Obama Blames Excess, Bankers Get out of Jail, Pass Go and Get $200 Bazzillion dollars

These days, I read the newspaper and shake my head. In his Martin Luther King memorial dedication speach, Obama said: “Dr. King would want us to challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing those who work there.”

Really? This is the change-agent everyone voted for?

So it's not about who needs to be held to account; who the government hasn't even bothered to investigate yet, let alone prosecute. It's not about fixing the hole in the dike that was opened by ill-conceived Congressional legislation in the first place. "Excesses" are the culprit. Gee, what are we going to do about those?

Let's keep on treating the symptom (unemployment) and not the disease. Let's let capitalism and the middle class waste away from a cancer within why don't we. We can continue to play politics with the few thousand jobs government is capable of creating and bury our heads in the sand like ostriches. We can console ourselves by dutifully repeating after Ben Bernanke in responsive reading and hope that Wall Street excesses are a thing in the past. The last thing we want to do is inconvenience or point fingers at people who work on Wall Street. Surely they see the error of their ways.

Really? This is Mr. Hope?

More like Bob Hope.





Meanwhile, back at the ranch, and buried on page 4, Medicare yanks licenses and gives them right back.

Dirty Minds in Charge

The image on the left has been making the rounds on the Web.

The image on the right is the way I saw it.

Henry Ford was no Steve Jobs

Henry Ford (left) invented the assembly line, Harely Earl started America's love affair with the car.

Over the last few days, I have heard one talking head after another compare Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. I'll agree with the Edison comparison, but Henry Ford? This shows how little, even to this day, the business press and business leaders understand Jobs' contributions to Apple and the world.

If you want to compare the evolution of digital devices and automobiles then Henry Ford was similar to Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM. True, by inventing the assembly line, Ford made automobiles affordable for the masses, and Jobs designed a computer for everyday people, but even that analogy is a stretch because Ford's automobiles were manufactured as strictly utilitarian transportation machines.

Jobs' was focused on revolutionizing computers for everyone by making them user friendly. He took, what was universally regarded as a utilitarian device and made it a playful and intuitive creative tool. No, if you want to look for a game-changer like Jobs in the automobile world, then consider Harley Earl the head of GM Design in the 1940s and '50s, who is generally recognized as the father of automotive design.

At the time Earl joined GM, Ford was the dominant automaker. All cars were manufactured with few variations, and any upgrades or innovations were made by engineers on the assembly line. Earl changed all that by convincing GM President Alfred P. Sloan that design should come first. GM Design ultimately became the company's most powerful division, dictating manufacturing and marketing strategies for all GM brands. Earl's many innovations, style initiatives and flamboyant marketing techniques made GM the largest automaker in the world, and started America's love affair with the car.

America waited with baited breath for GM to roll out the new body-style every couple of years, just like they do for Apple to announce the Next Big Thing today. Henry Ford on the other hand, once rather famously said, "People can have the Model T in any color — so long as it is black."

I wrote a feature article about Harley Earl in 2007. You can download a pdf file of the article and learn more about him by clicking here.

Read more of my feature articles here.

Apple: Don't miss this opportunity

Rerelease this ad with one more icon at the end.

I blog about this cartoon, which I did for the Palm Beach Daily News in October of 1993, in this week's Cartoonistry column. It's all about some of the reasons other than Halloween that people tend to get the creeps in October. I guarantee you that, by the end of the article, you'll be feeling a little paranoid. Bouahahahahaha!