Top management on Wall Street has been beyond incompetent. Wild risk taking camouflaged for years by multi-tiered, complex, abstract financial instruments kept the joy ride going and going until the massive financial hot air balloon started plummeting.
As large corporations, and their trade associations, complete their takeover of the federal government - a process that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called fascism in 1938 - the corporations become the government.
In a recent speech to a partisan Republican fund-raising audience, George W. Bush fictionalized his Iraq war exploits and other related actions, and said that next January he will leave office "with his head held high."