Obama Financial Team to Taxpayers: You’ll Get Nothing, and Like It

As a business person, Warren Buffet quite rightly wanted something for his money when he bought up failed banks that couldn't get help anywhere else. In fact, he wanted a lot. He expected to have the ability to make sure the same crooks executives weren't pulling down the same salaries for making the same mistakes, and that the business plan changed. It was pretty basic, a bedrock principle of capitalism, the ability to exercise control appropriate to one's share of ownership.

We're about to buy ourselves some failed banks, but we can't get what Warren Buffet gets because nobody wants to mention the "n" word, nationalization:

One part of that strategy will be addressing the toxic assets that are clogging lenders’ balance sheets and preventing them from expanding credit, people familiar with the matter said last week. Likely approaches include a government-run bad bank to buy and hold some of the securities, and insurance of other assets that remain on banks’ books.

As Dean Baker says, "many, if not most, of our banks are in fact bankrupt... the scope of the toxic asset 'problem' has reached $2 trillion... this sum vastly exceeds the capital of the banking system."

But our money somehow isn't as good as Warren Buffet's -- all we get for it is the "toxic assets":