"The economists were George Akerlof, who would later win a Nobel Prize, and Paul Romer, the renowned expert on economic growth. In the paper, they argued that several financial crises in the 1980s, like the Texas real estate bust, had been the result of private investors taking advantage of the government. The investors had borrowed huge amounts of money, made big profits when times were good and then left the government holding the bag for their eventual (and predictable) losses. 

"In a word, the investors looted. Someone trying to make an honest profit, Professors Akerlof and Romer said, would have operated in a completely different manner. The investors displayed a “total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending,” failing to verify standard information about their borrowers or, in some cases, even to ask for that information.

"On Tuesday morning in Washington, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave a speech that read like a sad coda to the “Looting” paper. Because the government is unwilling to let big, interconnected financial firms fail — and because people at those firms knew it — they engaged in what Mr. Bernanke called “excessive risk-taking.” To prevent such problems in the future, he called for tougher regulation.

"Do you remember the mea culpa that Alan Greenspan, Mr. Bernanke’s predecessor, delivered on Capitol Hill last fall? He said that he was “in a state of shocked disbelief” that “the self-interest” of Wall Street bankers hadn’t prevented this mess.

Earlier this month I wrote about the former head of a health care corporation that defrauded taxpayers and now is leading the charge against universal health care.  Now Christopher Hayes weighs in on the same subject at The Nation with more details.

"A Texas lawyer who shared a business partner with George W. Bush, Scott started his health company, Columbia Hospital Corporation, in 1987. Its growth was meteoric, expanding from just a few hospitals to more than 1,000 facilities in thirty-eight states and three other countries in 1997. As his firm gobbled up chains, like the Frist family's Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), it became the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country. By 1994, Columbia/HCA was one of the forty largest corporations in America, and Scott had acquired a reputation as the Gordon Gecko of the healthcare world. "Whose patients are you stealing?" he would ask employees at his newly acquired hospitals.

"He promised to put nonprofit hospitals--which he insisted on referring to as "nontaxpaying" hospitals--out of business and touted his company's single-minded pursuit of profit as a model for the nation's entire healthcare system. "What's happening in Washington is not healthcare reform," he told the New York Times in 1994. "Healthcare reform is happening in the marketplace."

"The press portrayed Scott as a guru to be admired and feared, "a private capitalist dictator," in the words of one Princeton health economist. 'Probably the lowest body fat of anybody I've been in business with,'  his partner told the Times. 

"The press portrayed Scott as a guru to be admired and feared, "a private capitalist dictator," in the words of one Princeton health economist. "Probably the lowest body fat of anybody I've been in business with," his partner told the Times.

" 'Other hospitals were intimidated,' recalls John Schilling, who worked for Columbia/HCA in the 1990s. Scott was "like the bully that would come into town and if you didn't sell to him or partner with him, he would open up shop across the street from you and put you out of business.'

"Not long after joining the company in 1993 as the supervisor of reimbursement for the Fort Myers, Florida, office, Schilling noticed things weren't quite kosher. 'They were looking for ways to maximize reimbursement...which ultimately would improve the bottom line.'

"The backdrop to the EFCA as a stimulus for the US economy is the crash of a multitrillion-dollar housing bubble. Absent a worker's ability to tap into her rising housing price as the economic slowdown worsens, she is pulling back on consumption of all manner of purchases: from autos to food and travel. This pullback effect is underway across the US economy, 70 percent of which is on consumer spending. Therefore, a national policy of recovery requires government intervention for the working majority. The EFCA could do that.

"If Congress passes the EFCA and President Obama, who co-sponsored the bill as a senator in 2007, signs it, the ranks of union members could grow by millions. That would speed up the recovery of the economy, according to a recent report by David Madland and Karla Walter of the Center for American Progress. "One of the primary reasons why our current recession endures is that workers do not have the purchasing power they need to drive our economy," they write.

"As labor unions weakened, US workers' share of the pie got smaller. The process sped up with the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980. "Looking from 1980 to 2008, nationwide worker productivity grew by 75 percent, while workers' inflation-adjusted average wages increased by only 22.6 percent, which means that workers were compensated for only 30.2 percent of their productivity gains," write Madland and Walter.

The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that households lost $5.1 trillion, or 9 percent, of "their wealth in the last three months of 2008, the most ever in a single quarter in the 57-year history of recordkeeping by the central bank.