Wall Street is the problem!

If we’ve been paying any attention, the current financial crisis provides all of us with a daily dose of education. We learn a little more as time goes by, as the situation keeps on deteriorating, and as we go along we seem to discover how ugly things really are. We know that our crisis was triggered by an out-of-control real estate market in which everything went while both the financial institutions and our politicians looked the other way. For the former, it was a great way to amass huge heaps of money and for the elected officials it was a welcome distraction from a needless as well as costly war in Irak and an economy that kept on shipping jobs abroad. Politicians and financiers were joined at the hip and it’s no surprise that when banks started to cry, Congress obliged with a generous, no-strings-attached, bailout. Today, Wall Street and the banks could care less about a high rate of unemployment or jobs going offshore. When Microsoft or Kodak lay off workers their stock goes up. People’s suffering is merely a tiny blip on Wall Street’s radar screen. Our financial community is absolutely not looking for the long-term good of the nation, but rather for the shorter long-term, the kind of future that just let peek far enough to engineer trades that are profitable for its members. I have written before that our economy will have to change in a dramatic way, but Wall Street doesn’t want to re-invent itself. It’s only capable to stick with the old Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down business theory that only worked to line up the pockets of our finance community and have failed to work for the rest of us for the last three decades. After we’ve learned about the $18 billion bonuses paid last year and that we face another three to four trillion financial black hole that we may have to fill, doesn’t all that make you all depressed? Oh yes, it's not official yet, but we probably have entered a new depression...