This week, Bob Samuelson bemoans Wall Street and its ship-wrecking captains who command treasure chests of severance packages. At Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, large losses on subprime securities cost chief executives their jobs -- and they left with multimillion-dollar pay packages. Stanley O'Neal, the ex-head of Merrill, received an estimated $161 million. Everyday Americans will conclude (rightly) that this brand of capitalism is rigged in favor of the privileged few. It will be said in their defense that these packages reflected years of service, often highly successful. So? It's not as if these CEOs weren't compensated in all those years. If you leave your company a shambles -- with losses to be absorbed by lower-level employees, some of whom will be fired, and shareholders -- do you deserve a gold-plated send-off? And that's all fine and good, but after a fair job of illustrating the perverse pay incentives facing CEOs, he ends his column worrying that Americans will lose faith in American capitalism. But if the subprime failure turns out to be a preamble to a larger financial breakdown, flowing from the creation of new securities that offered short-term trading possibilities but whose long-run risks were underestimated, then the mood could turn uglier. Indeed, many Americans may conclude that capitalism has run amok. And yet Samuelson can't quite bring himself to say that maybe capitalism has run amok. Nevertheless, here's to Samuelson for shining more light on the damaged goods of Wall Street.