When Enron failed Ken Lay and co were charged with felony and were sentenced to long jail terms. Lay escaped by dying. Lehman bros, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch failed but their chief executives walked off with millions of dollars in bonuses and severance payments causing a melt down of the financial system and millions of people losing their jobs and pension benefits. No one has been charged let alone being sentenced to prison. The stories of the unemployed are heart rending. These were respectable, hard working people who now face destitution. Astonishingly the richest country in the world has no safety net for such people in distress even if they have families with little children. Apparently they receive benefit cheques for 99 weeks and then they stop so these people are called 99ers, which seems a cruel mockery because the 49ers are a football team. Capitalism is the only system that works because it rewards merit and punishes failure. In the case of financial institutions that does not seem to apply. Failures were rewarded with millions and accounting fraud went unpunished. This is not meritocracy but kleptocracy on a grand scale and is vandalism disguised as capitalism. The Republicans are still supporting tax cuts for the rich and refusing to extend benefit payments for the victims. Curiously ordinary people seem to be supporting this utterly shameless crony capitalism. How is it that americans have forgotten that it was George Bush who turned Clinton's surplus into deficit and the friends of these same Republicans were responsible for the recession. Americans are truly stupid.