Duffy said that “the celebrity thing” had become a bore.

…Now, like a worn rut in a road, the whole business of celebrity seems so well established as to be old and familiar, and in fashion, hopelessly preoccupied with the new, that makes it worthy of contempt.

Stars, too, find a front-row appearance less of a thrill. They see little reason to put up with the swarming photographers and inane questions from pouncing gossip reporters. Some celebrities strive for loftier images. “Angelina Jolie doesn’t go to the shows,” Ms. Schmeidler observed. “She goes to Haiti.”

Bling is out, social responsibility is way more fashionable?

Which brings us back to Snooki and the “Jersey Shore” bunch.

Inevitably they will be invited to a fashion show, just as surely as Lindsay Lohan, who only a few years ago was a desired “get” for the front row, will be told by someone’s publicist that there is no place for her now. She’s old business.

“one minute you’re in, and the next minute… you’re out.”

Which brings us back to Snooki and the “Jersey Shore” bunch.

“Oh, you know you’re going to see them at something,” Mr. Kors said of the “Jersey” cast. The fashion world scorns anything — camp taste, bad hair — until suddenly it’s in its interest to approve them, and then the idea is genius.

Alexander McQueen from Kinho.com

The fashion world has always been one of knock offs and derivatives, today they just happen at an accelerated pace. But in the Post Industrial Revolution world of designers as artists, there have always been a handful that serve as the true channels of zeitgeist that pretty much everyone else riffs off of. Alexander McQueen was such a genius, and the fashion world is painfully aware of the empty hole left by his suicide.

But it’s Stephano Tonchi, editor of T, the New York Times Style magazine, that had the courage to pierce through the veils of insular industry hype and call out the fashion system itself, the system that has been overtaken by corporate conglomerates that are now the only option for high end but envelope pushing designers to finance their endeavors by turning themselves into a brand and squeezing out ever increasing amounts of product.

The following was taken from New York Magazine’s blog, The Cut:

“I think it is just the tip of the iceberg…We all know that this is a very critical moment in fashion, and that basically he is the first victim of what is a conflict between creativity and business. Today to be a fashion designer, you have to be a superman or superwoman. You have to have nerves of steel. You have to be so strong. And if you are a little bit weak, if you have psychological problems or weakness, you end up like him.” When McQueen began in fashion, designers worked on two or three collections a year, said Tonchi. “Now you have to be a business manager, a marketer. It’s, what? Eight, ten, fifteen collections a year. Men’s, women’s, couture, diffusion. Then they want accessories. Then they want watches. Then they want jewelry. It’s a machine, and I think that killed him.”

Tonchi also comments on McQueen’s move from working on his own to Givenchy (owned by the LVMH conglomerate) and then to the Gucci Group:

“He is really someone who has been chewed by the system,” said Tonchi. “I think all these different bosses are part of the pressure that we are putting on our designers. And also the pressure on creators of topping what they have done before. But not once a year: Every three months, every six months you have to be better than what you have been. You always must feel like you’re running behind.”

Fashion’s transformation into a big business, Tonchi said, reminds him of the end of the Hollywood studio system in the forties and fifties. “Do you remember how many people were getting killed by the job?” he asked. “The Marilyn Monroes, the James Deans. It was the same kind of self-destruction complex that brings you to kill yourself or do something so stupid as suicide.”

Anger at suicide is a common reaction, but Tonchi said he was coming more from a place of concern about what the industry is doing to the people who work in it. “We cannot look at the poor Alexander McQueen, abused child or abuser of substance,” he said. “I think you have to put it in a larger context in terms of the fashion system. He’s just one of the little cogs that got squeezed.”

Daniela Perdomo neatly sidesteps engaging in the content of the theories themselves, but rather takes a step back and asks what their growing popularity means:

promo ad for Jesse Ventura's tv show

“We have got to get to a point where we have leaders who are there for us instead of representing their manipulative, greedy ways,” he told me.

This insight is one most progressives can identify with, and it drives home the fact that people like Jones and Noory are driven to do what they do because they are distrustful of the powers that be. The fear of a government that ignores your constitutional rights or of too-powerful interests controlling the economy is a perfectly legitimate concern. This manifests itself across the political spectrum in the United States.

…That doubt stems from not knowing what happens behind closed doors in government and in the board rooms of the largest, most powerful companies in the country. What we have little doubt about is that power in the United States — and everywhere, for that matter — is monopolized by small, associated groups that do not represent the interests of the great majority. That’s why there is at least a grain of truth in every bit of conspiracy theory, even the most delusional ones.

The fear of concentrated power is valid and brings up important questions that mainstream culture is often unwilling to ask. Conspiracy theorists ask those questions, though their answers may lead some astray.

This is sort of where I’m at with all of this - can’t say too much about the specifics, aware that anyone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out is still seeing through their own filters, and since I’m still awaiting my invitation to the next Bilderberger event know that I’m so far outside elite power circles of any kind I’ll never have a chance to draw first hand conclusions.

But what I do see is a growing populist discontent with whomever is in power, and as the Supreme Court’s baffling decision to grant giant corporations with multi billion dollar arsenals the same rights of the individual ‘persons’ that have nothing near the means to compete on that playing field shows us, whomever that is sure isn’t governing ‘for the people.’

So the question becomes not ‘is there a shadow elite intricately tangled up in corporate and government trying to manipulate the masses for their own ends using mainstream media bombardment to frame the reality they want everyone to believe?’ (see the film Orwell Rolls in his Grave for an excellent expose on the specifics of that). The question is ‘what are people going to do when the system of consumer supply that keeps us comfortable and compliant begins to falter?’ It’ll be then - and only then - that we’ll start to see any widespread challenges to said structure that go beyond watching tv shows.

I happened upon on a succinct and thought provoking post on attention, consciousness and how the internet is affecting the two. The host site, Edge.org, introduced me to the term ‘The Third Culture:’

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

Thomas Metzinger, a self described ‘neuro-philosopher,’ is the author of The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self:

The core of the problem is not cognitive style, but something else: attention management. The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings, and to those of others is a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life. We need attention in order to truly listen to others — and even to ourselves. We need attention to truly enjoy sensory pleasures, as well as for efficient learning. We need it in order to be truly present during sex, or to be in love, or when we are just contemplating nature. Our brains can generate only a limited amount of this precious resource every day. Today, the advertisement and entertainment industries are attacking the very foundations of our capacity for experience, drawing us into the vast and confusing media jungle. They are trying to rob us of as much of our scarce resource as possible, and they are doing so in ever more persistent and intelligent ways. We know all that. But here is something we are just beginning to understand — that the Internet affects our sense of selfhood, and on a deep functional level.

Consciousness is the space of attentional agency: Conscious information is exactly that information in your brain to which you can deliberately direct your attention. As an attentional agent, you can initiate a shift in attention and, as it were, direct your inner flashlight at certain targets: a perceptual object, say, or a specific feeling. In many situations, people lose the property of attentional agency, and consequently their sense of self is weakened. Infants cannot control their visual attention; their gaze seems to wander aimlessly from one object to another, because this part of their Ego is not yet consolidated. Another example of consciousness without attentional control is the non-lucid dream state. In other cases, too, such as severe drunkenness or senile dementia, you may lose the ability to direct your attention — and, correspondingly, feel that your “self” is falling apart.

If it is true that the experience of controlling and sustaining your focus of attention is one of the deeper layers of phenomenal selfhood, then what we are currently witnessing is not only an organized attack on the space of consciousness per se but a mild form of depersonalization. New medial environments may therefore create a new form of waking consciousness that resembles weakly subjective states — a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication, and infantilization. Now we all do this together, every day. I call it Public Dreaming.

...

Alt press influential Arianna Huffington shines the spotlight on her first book pic of the year:

My first HuffPost Book Club selection of 2010 is Janine Wedel’s Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. It’s a gripping, disquieting book that exposes and explains why it’s been so hard to bring about any real change in our country — why Washington no longer seems capable of addressing the problems our nation faces.

It’s not an altogether new idea, but what’s notable is the divergence from the usual focus on corporate power and towards individual players. It will be interesting to read it and see how much overlap there is with conspiracy theories that target organizations like the Illuminati.

But the mere fact that books like these can still be published and then promoted on a alternative-mainstream site with a large audience gives me a glimmer of hope.

“The shadow elite clearly knew that the months and months of so-called debate over the issue was nothing more than a charade — the ultimate outcome never in doubt. The bill was created in the shadows. The public process since then has essentially been like a Hollywood adaptation — complete with the requisite third act happy ending (or, in the words of our elected officials, a “historic” ending).

“The new breed of players,” writes Wedel, “who operate at the nexus of official and private power, cannot only co-opt public policy agendas, crafting policy with their own purposes in mind. They test the time-honored principles of both the canons of accountability of the modern state and the codes of competition of the free market. In so doing, they reorganize relations between bureaucracy and business to their advantage, and challenge the walls erected to separate them. As these walls erode, players are better able to use official power and resources without public oversight.”

Years ago I made the claim that there was an undercurrent of anti-corporate sentiment that was destined to gain momentum and break into the mainstream. At that pre-economic meltdown time it would have been unthinkable to also see attacks on capitalism itself recognized by mainstream media, but with Michael Moore’s documentary, Capitalism, a Love Story, poised to explode into theaters near you, I see this entering the discourse as well. But these two themes together can all too easily provide fuel for right wing hysteria about a communist state just around the corner, it is fortunate and timely to have authors like Cenk Uygur provide an eloquent defense of capitalism and what it really is, and explain how the corporatocracy we’re currently living under is anything but that.

My favorite quote in Corporatists v. Capitalists: comes near the end:

I believe in the capitalist system. I think it makes sense and it is attuned to human nature. People do not work to the best of their ability and take only as much as they need. They work as little as humanly possible and take as much as humanly possible. Capitalism helps to funnel these natural impulses in a positive, hopefully productive manner.

But in order to have capitalism we must have choice. If consumers do not have different companies to choose from, if the markets aren’t truly free and there is no real competition, then you kill capitalism. Corporations are a natural byproduct of capitalism, but as soon as they are born they want to destroy their parent. Corporations are the Oedipus of the capitalist system.

The ultimate dialectic.

He elaborates on the term ‘corporatist:’ (more…)

from Alexsandro Palombo's upcoming book of illustrations, 'Vanitas, Inshallah'

Robin Givhan’s latest article for the Washington Post zeros in on what everyone knows but that no one of any importance dare to speak of, lest they be ignored and excluded by the same inner circle they seek to critique:

There is an assumed degree of extreme intimacy, among those who are in the business of making and marketing expensive clothes, that sometimes borders on incestuous.

One of the most recent examples of how the various strands of the fashion industry are interwoven — or more aptly, tied into a tight, complicated little knot — comes in the form of a Prada project called “The Iconoclasts.” The Italian design house announced that four well-known fashion editors will each window-dress one of its flagship stores. The guest merchandisers’ work is organized to coincide with Fashion Week in each of the four cities.

…The point, however, is whether they should be doing it at all. In a business where conflicts of interest occur every day, this is a step too far and poorly timed. Fashion does not need such a public blow to its credibility during an economic crisis that has it quite literally — and at times, unfairly — having to justify its existence.

Yes, that’s right, magazine editors are not offering us an objective, unbiased view of fashion designers offerings, and show favor to their advertisers. This situation is already so taken for granted that it only serves as the background context for Ugly Betty episodes rather than a full plot line. So why does Givhan now see this as such an issue, worthy of risking exclusion from the relevant insider parties? The Washington Post is making serious budget cuts, so could be there’s a ‘nothing left to lose since they won’t pay for me to fly to Milan anyway’ undercurrent, but Givhan expresses concern that given the current about face in consumer spending, this now undermines their credibility:

…the Paris store will be merchandised by the editor in chief of French Vogue, Carine Roitfeld — which would seem to be a bit like the editor of Sports Illustrated calling the plays at a football game and then writing about how brilliant the coaching was.

…Magazines have never pretended to be objective observers of fashion. They have always seen their role as that of cheerleader and champion. They celebrate the most talented designers and the most beautiful clothes and simply ignore the rest. They give special attention to advertisers. And so it’s often hard to know whether the best truly is any good at all. Maybe the only reason that a collection gets press is because the designer just happens to be a good schmoozer with the right connections or a compelling story.

Yah think? Again, this is not an earth shattering revelation. So why is it now such a big problem?

At a time when the industry needs all the credibility it can muster, Prada is bragging about its coziness with editors. With so many folks scratching each other’s back, why should any reader put stock in a story about clothes that supposedly have lasting value?

No kidding. It’s the same extreme trend over the top flashy excess that last year was sold as a ’splurge’ but now is spun with the new buzzword, ‘investment.’

Why should anyone believe magazines, designers or anyone in this industry? No wonder so many consumers believe the fashion business is just one giant conspiracy out to dupe women. It’s just what the paranoid always thought: They are all in this together.

Perhaps it was less of a problem when there was an ever increasing supply of cash flow into the industry fueled largely by the arms race between aspirational desperate housewives convinced that buying ‘It Bags’ on credit was necessary and innocuous.

The fashion industry painted itself into this corner over the long haul. It doesn’t see itself as a conglomeration of businesses that are interdependent and yet provide each other with checks and balances. Instead, the industry would best be described as an unruly family filled with enablers who encourage behavior that weakens consumer trust.

This sudden new reverse status of thrift and restraint combined with how excessive displays of consumption and lavish lifestyles have become unfashionable (in case you haven’t heard, bankers and by association the arm candy they used to finance are way unpopular symbols right about now) have left this insider clique looking, dare I say, out of date. And scurrying to regain their relevance in a way that seems to echo Wall Street’s denial that the way of life they’d become accustomed to isn’t going to ‘return to normal.’ Ever.

Hopefully these cracks in the establishment will provide opportunities for genuine innovation and relevant collections from heretofore excluded designers.

I’ve also been seeing the phrase ‘tone deaf’ used a lot, too. From ABC News, JPMorgan Chase To Spend Millions on New Jets and Luxury Airport Hangar

After pressure from his administration, Citigroup abandoned plans for a new $50 million corporate jet from France. And in February, Obama said the days of bank executives flying corporate jets “were over.”

But on March 11, the chairman of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, said he could not understand why corporate America has such a bad image.

“When I hear the constant vilification of corporate America I personally don’t understand it,” Dimon said.

Dimon, whose 2008 compensation package, according to SEC documents, was worth more than $19 million in salary, stock and options, declined to speak with ABC News about the proposed plans.

Can we say deeply engrained sense of entitlement totally divorced from performance or contribution not just to the greater good, but even to their own benefit? Because as I understand it, the whole Ayn Rand kick is all about leaving these superior, brilliant beings to pursue their own self interest because since it wouldn’t be in their self interest to, let’s say…have their companies blow up in a super nova that becomes a black hole sucking away global capital… that they wouldn’t - couldn’t - let that happen. And how’s that theory working out for us right about now?

Tony Schwartz writes How Self-Interest Destroyed the Economy and explains the ‘tragedy of the commons.’ Expect that phrase to be popping up more and more:

Do you find yourself asking this question: How is it that so many ostensibly smart people in the financial world made such terrible choices for so long?

Thirty years ago, an ecologist and professor named Garrett Hardin wrote a classic article in the journal titled “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His thesis was that individuals, acting in their rational self-interest, may ultimately destroy a limited resource over the long term.

To illustrate, Hardin used the metaphor of an open pasture - “the commons” - to which herdsmen bring their cattle to feed. The herdsmen understandably want to feed as many of their cattle as possible - or as Hardin put it: “As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain.” This works fine for everyone so long as there’s enough grass to feed all the cattle. As demand rises, however, the effects of overgrazing take a progressive toll on the commons, until ultimately they’re destroyed for everyone.

“Therein is the tragedy,” Hardin writes. “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit - in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”

But we’re not herdsman (well, at least not literally. Although the case could be made for anyone in marketing…) How does this relate to our financial system?

Far too many of us conspired to get as much as we could while the getting was good, never stopping to consider that if everyone keeps trying to get more - leveraging their bets and running up debt to do so — there will eventually be a day of reckoning.

And the antidote?

We live now in a world of palpably limited resources. Every choice we make has an increasingly visible impact on the commons. The leader who suggests that his company’s only obligation is to maximize profit for his shareholders is dangerously delusional.

We’re all in this together, and we literally can’t afford to act any longer as if we’re each free to pursue our self-interest with blinders on. The antidote is a higher level of awareness - the capacity to see the consequences of our actions over the long term and to make choices from that perspective rather than succumbing to our most primitive impulses.

A perspective which, of course, is the opposite of current advertising methods which are all about stimulating those primitive impulses in order that they may be sated by the product on offer. What we’ll have to see then, is a layer of sophistication integrated in - since thinking about others or the common good might now have perceived rewards (feeling good about oneself and the like) then the brand will need to associate itself with those actions. This will become a feedback loop of sorts - as consumers get more activist and whistleblowing becomes accessible to everyone with a cell phone camera, corporations will have to watch their p’s and q’s. How many investment bankers can become PR people? Hype alone isn’t going to cut it.

Mark you calendars: April 11 might turn out to be a newsworthy flashpoint day. I just read an alternet article about A New Way Forward, a group that’s formed to synchronize protests against Wall Street and the ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions:

Somehow, we’ve created a system that protects some of America’s wealthiest individuals by letting them build institutions that are “too big to fail.” Large scale banking has left our economy unstable, and overly dependent upon too few institutions. Greed for short-term profit, and competitive exuberance, has led to incomprehensible financing schemes and rewards for companies that sold people things they couldn’t afford.

But, increasingly, people are realizing that anger at the banks ought also be directed at Congress, and at ourselves. We have created corporations that have left us exposed, unstable, and made it easy for concentrated wealth to exploit the political process.

A new grassroots, bottom-up, organization, has sprung up demanding structural change, and grown from 4 to over 1,000 people in the last week. Their clear and important demand is this: any bank that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

Writer Matt Taibbi thinks the same thing. Keeping with the ‘too big to fail is too big to exist’ theme, Rachel Maddow interviews Taibbi and calls his piece for the Rolling Stone a must read:

Here is the introduction from The Big Takeover, which is well worth reading in its entirety. He follows with a blow by blow historical account framed in his take-no-prisoners style.

So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all.

… He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its “pneumonia” was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn’t have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — “our partners in the government,” as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

And then for some fun with time machines and crystal balls, Rachel Maddow interviews Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. Why is that fun? She pulls quotes from 1999 where Dorgan - one of the only 8 senators who voted against the bill that allowed for the consolidation of insurance companies/banks/investment firms heretofore prohibited because that’s what helped lead up to the great depression - expresses concern that 10 years forward we’d find ourselves bailing out these institutions.

Who’s looking like the smart guy now?