Payola

"Conservatives have argued for decades that the sins most dangerous to our society were rooted in lust when in fact they were rooted in greed," E. J. Dionne observes in today's Washington Post.

He's right, of course, ever since Reagan, in our time, and until now as Bush screwed the pooch and trashed our economy. That's going to be his bush-league legacy, that witlessly he brought down his own house and left us the rubble to rebuild our so-called democracy, this time for the people perhaps instead of payola.

"The sound you are hearing in response to the AIG payoffs -- excuse me, bonuses -- is the rancorous noise of their arrogance crashing to earth," Dionne continues. "A study of compensation levels in 2007 found that average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies was 344 times higher than the average worker's wage, and that the top 50 investment fund managers took home 19,000 times -- yes, that's with three zeroes -- as much as typical workers earned."

Now, Dionne urges, Obama's "administration should be unafraid to use its proposals on health care, taxes, education, energy and financial regulation to argue that it is building a new economy on the ashes of the old -- an economy based on fair rewards to capital and labor alike, not on an ethic of greed and excess."