Little Timmy Geithner is on a book tour, launched (at least so far as I was aware) in yesterday's New York Times Magazine puff piece by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Today I ran across this quote, which sort of follows up on Little Timmy's remark that the purpose of the homeowner relief program was to “foam the runway” for the banks. In other words, it was a sham that enabled them to stretch out the foreclosure process, allowing the banks to make their books look better, while doling out false hope to millions of ordinary people. Little Timmy uses another plane analogy for not prosecuting the banksters:
In this fascinating interview today with Susan Page at USA Today, Geithner actually uses the plane analogy, but his image of himself is something like that of Indiana Jones, hero to the rescue, defying all odds:
“It’s like you’re in the cockpit and the plane’s on fire and smoke is filling the cabin. And you’ve got a bunch of people on the plane — you’ve got some terrorists, or you’ve got some people who built the plane or didn’t design the fire system right — and people want you to come out of the cockpit and put them in handcuffs or beat them up. And it’s understandable, but you’ve got to land the plane safely if you want to protect people from the risk of catastrophe.”
Now, I'm no expert in criminal law, but I imagine if that scenario were to play out in real life, those terrorists and designers would have been arrested once the plane was safely landed. I'm fairly sure that the pilot would not, as Geithner, did, hand them multi-million dollar bonuses. This is only surmise, of course, but I'm fairly sure I'm right.
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