The Wall-Streeters are pathological

From The Business Insider
Janet Tavakoli

(Click on the link to read more)



[Pathological - Involving, caused by, or of the nature of a physical or mental disease.]

"I'm going to put if very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological...these people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes. They have no responsibility to their clients...to counter-parties in transactions.

They are tough greedy aggressive and feel absolutely out of control...and they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent. And they have a docile President, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that can't find its voice. Its terrified of these banks. If you look at the campaign contributions the financial markets are the #1 campaign contributors in the US now.

We have a corrupt politics to the core...and both parties are up to their necks in this. The corruption is as far as I can see everywhere. But what it's led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning...and it is very unhealthy. I have waited four, five years now to see one figure on Wall St. speak in a moral language and I've not seen it once.

We are so owned

Here I just posted about the importance of the constitution in America, and now I'm doing a turnabout because we are owned, and I mean totally owned, by the monied interests in this nation. I'd wager that a lot of patriots are turning over in their graves. We suffer at the hands of the religion of greed, son't we?

Speaking of the Financial Crisis

There's a great essay, by Joe Conason, on the financial crisis over at Salon. I think Salon is a subscription-only web magazine, but this article is free - once you get past the advertisement on the way in.

Click here to read the whole article, but here are a couple of paragraphs to whet your appetite...

Now that we're all about to take on hundreds of billions or perhaps a trillion dollars in new public debt to redeem the nation's super-smart corporate financiers, there is one thing I hope we can expect in addition to postponing the apocalypse. Will they all please shut up about the wonders of the unfettered free market and the horrors of big government?

For decades, the investment class and their mouthpieces in the conservative movement have been telling Americans that if only we repealed all those musty old New Deal rules and programs, then we could enjoy unprecedented prosperity. Repeated endlessly by the think tanks, magazines and academics of the right-wing machinery, this message eventually drowned out the reality-based ideas of the American liberal tradition. Although those were the ideas that had actually built this country over the past century, they were erased from public consciousness by a combination of amnesia and propaganda.

...

We ought to have learned the way the world really works -- that is, how privilege, power, entitlement and greed undermine free markets -- during the teaching moments of the savings and loan debacle, the corporate scandals of George W. Bush's first term, or any of a number of smaller crises when taxpayers had to rescue major enterprises that were "too big to fail." Indeed, there has been a similar result -- along with higher unemployment, falling family incomes, rising debt and deficits, and neglected public infrastructure -- every time we have bought into the free-market extremism of the Republican right.