"John McCain and Richard Shelby, two high-profile Republican senators, said Sunday that the government should allow a number of the biggest U.S. banks to fail.

"'Close them down, get them out of business,' Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, said on the ABC television program "This Week With George Stephanopoulos." 'If they're dead, they ought to be buried.'

"While the Alabama senator did not say which banks should shut down, he suggested that Citigroup might be on that list, saying the bank has 'always been a problem child.'

McCain, appearing on "Fox News Sunday," echoed that sentiment without identifying banks. McCain, who lost the U.S. presidential election in November, accused the Treasury Department of avoiding the 'hard decision' to let 'these banks fail.'"
Top Republicans say banks should be allowed to fail - International Herald Tribune (http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/08/business/shelby.php)

Too bad Bush didn't feel the same way.

If the opening statement were indeed true, where does that leave Lehman Brothers?
After all that was the largest corporate bankruptcy of all time at $600 BILLION!!

If they are too big to fail they are too big. Antitrust laws were designed in theory so that no business could be too big to fail.

I'm more concerned about nations failing... not businesses.

This idea that tax payers should keep zombies alive is a cruel joke. Perhaps if these businesses did not think we would pick up the pieces for them they would conduct business better.