He’s a humongous donor, a trustee, and a saintly presence at Cornell (‘”We [he and his wife] are both crazy enough to think we can make a bit of difference in this world and crazy enough to try,” he said.’), but Sanford Weill, who made the zillions he gave the university by creating a bank too big to fail, now announces we should break up the banks.
Jon Stewart’s calling Cornell’s Joe Paterno an asshole, and Matt Taibbi, who also calls him an asshole, notes that
Through his ambitious (and at the time not yet legal) decision to merge Citibank, Travelers, and Salomon Brothers into one giant wrecking ball of greed, self-dealing and global irresponsibility called Citigroup, Weill more or less single-handedly created the Too-Big-To-Fail problem. You know, the one currently casting that thick, black doomlike shadow over all humanity which, if you look out your window, you can see floating over all our heads this very minute.
The people interviewing him should have “beat Weill repeatedly about the neck and head with a Swingline stapler, until he screeched out a tearful apology to every last living soul on earth.”
Paterno apologized. I wonder if Weill will. Nah.