Fire. Them. All.

(with apologies to Ezra Levant, who coined that phrase)

Okay. So here we have former and current political figures from both parties calling the financial bailout spade a spade.

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives:

"You have the former Chairman of Goldman Sachs asking for 700 billion dollars, and in his initial request, asking for it in such an un-American way that I think he should have resigned," said Gingrich. "I think Paulson has terminally misunderstood the nature of the American system. Not just no review, no judicial review, no congressional accountability. Give me 700 billion dollars, 700 BILLION dollars! 'I'll be glad to spend it for you.' That's a centralization of power that is totally un-American."

U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Indiana):

"We are now in the golden age of thieves. And where I come from we put thieves in jail, we don't bail them out."

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And I never, EVER thought I'd see the day I quote Michael Moore, whom I abhor, but in this case, he's right:

"No matter what they say, no matter how many scare words they use, they are up to their old tricks of creating fear and confusion in order to make and keep themselves and the upper one percent filthy rich. Just read the first four paragraphs of the lead story in last Monday's New York Times and you can see what the real deal is:

'Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

'Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

'At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.

'Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury's proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions.'

"Unbelievable. Wall Street and its backers created this mess and now they are going to clean up like bandits. Even Rudy Giuliani is lobbying for his firm to be hired (and paid) to 'consult' in the bailout."

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Okay. The crisis is still in full swing, and it's difficult to remain objective while events are unfolding.

But objective we must be, if we're to make sense of it all. A good start to understanding how the whole thing got started, and snowballed, can be seen here.

But it's clear to me that the root cause is unbridled greed.

As a conservative -- therefore, a spiritual person (if not "religious") -- it is deeply ingrained in me that:

A) Markets are best left as unregulated as possible; and

B) This comes with a concomitant moral responsibility to make sure NO ONE SUFFERS as a result of personal or corporate speculation.

A handful of greedy speculators has managed to throw the entire world economy into turmoil.

Personally, I'd say they're lucky if a whole lot of people don't seek them out with pitchforks and torches in hand.