There is a very short list in all of our lives of people that we would never miss a scheduled meeting with. Valuable clients, close friends, family members, and the President of the United States are all probably somewhere on that list.

However, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; John J. Mack, chairman of Morgan Stanley; and Richard D. Parsons, chairman of Citigroup do not appear to have the same list that we do. The cabal of bankers decided to phone into Washington rather than be present at a scheduled meeting with the president.

In all fairness, most of us would not show up for a scheduled beating, and with the media buzz being as it has been for the last few days, this meeting was supposed to be a public flogging, a notice that bonuses had become too excessive and executive pay too high from organizations that were acting like beggars at a feast in Washington just earlier this year. I would argue that the generous dole that the government handed out means that bank bosses should probably show up to press Obama’s linens and serve him coffee if he asked, but maybe I’m going out on a limb here.

The American people have a right to be more than a little upset with their banks. They played with their mortgages like they were chips at a roulette table while just north of the border in Canada, you can’t get a mortgage without sound financials and preferably the pledge of your firstborn. Which is probably how it should be, as stringent as it sounds. They fooled the American people into thinking they had free and easy access to the means to purchase a $400,000 house on a $40,000 family income, and pulled out the rug from under them when the cards came tumbling down.

The bank bosses should have been at the meeting instead of checking in via teleconference. Obama called an in-person meeting for a reason, and he’ll probably still want to talk to all of them. I only hope that their inability to show up after years of schooling and running large corporations carries some form of penalty.

Tags: bank bailouts, obama banks, obama wall street, wall street corruption, wall street entitlement

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