Nightmare on Wall Street

I told myself when I started this blog that I wasn’t going to do politics. Yeah, sure “everything is political,” but as far as the usual republican/democrat liberal/conservative thing, there must be billion laptop-slinging geeks that can do more justice to it than I can.  It’s not that I don’t care, quite the opposite, but I get upset over it and it distracts me from more important things.

Well, here goes.

I’m pissed off. How could our so-called leaders allow the economic situation to get to its current state?  Shit! My parents lived through the Great Depression and now I’m looking at the possibility that my kid will face something not that different?

I may not know economics, but I know scary, and while I’m not scared (yet) I’m a shade beyond nervous. Back in those dark days, we had a leader who knew how to inspire.  Modern communications seem to have done more to isolate our leaders from their constituents.  “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”  That’s what people needed to hear back then, but I’m not expecting to hear anything similarly reassuring.

Now, you don’t have to fear a damn thing… as long as you ran one of these big banks or Wall Street outfits into the ground, because then you’ll be qualified to suck on the Federal Money Tit until you’re back in shape again. You little people, you “nation of whiners?”  Tough fucking shit.  Let the buyer beware.  Get a second job at Wal-Mart and shut up.

(Think I’m exaggerating?  Check this shit out: Key Lehman Execs to get $2.5 billion in bonuses.)

Fingers will be pointed, there will be no shortage of talking heads to throw darts at, starting with Al “The Rate Slasher” Greenspan, but you can’t deny this:  for the past eight years, the banks and credit card companies have written their own laws, have been allowed to grow beyond the size of what was formerly called a monopoly, and now its coming back to kick our economic ass.

Many of us already knew that the “real world” economy, the day-to-day economy that normal people have to live in, was starting to smell.  I think it’s been a real shock to the Bush administration that you can’t base your rosy assessment of the the economy on Exxon-Mobil’s annual reports.  A rising tide lifts all boats?  That can be true — unless you can’t afford the boat. Or, more likely, you couldn’t afford the payments on it due to the loan sharkization of the credit industry.

The Bush administration and their enablers in Congress (of BOTH parties) deserve a lot of the blame.  It’s become pretty damn obvious to any reasonable person that this free market / hands off / deregulation-uber-alles paradigm may have some downside.

Modern conservative philosophy now holds that the government needs to stay out of the way of the markets — until they’re nearly dead. Then, the feds need to leap in and “stabilize” the market and save the free world from evildoers.

I’m not a violent person, but if this thing goes over the edge, it should be every citizen’s duty to help hunt down the executives of these outfits and make sure their their well-coiffed heads are impaled on the lampposts of Wall Street as a warning to those with a similar level of greed, incompetence and lack of judgment.

Okay, I’m through now.