John Kenneth Galbraith famously described financial genius as "a rising market." This was on display in the expansionary era of the 1950s and 1960s. New bank credits funded growing businesses. Investment bankers injected their own capital into initial share offerings of "public" companies, allowing businesses to grow by taking in shareholders as partners. Finance flourished.

Some people were outraged last week by a report that a member of the kitchen staff of bailed-out Wall Street firm AIG had received a $7,700 bonus.

Surely that was far less outrageous than the million-dollar bonuses paid to others at AIG who actually carried out the firm's financial business.

After all, the kitchen helper produced something that at least could be eaten. Apart from perhaps overcooking the Chateaubriand or leaving spots on the champagne glasses, what harm could the kitchen helper have done -- compared to driving the world economy over a cliff?

Yet I've heard barely a whisper of mea culpa from members of this corporate crowd.

On the contrary, they seem to see the economic meltdown as an opportunity to finally do in their old foes in the labour movement.

After years of demonizing unions and undermining workers' rights, they're now taking advantage of the unpopularity of the auto bail-outs to try to take away gains that the Canadian Auto Workers spent decades achieving, and that set a standard for the labour movement.

Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb's company was a symptom in that era of high globalization, the 1990s: theatre as a vehicle for corporate grandiosity. Its first coup was getting the Canadian franchise for The Phantom of the Opera. They produced it from a template.