The banksters understand all this completely. It's what enables them to make millions of dollars in bonuses. Quite likely they will have to wreck the US economy in order to get all the money they want and can get. But hey, that's not their problem; they can always pick up the pieces after everything falls apart, and pick them up at bargain prices, thereby emerging much more powerful and more dominant over the rest of us than ever before. So the current situation is not their problem; it is OUR problem. And it seems we are too weak and/or lazy and/or in the dark, to do anything about it.
Does anyone really think that all of a sudden our bought-and-paid-for politicians are going to stick it to the banksters? Please, spare me such naà ¯vetà ©. The politicians will sooner close the libraries, reduce social security checks by half, and make kids pay to ride the subway to school, than to take a hard line with their financial betters, on whom their reelection depends.
That is the reality. The bankers get it. And most Americans still don't. (Click here for source article.)
The Other Plot to Wreck America
As Frank Rich points out in a recent column, there may not be one person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit -- in the years since 9/11, we've all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York, i.e. the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers -- most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the "financial weapons of mass destruction" that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic CDOs and credit-default swaps, most of us are still in the dark.
Regarding this plot, what we don't know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks -- secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we still get stuck with the losses.
The window for possible change is rapidly closing. Health care, Afghanistan and the terrorism panic may have exhausted Washington's already limited capacity for heavy lifting, especially in an election year. The White House's chief economic hand, Lawrence Summers, has repeatedly announced that "everybody agrees that the recession is over" -- which is technically true from an economist's perspective and certainly true on Wall Street, where bailed-out banks are reporting record profits and bonuses. The contrary voices of Americans who have lost pay, jobs, homes and savings are either patronized or drowned out entirely by a political system where the banking lobby rules in both parties, and the revolving door between finance and government never stops spinning.
It's against this backdrop that this week's long-awaited initial public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are so critical. This is the bipartisan panel that Congress mandated last spring to investigate the still murky story of what happened in the meltdown. Phil Angelides, the former California treasurer who is the inquiry's chairman, said in interviews late last year that he has been busy deploying a tough investigative staff and will not allow the proceedings to devolve into a typical blue-ribbon Beltway exercise in toothless bloviation.
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