Don't blame indigenous bankers

Blue Eyed Greed?

By Maureen DowdAs international lunacy goes, it was hard to beat the pope saying that condoms spread AIDS.

But Brazil’s president, known simply as Lula, gave it his best shot.

At a press conference Thursday in Brasilia with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain—who has a talent for getting himself into dicey spots—Lula started off coughing from some cheese bread he’d wolfed down. Then he suddenly turned accusatory.

“This crisis was caused by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing,” charged the brown-eyed, bearded socialist president.

As the brown-eyed Brown grew a whiter shade of pale, Lula hammered the obvious point that the poor of the world were suffering in the global crash because of the misdeeds of the rich.

“I do not know any black or indigenous bankers,” said Lula.Comment:  Before Stephen tells us that not all bankers have blue eyes, I'll say it for him. This is a generalization and not a very accurate one. Most of the West's financial leaders--like most Westerners--have brown eyes. And I suspect the brown-eyed financial leaders in Asia didn't help matters any.

Ironically, it used to be brown-eyed Jews who were stereotyped as money-lenders. Now it's all the fault of those Northern European types.

But we understand Luna's point even if he made it poorly. The world's industrial countries, primarily the US, are responsible for the global economic crisis. The developing countries, where most brown-skinned, brown-eyed people live, aren't. The crisis is a failure of the West's capitalist credo--its pseudo-religious faith in free markets.