Wall St. and the Media Are Trying to Make Us Forget Who Started the Financial Crash

[laststeamtrain]

Wall St. and the Media Are Trying to Make Us Forget Who Started the Financial Crash
By Les Leopold, AlterNet
Posted on May 20, 2009, Printed on May 20, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140123/

It’s fast approaching the time Wall Street has been waiting for: the time when the media and the public forget what got us into this economic mess. As massive doses of taxpayer Viagra lift the stock market ticker, we hold out hope that our 401k and pension plans will re-erect themselves along with our jobs. We feel stimulated by the stimulus package… and the morning after we forget. The crisis, whatever it was, is over, isn’t it? Surely, it’s time to move on.

Wall Street is praying that we forget how they broke open the Treasury vault to the tune of trillions in loan guarantees, subsidies and interest free money in addition to the more highly publicized TARP funds -- the largest transfer of wealth since African-American slaves built the South. It would be nice if we forgot about proposed wage caps on bankers. It would be nice if we stopped talking about ridiculous reforms and regulations that might prevent banker and hedge funds operators from walking off with hundreds of millions in private booty. Better to turn our attention to the auto industry. And maybe, if it all breaks just right, most of us might start to believe that the real problem all along was Detroit, rather than the wildest Wall Street casino ever created. It would be much better for the wealthy if we returned to one of our favorite pastimes: blaming autoworkers’ health care and pension benefits, or blasting big government for interfering in the economy.

<snip>

Yet, it’s easier to blame average consumers who ran up too much debt on their credit cards or subprime borrowers who got in over their heads. In times of crisis, our complicit media likes to spread blame around. Columnist David Brooks suggests that the big unanswered question of the crash of 2008 is “how so many people could be so stupid, incompetent and self-destructive all at once.” ( www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/opinion/16brooks.html.) But everyone is not to blame. Not this time. Financial free markets failed. Free-market ideology failed. Firms that are too big to fail, failed (while profiting all the way until they raided the Treasury.). Let’s hope our memories don’t fail as well.

PS. My editors tell me I should end on a more empowering, uplifting note. Here’s one: Turn the too-big-to-fail banks into publicly regulated utilities. That might prevent the next crash and might prove less taxing on our memories.

<more>

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/140123/wall_st._and_the_media_are_trying_to_make_us_forget_who_started_the_financial_crash/

[izzie]

1. and on top of this Nancy did all the water boarding.

I must say it looks she walked into the mess. How did the GOP do that? Get it around to the Dem. did it all? ONce more the deed is not as bad as the tales that come from it.

[zbdent]

3. FDR was piloting the plane which hit the first WTC tower ...

[izzie]

4. Yar and the banks failed because a man making 40,000 a yr

got a loan from a CEO making 40 million. We all understand this stuff.

[MannyGoldstein]

2. FInancial Services Modernization Act And...

almost-free trade with China.