Solution to our economic woes

17,000 dollars an hour.

That's how much the outgoing CEO of Lehman Brothers -- the gigantic financial institution that just went tail-up and has taken its place on the corporate welfare check line outside the Federal Reserve -- received last year as part of his 45 million dollar salary running the 158-year old company into the ground.

Yes, Richard Fuld made it out just fine as his employees, investors, and millions of people caught up in the externalities suffered as Lehman met the same fate as a number of other financial institutions because its leadership (and the politicos on both sides of the aisle who greased their wheels) got too greedy and wanted too much too quickly.

What to do about this crisis has become a hot-button topic. McCain and Obama have jumped on the issue (though both employ advisers at the highest levels responsible for creating it), and Ralph Nader gleefully tells us in an email that he predicted this crisis long ago.

Here's my own solution. Why don't we find the people responsible and tar and feather 'em, all old-school like.

The Founding Fathers did this to collaborators with the British, mayors, and even tax collectors -- people no one really likes.

Well, no one really likes Mr. Fuld or his equivalents in AIG, Bear Sterns, Washington Mutual, or the various incest-driven legislative bodies who got us into this mess. So let's apply this old-school technique -- and a few others -- on these folks.

We can tar and feather Fuld outside one of his tax sheltered beach houses, or maybe waterboard Greenspan, or launch Phil Gramm via catapult into a steaming mound of cow dung. Robert Rubin can get a ritual beheading (maybe with a steak knife set from the closest big box store, just to make it more ironic?), and Newt Gingrich can be offered a choice between being disemboweled or having his eyes chewed out by rats.

Yeah, that sounds kind of cruel. But millions of people are about to lose their jobs and livelihoods, their retirements, homes, health, and sanity. And in a country that's gotten this bad, maybe joking about delivering the harshest of punishments as deterrent to future bad behavior on behalf of these out-of-touch elites isn't even funny anymore.