(1)
Why all the fuss about the unequal treatment of GM CEO Rick Wagoner and, say, Vikram Pandit of Shittygroup? Didn’t we always know that all CEOs are equal but some CEOs are more equal than others? Which pigs was George Orwell writing about if not the proverbial capitalist pigs?

(2)
The thoroughly inestimable Charles Krauthammer — whose whole existence is thoroughly redundant since there are more than enough other people who demonstrate that a very successful career as a conservative pundit can be achieved even if you lack an ounce of both intelligence and common sense (William Kristol comes to mind immediately, for example; I’d love to see Krauthammer and Kristol debate whether Krauthammer is the poor man’s Kristol or vice versa) — delivered himself of this putrid intestinal eructation about the forced resignation of Rick Wagoner:

KRAUTHAMMER: What this is is the President giving in to populist pressure, demanding a head on a pike, which is the titular head of the company, whether or not it makes any economic sense at all. And that makes you worry.

I am a great one for living life by a few simple rules. One of the most reliable ones, I find, is that if Krauthammer says it, it must be totally wrong. So, by Charlie’s Law, it did actually make perfect sense for Obama to ask for Wagoner’s resignation.

Most sensible people express outrage at the treatment of GM (and Wagoner) by comparing it to the treatment of the rogue investment banks (and their CEOs). The point is not that GM and Wagoner are necessarily being treated unfairly; the point is that the rogue investment banks and their CEOs escaped their just desserts.

That point seems to have never occurred to Krauthammer.

(3)
Rick Wagoner has been working at GM since 1977. He has been President and CEO since June 2000. For most of that time, GM hasn’t exactly prospered. And since 2005, GM has lost more than $73 billion. So it makes perfect sense that Wagoner’s retirement benefits — without the benefit of any golden parachute or outrageous non-retention bonus — add up to just over $20 million dollars. It’s good to be the king, huh (even if you run the risk of being deposed)?

However, the Washington Post reports that the guy may get shafted by being kept on at GM at his $1 annual salary, just not as CEO:

Wagoner’s resignation does not mean that he will leave the company immediately. He will continue to draw his $1 annual salary, because if he leaves the company he is entitled to a multimillion-dollar pension that the government does not want to pay, a source familiar with the matter said.

(4)
By now it is a truism that Congress allowed itself to be persuaded to overwhelmingly support the initial Bush-Paulson TARP bailout proposal because no one in Congress (except, maybe, for those who have engaged in repeated acts of congress with the stalwarts of the investment banking industry) had any idea what investment banks actually do, and no one was going to expose their ignorance by asking.

But how or why did the CEOs of Citi and Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch and AIG and Lehman Brothers allow their companies to take such humongously huge risks in the mortgage derivatives market? Did they too have no idea what their rogue divisions actually did? And they figured they were being paid all those hundreds of millions of dollars not to know?

(5)
Those who firmly believe that whatever government does (or doesn’t do, in this case) private enterprise can do better may take some comfort in the fact that the free market is trying to make up for the Bush and Obama administrations’ failure. There are moves to dethrone at least some of the emperors of Wall Street. Take Bank of America’s Kenneth D. Lewis:

“The Merrill deal was done with little or no due diligence. Lewis went ahead and took a huge risk,” said Michael Garland, director of value strategies for CTW Investment Group, a shareholder activist group that works with pension funds. “He has also been complicit in the Merrill bonus fiasco. He has lost credibility with investors and regulators and needs to be replaced.”

CTW is urging investors to vote against reelecting Lewis to the bank’s board at the company’s shareholder meeting on April 29. Another BofA shareholder, Jerry Finger, is doing the same.

Finger, whose Finger Interests investing firm owns 1.1 million shares of BofA, said he is hopeful that private investors will succeed in forcing Lewis to step down. But he said he’s not against the government doing so, especially if it turns out that BofA needs more taxpayer funding down the road.

“The government has not supervised banks as diligently as they have in years past. They have given too much discretion to management,” Finger said. “Shareholders also have a responsibility to try and replace management, but if shareholders don’t do it, I’d be pleased if the government would.”

I imagine that a few people will be hoping that Lewis gets Fingered (nullus?).