They - and I include among them, representatives of both parties, and most of our mass media - ignored cries for help from victims of predatory lenders dating back into the 1990s, and, then, for years warnings from David Walker, the Comptroller of our Currency and head of the Government Accounting Office (GAO) that our growing debt burden could lead to a sudden collapse threatening our national security. He had been labeled "Dr. Gloom" for his sobering prognostications. In February, 2008, he stepped down from government, frustrated by his inability to promote changes.
A closer look, usually in times of crisis, offers a window into another kind of financial world, a world of panic and fear, where irrationality is the order of the day, an irrationality that goes by the name of "Market Psychology."
Forget the bulls or the bears...this is a world of sharks deeply in need of shrinks.
When things go well, the wizards of Wall Street are anointed by the media as geniuses. When they don't, you get Time Magazine's condescending putdown of "Wall Street's mad scientists blowing up the lab again."
This kind of humor seems out-of-place when we are talking about what many fear has lead to the collapse or at least a severe wounding of the global economy with millions of jobless and homeless victims who believed in the system until it failed them.
And yet, as we saw in the great manufactured budget stalemate in Washington, members of Congress were and still are prepared to trigger a collapse in the name of a naïve but rigid ideology.
Some of us argue with them thinking our facts can refute theirs but at bottom, fanaticism is not neutralized by rational argument. You need countervailing power and a willingness to fight for another vision.
News Dissector Danny Schechter made the film Plunder The Crime of Our Time (plunderthecrimeofourtime.com) about the financial crisis as a crime story.
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