Isn't it ironic, don't you think?

It certainly wasn't in the Alanis Morissette song but it certainly seems to be in real life. An assistant bank manager in Scotland has been jailed for a little over a year for stealing £31,000 from customer accounts. In today's environment this seems rather curious. Perhaps her real crime was stealing ONLY £31,000. Had she stolen £31,000,000 or better yet £31,000,000,000 she probably would have been made a Dame!

I guess that Carol Barclay will have to accept her fifteen minutes of fame coming from the fact that she will almost certainly be the only HBOS employee to be punished for stealing money from taxpayers.

Unfortunately looters will not be shot on sight

Wachovia Corporation which has seen losses of over $30,000,000,000 in the last half of a year and is fleeing to the hopefully safe arms of Wells Fargo in a "merger" that was forced upon it by its dire financial position looks set to award $98,000,000 in platinum parachutes to its top ten executives should the merger go through.

The first person to say that they "earned it" gets waterboarded.

Don't worry your $700,000,000,000 is in safe hands...

...because if you can't trust a former executive of a company that couldn't make it as an investment bank with your money, who the hell can you trust?

1,000 reasons John McCain shouldn't be President

Number 92: he believes in income redistribution; unfortunately in the wrong direction. A McCain aide has admitted that the Aged One plans cuts in Medicare and, obscenely, Medicaid to fund his loser of a health care plan. You have been warned.

It must have been all that free checking

Washington Mutual has slipped into bankruptcy after the sale of its banking operations to JP Morgan with the potential loss of thousands of jobs. But at least one ex-employee won't risk financial disaster; the CEO of the failed institution Alan Fishman stands to get $13 million in severance after roughly two months on the job. Heartwarming.

A musical interlude

I thought this might be appropriate in light of the US Treasury's "here take some money please" socialism for the rich bail out of the dumb fucks who got us in this mess in the first place.