These days, privilege is rank and so is brimstone!

But, it won’t be tomorrow that I invite my neighbor over. ’Cause, if you recall, my shadow and I are visiting the pub. And that’s just the way us bleeding-heart sinners are put together, as I’m sure Sarah Palin will tell you. We’re all really long on high-flown ideals and way too short on the kinds of action she's used to, the kind that doesn’t even cause her to blink.

So, I was talking to the guy that cleans our offices yesterday, and he made me realize that almost everything wrong with all the institutions in the U.S. can be summed up in two words . . . executive privilege. And I'm not talking only about the federal offices in Washington, D.C., either.

Are the corporations of America—those grand ole businesses that have flourished for generations on the sweat and labor of honest men and women—truly not responsible for the fixes they've gotten themselves into? I mean, who do they have to blame but themselves for never having paid any attention to one jot or tittle above the bottom line? It's exceedingly demeaning to those of us who have a few connected synapses left when they tell us that they "couldn't have foreseen" whatever today's disaster may be and they expect us to buy that BS!

Anyone who can add and subtract could have predicted the eventual failure of the so-called "housing bubble." The first time it became clear to me exactly what a "sub-prime mortgage" was, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. "Who would buy such an abortion?" I thought to myself. A lot of people, apparently. Part of the problem is that we let ourselves be easily swayed by language that comes to us with it's own quotation marks already tied to each end of the phrase. That's all the more true if the language is coming out of the mouth of someone supposed to be an authority in the field—like a mortgage banker, for instance, or an economist, or a hedge fund manager.

What do any of us peons actually know about the high-flown world of finance, after all? We've simply got no choice but to trust the experts. Problem is, most of them are plain and simple opportunists; i.e., someone in the right place at the right time. For the rest of us, it's caveat emptor right and left.

So now OUR government has bailed out Bare Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and, today, AIG! I can't even keep up with the sum total of our money they've so far committed to these giant corporations. But I'm going to have a real hard time forgetting that they fired the CEO's of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after the two of them jointly earned almost $30 million last year, and we didn't ask them for a penny of it back . . . although it seems we aren't going to give them their golden parachutes. Boo hoo!

Do you begin to get a glimpse of what I mean by executive privilege?
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