And... one more thing... your question has been answered.

Fidelity, Vanguard and the Investment Company of America (American Funds) are the three largest fund managers in the world and they have never, ever, ruffled corporate feathers. So they can gather all the assets they want without even a gesture towards shareholder activism or democracy. They don't need to exert control to win assets (that are mostly involuntary anwyay as people invest where their employers make them invest) so... they won't.

I made quite a bit of money, but it was a soul killing profession and I left it to produce a Sci-Fi film for Wim Wenders about the year 2000.

I know the feeling, Jonathan, and respect you for making the change. I'm 50, and wish I had similar options. But it looks like soul death will remain on my personal economic agenda for some time.

As for revolution, I think we have to look at what is happening to the United States from a global point of view. It appears to me that we are in a global cusp or transition period that will affect the US is ways similar to what happened to the British Empire following the Second World War. Obama is a good guy, but he is now the leader of an obsolete, overstretched and very expensive national security establishment built on the power assumptions of the last century. This has little to do with choices he makes, but is a consequence of shifting global power relations that are mostly outside his control. Obama heads up a postwar imperial order that is declining, and experiencing dislocation.

The recent Pentagon budget changes don't indicate he and his administration yet get it. Obama still thinks he is going to "restore American leadership in the world". He needs to reorient his thinking, and adapt to the epochal changes that are occurring. Washington is a governing machine addicted to a variety of unsustainable commitments. These are commitments the US has assumed, in one form or other, since World War II. Soon Obama and other leaders in Washington are going to turn around and find out that few people are following them any more.

The challenge for all of us is whether we will adapt to these changes and help make a graceful transition to a reworked global order, or will embark on even more quixotic efforts to freeze history and hang onto our former levels of power in a vanishing order. The British effectively transferred many imperial operations to the US, and then accepted a junior position in the new America-lead order. The situation today is not exactly parallel. But the question is whether the US will help manage an organized transfer of responsibilities to global institutions, or will claw to hang on to the American Century and dominate the disappearing past, and as a result precipitate a more pitched, competitive struggle for power. Will we be more like postwar Britain or between-the-wars Germany?

Whether these times will prove to be revolutionary in the political economy of the United States is yet to be seen. But I don't think the lessons of the 60s, which proved to be a far less revolutionary period in some ways than many participants expected, are a good example. The US was in many ways at the height of its power then, particularly economic power, despite the strategic blunder of Vietnam which caused much of the popular outrage. But imagine if both Vietnam and the 1929 crash had happened together, and at a time when US power was already declining in relative terms.

I don't think we are talking about a "storm the Bastille" kind of revolution in 2009. But there has to be some sharp political response to the growing popular realization that Washington and Wall Street comprise a predator state that are hostile to the best interests of ordinary Americans.

The events of the past few years have exposed some huge political-economic myths as myths. Americans have observed the extraordinary growing wealth of their corporate bosses and financial captains for years. Dollars reproduce in these corporate offices like an invasive species of weed. But they are dollars that could be going elsewhere. We were told that these moneybags are entitled to their astronomical earnings because the invisible hand of the market allocates resources in the most economically rational way, so there is an underlying divine method to the madness. That story has been exposed as a myth. So now people are increasingly starting to ask, "If those people have not been paid a fortune because paying them a fortune is economically rational, what is responsible for those decisions?" And I think the answer people are beginning to understand is, "Because it's a racket; because the class of people who direct the nation's capital and direct corporate decisions work as a common interest in siphoning vast, unmerited quantities of that wealth into their own pockets." The securities market meltdown is only part of the national education. Before that we had Enron teaching the same lesson.

Iraq was the inspiration for a similar round of revelatory myth-busting in the national security field. Who controls the decisions to throw thousands of young American lives and trillions of dollars of hardware into a barbarous Middle East maelstrom? Who benefits? Who tells the stories that promote these efforts? Many millions of Americans are perceiving our system in a whole new way, with a more critical and skeptical eye and ear, and that is going to have a profound effect on our politics. What other pious claims and self-rewarding myths have been promulgated, and need to be exploded? Unlike the sixties, we don't have a generational split between a younger cohort of sacrificial lamb-children and an older generation of pious, faithful Abrahams, ever-ready to do the lord's work. The pain of those lost retirement funds and lost jobs is being felt across the society, among all generations.

Thanks guys.

I'm not arguing that Pandit, a hedge fund manager and academic, is/was the best choice. He was there because Citi bought out his fund and probably, a known quantity and thus, acceptable to da boyz at Citi. Only, that he wasn't the "idiot" who "oversaw this disaster."

The "disaster" was baked in the cake well before Pandit took over. Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed in July 2007; the LIBOR spread spiked in September. It was only a matter of time before Citi's real condition became known.