From this morning Times:
For 16 years, Marshall A. Cohen served as a director of the American International Group, stepping down just months before the company’s near-collapse in 2008. Several months later, Mr. Cohen was again in demand, joining the board of Gleacher & Company, a New York investment bank.
Gleacher expanded its board last year to include not only Mr. Cohen but Henry S. Bienen, who served as a director of Bear Stearns from 2004 until its rescue by JPMorgan Chase in March 2008.
On the second anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, appointments like those of Mr. Cohen and Mr. Bienen highlight how the directors of the companies at the center of the financial crisis — A.I.G., Bear Stearns and Lehman itself — still play an active role in the governance of corporate America.
“In too many cases, the radioactivity of a board member of a collapsed company has a half life measured in milliseconds,” said John Gillespie, a longtime Wall Street investment banker and the co-author of “Money for Nothing” (Free Press), a recent book on corporate boards.
It is a fact of life that among our betters, failure is the only sure path to success. It’s one of the few things on which both political parties seem to agree. Obama turned to the Democrats most responsible for screwing up the economy to fix it. Apparently, like the directors who claim that they have learned from previous failures, we were supposed to assume that Geithner and Sommers have learned from theirs. Truth is, they never do.
Can we forget the Republicans who never learn from the failure of the tax cutting road to peace and prosperity (okay, this is a special case, since they don’t really believe their own guff), the pundits who cheered us into Iraq, the “deficit hawks” of both parties who will spend on war to our last penny, but can never see their way clear to spending money to help real Americans, or the economists who couldn’t see the housing bubble as it grew to mammoth proportions?
All of these folks have one thing in common. They have thrived as a result of their failures. Meanwhile, those who were right on these various subjects are still dismissed as kooks.
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