The fast, easy money for just "being" in upper management is quickly drying up. The "they owe me a million bucks for just showing up," mentality has just had its bubble burst big time by the Obama administration whether the AIG managers manage to sneak off with their bonuses or not.
Reality finally takes its bite out of the Frat Boy, Trust-Fund-Baby businessmen. Too bad it didn't happen long before this. Might have made some difference.
At this point, I figure if there aren't at least a dozen suicides by managers and directors of failed mega-corporations, then the government isn't doing its job very well. When your blatant malfeasance at your job is directly responsibility for the loss of millions or billions of dollars and the livelihoods of hundreds and thousands, if not millions of families, there is only one appropriate price to be paid by anyone with a conscience.
But that word "conscience," now that's the rub. Yep. It's the key to how we got where we are. The movers and shakers of our society, the "captains of industry," the Ponzi's and Madoff's of America, have no consciences. None.
These are the real John Gault's of America, the sort of men whom Ayn Rand romanticized in her novels. This is the reality of "free enterprise," as opposed to the fiction of what her grandiose and dogmatic excuse for an imagination cooked up.
Greed, pure and simple greed, in its crudest sense. Greedy men doing greedy things without limit. That is the reality. We finally have the answer to the musical question, "Who is John Gault?" He is every incompetent loafing silver-spoon trust-fund-baby frat boy who grew to adulthood and slipped into management to offer nothing to society but his monumental, insatiable, conscienceless greed.
If you need an example, try "George W. Bush" on for size. THAT is who "John Gault" turned out to be.