On "Left, Right, and Center," my conservative pal Tony Blankley made the perfect comparison: "Thain and these CEOs have been studying at the Marie Antoinette School of Public Presentation," he said. "The crassness and the stupidity are stunning. . . . They ought to be boiled in oil."

Marie Antoinette and her "let them eat cake" became the symbol of Not Getting It -- of not realizing, until it was too late, that a new era had begun. And just like Marie Antoinette, Thain didn't get it, even as Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis was leading him to the corporate guillotine.

In fact, Thain had such a run of not getting it that TPM was able to compile a top ten list of his greatest moments.

The pinnacle of Thain's tone deafness, of course, was his over-the-top makeover of his office in early 2008, just as Merrill Lynch was already hemorrhaging money and preparing to lay off thousands of workers. So to soften the blow (on himself), he spent $1.2 million redecorating. Lowlights include $87,000 for an area rug, and $1,400 for a trashcan.

But Thain was far from done with not getting it. Cut to October 2008. Merrill Lynch, after teetering on the brink of failure during September, has just been acquired by Bank of America, in a deal brokered by the government and partially financed by taxpayers. Sleeping through this wakeup call, Thain decides that he deserves a $30 million to $40 million bonus. That figure wasn't received very well, so Thain, chastened, lowered the number to $10 million. In the end he received an appropriate bonus: $0. And then, as the New York Times put it, "he later denied having asked for one" at all.

He was not, unfortunately, stopped from ramming through big bonuses for Merrill Lynch executives -- just days before the taxpayer-financed merger with Bank of America became official. Though bonuses are usually given out in January, in December Thain handed out nearly $4 billion to Merrill employees. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is investigating.

Which brings us to the miserable job he did at Merrill, for which he wanted to reward himself so lavishly. Under his misguided guidance, Merrill Lynch lost $27 billion in 2008. What's more, in late September 2008, as the Merrill Lynch-Bank of America merger was announced, and the world's financial system stood on the verge of collapse, Merrill's traders, as the Times put it, "began buying risky mortgage assets, thinking that the market had bottomed out. . . . Merrill also began to run up losses on equity derivatives and other instruments."

Let me repeat that: In late September, Merrill "began buying risky mortgage assets."

The result? Merrill Lynch lost $15.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008 -- a loss so great, Bank of America had to get an extra $20 billion from taxpayers to complete the takeover.

In retrospect, it's too bad Thain didn't spend all his time redecorating his office, because any time he spent making business decisions turned out to be very costly to the country. Even scarier, as a big McCain backer, Thain was rumored to be headed to an administration job had McCain won. At least we dodged one Thain bullet, even if we're on the hook for 20 billion others.

As one insider told the Wall Street Journal, Thain "didn't really have a good grasp of what was going on." But this didn't stop him from winning the prize as America's highest paid CEO in 2007, raking in a package worth around $83 million.

Clearly, something is wrong with the process by which executives rise to the top on Wall Street. There's been a lot of focus on how the failures of unregulated markets led to our current structural problems, but too little on how the market system has failed in the way it rewards and penalizes executives. As Treasury Secretary-designate Tim Geithner said: "Excessive executive compensation that provides inappropriate incentives has played a role in exacerbating the financial crisis."

But this is about more than a few rotten apples. And the Era of Not Getting It is not yet behind us. Nor is it limited to one side of the aisle. The Wall Street Journal reports that in December Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, secured a $12 million TARP payment to the OneUnited Bank in Boston. OneUnited was an unlikely candidate for bailout money, having been accused of poor lending practices and Marie Antoinette moves such as providing a Porsche SUV for bank executives to use. Not Getting It: There is no substitute.

Others Not Getting It include:

Gateway Financial Holdings executives Ben Berry and David Twiddy, who received nearly $1 million in bonuses on the same day their bank received $80 million in bailout money.

Wells Fargo and State Street. Both financial institutions received bailout money ($25 billion for Wells Fargo, $2 billion for State Street), then turned around and increased the amount of money they spent lobbying the government in the last quarter of '08. Not a bad deal: We give them our money, which they use to pay lobbyists in an effort to get more of our money.

In his Inaugural address, Obama defined what the New Era of Responsibility would entail: "A recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world."

Recently, there were steps taken that will encourage adherence to those duties, and make it harder for those who still don't get it. Sens. Johnny Isakson and Kent Conrad introduced a bill that would create a seven-person Financial Markets Commission that would establish how the crisis started and how to avoid another one in the future. The GAO called for increased oversight of the bailout. And the Obama administration announced it would make a series of rule changes that will increase oversight for hedge funds, mortgage brokers and ratings agencies.

It's a start -- and hopefully will put us on the path to throwing the Marie Antoinettes of the Meltdown out of their Wall Street Palaces and tossing the Era of Not Getting It into the trashcan. One that costs considerably less than $1,400.

Recent Political Commentary

Obama Economic Team's Flawed Cosmology:
Still Believing Universe Revolves around Banks
Arianna Huffington

A series of recent meetings with members of Barack Obama's economic team leading to a spirited back-and-forth that made me feel like I was back at Cambridge, debating the smartest kid in the class), left me with a pair of indelible impressions:

First, these are all good people, many of them brilliant, working incredibly hard with the best of intentions to solve the country's financial crisis.

Second, they are operating on the basis of an outdated cosmology that places banks at the center of the economic universe.

My Wish List
Andy Rooney

In an idle moment, trying to come up with an idea, Humorist & Commentator Andy Rooney decided to make a list of things he should do but has not.

I Would Rather Stay Home & Not Travel
Andy Rooney

Andy Rooney would like to mount a campaign once again to encourage people not to go anywhere as he was looking at all the ads in newspapers and magazines for places to go. Sometimes, travel is quite unpleasant.

I'm Hedging Today
Andy Rooney

Andy Rooney sees the phrase "hedge fund" in the newspaper every day now and does not really know what a "hedge fund" is. A hedge fund has something to do with money. He was surprised to find "hedge fund" in one of only six dictionaries, but then read the definition.

Greening My House
Arianna Huffington

Ever since I saw the Green light, thanks to my friend Laurie David, and traded in my gas-guzzling SUV, I've tried my best to up my eco-awareness.

On the Road to Buenos Aires
Even the United States can Manage Itself into Irrelevance
Chris Thomas

America has been the greatest of all nations for a long time. We have been great for so long that we believe it is part of the natural order of the universe for us to be who we are. But in reality, we managed our way to where we are now. We decided to create the Constitution. We decided to have an open culture. We decided to have free trade and open markets. The sum total of these decisions created this great human enterprise.

But we should not forget, especially at a crucial juncture like this, that with enough bad decisions and enough political incompetence, we can indeed manage ourselves into decline.

Even we can become Argentina.

Larry Summers: Brilliant Mind, Toxic Ideas
by Arianna Huffington

According to most commentators, the president's press conference went a long way toward taking the spotlight off the roiling anger over AIG, bonuses and Wall Street abuses -- and putting it back where the president wants it: on the imperative need to pass his budget.

But the best laid plans of our remarkable president may be laid to waste by a bank rescue plan that is the product of exhausted ideas put together by men far too beholden to Wall Street.

To understand why a man as brilliant and accomplished as Summers can be so wrong about what to do with the banks and Wall Street, it would be useful to turn to "The Innovator's Dilemma," by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.

What if Jon Stewart, Instead of John King,
Interviewed Dick Cheney
Arianna Huffington

Jon Stewart's Jim Cramer interview was a pivotal moment -- not just for Stewart, Cramer and CNBC, but also for journalism. Stewart kept popping into my head as I watched John King interview Dick Cheney three days later.

King opened the interview by showing clips of President Obama saying that his administration had "inherited an economic crisis" and "inherited a big mess." He then asked Cheney: "Did you leave him a mess?"

"I don't think you can blame the Bush administration for the creation of those circumstances," responded Cheney. "It's a global financial problem. . . . So I think the notion that you can just sort of throw it off on the prior administration, that's interesting rhetoric but I don't think anybody really cares a lot about that."

Tim Geithner, CNBC &
The Second Coming of Known Unknowns
Arianna Huffington on Tim Geithner, Economic Crisis & Obama Budget

Besides being awash in toxic paper, credit default swaps, and collateralized debt obligations, we seem to be drowning in unknowns.

Only, I get the sense that there are fewer unknowns than we're being told. Instead, we're greeted with a wall of manufactured complexity by the people whose job it is to make known unknowns into known knowns.

The Rush and Rahm Show
Chris Thomas

This past week, while iconic American enterprises like GE and Berkshire came under substantial market pressure, our "Leadership" in Washington became preoccupied with talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Rahm Emmanuel (left), a brilliant partisan tactician, and Clinton retreads Paul Begala and James Carville formulated a plan to make Limbaugh the face of the GOP.

After all, its much more fun than wondering why the Credit Default Swap market is treating GE like Citibank or weather we can spend ourselves out of a recession that we got into by ... well ... spending too much. Rush is much more fun to listen to than Jeff Immelt anyway.

Rove Pontificating on Economy Like Madoff Pontificating on Investing

Although anointed as "the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party," Rush Limbaugh is just a massive shiny object that distracts our attention from the real intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party, Karl Rove.

The Credit Card Crisis: The Next Economic Domino

Hot on the heels of the banking crisis, the employment crisis and the mortgage-foreclosure crisis, the country is on the verge of experiencing a credit-card crisis.

Time to Treat American Homeowners as Well as Wall Street Bankers
Arianna Huffington

"The banks are too big to fail" has been the mantra we've been hearing since September. But when you consider the millions of American homeowners facing foreclosure, aren't they also too big to be allowed to fail? So why hasn't the foreclosure crisis gotten the attention it deserves? A combination of perverse priorities and flawed thinking.

America's Best Bet: Municipal Redemption Fund (MuRF)
Stopping Foreclosures & Protecting Investors

An original economic stimulus plan developed by a real estate agent in New Jersey that is currently in the hands of the House of Representatives and every Senator in Washington D.C. The Federal Government purchases NO interest in any private property and may take NO assignment of any lien under this plan. This plan is strictly a transparent "time-out" and "reset" of the national tax lien industry for the sake of stopping foreclosures while simultaneously protecting investors by shoring up the absolute bedrock of the capitalist economy which emanates directly from real property values and the taxes thereon.

Barack Obama Sober Sermon on the Steps
Arianna Huffington

The new president and the throng that turned out to cheer him and hear him on Inauguration Day were on two very different missions.

The crowd had come to celebrate. Obama had come to deliver a sober sermon.

Inaugural Address By President Barack Hussein Obama
President Obama's Inauguration Speech in text & video

President Barack Obama gives his inaugural address after taking the oath of office in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2009. The presidential inauguration is a tradition dating back to George Washington's 1789 inauguration. President Obama's Inauguration Speech in full in text & video.

(Arianna Huffington's e-mail address is arianna@huffingtonpost.com.)

(c) 2009 Arianna Huffington. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.