The Men Who Put Millions Of Americans Out Of Work To Enhance Their Own Wealth
Our three major business lines — consumer and commercial banking, asset management and global corporate and investment banking — in total increased their revenues by 8 percent last year, … Their achievement allowed us to overcome significantly higher credit costs plus much lower equity market-related revenues and still increase operating earnings for the year.
Kenneth Lewis
Chairman, Bank of America
The disconnect between Main Street and Wall Street America is driven by the unhappy reality that some, far too many, of our institutions of governance are impotent, inflexible, or misdirected. They are misdirected because ordinary Americans have failed to intelligently participate in government, politics and policy articulation. As a result, it’s business as usual again.
The thieves and predators who partied on your money and mine are still in charge. They still run the banks that speculated and lost. They still run the insurance companies that insured imaginary financial instruments. They still run the companies that enrich executives while running their corporations into the ground.
There is damage and suffering all around us, but there remains scant evidence that we intend to, or want to change our habits. The implications of our unwillingness to change are troubling. Every day we drive by the closed storerooms on Main Street and the boarded-up big boxes leftover from debt dependent retailers fleeing suburbia.
Even in the once safe reaches of homogenized American life millions of foreclosed homes strew the cityscape. The quiet and emptiness left behind are damming evidence of what little remains for ravaged families left to take refuge in shelters, or sleeping in their cars — fearful for their survival.
Today, some fifteen million of our fellow citizens are unemployed because of the excesses of others — excesses that have not been addressed by government or the institution being run by people who have been exposed as crooks, thieves and predators masking as CEOs, bankers, financiers and responsible adults.
Led by Wall Street wheeler-dealers and today’s gigantic banking institutions some segments of international finance have returned to the same activities that brought them down just a year ago. What’s changed is not what government agencies politely asked the firms you saved from catastrophe, or what ordinary Americans, whose children ponied up the bail-out monies, deserved.
To the contrary. What’s now unfolding is a return to the speculation, derivative worship and non-productive uses of credit that brought down worldwide financial markets almost exactly one year ago. Though we conceal our national obsession for endless wealth behind the illusion of normalcy, this generation’s preoccupation with wealth shall bedevil us, and our progeny, for as long as any of us shall live.
That we did this to ourselves is unforgivable. That those who stole our money and were bailed out still party at the expense of our progeny, robbing them of economic opportunity is inexplicable.
And what did we do to ourselves?
What have those we elected to Congress or awarded the White House done for Main Street Americans? The list is so long it cannot be read in a single lifetime, but here are some of the things done by congress, both parties, both houses, to enrich themselves and their big money supporters.
- At the demand of broadcasters, congress deregulated broadcasting to permit 16 minutes of commercials on TV where previously there had been only 8 minutes.
- At the demand of banks, the ceiling on credit card interest rates was increased to 34.99% where there had previously been a 6% ceiling.
- At the demand of station owners, congress transferred ownership of broadcasting from responsible citizens to irresponsible corporate executives.
- At the demand of pharmaceutical companies congress authorized the transfer of prescription selection authority from physician to television advertising.
- At the demand of television executives congress authorized news and infotainment programs largely devoid of probative, relevant and credible news.
- At the demand of insurance companies congress rewrote insurance law to permit contracts that are easily canceled or whose benefits can be arbitrarily reduced or eliminated.
- At the demand of bankers congress redefined banking from making productive loans to pushing money around for the benefit of corporate executive bonus programs.
- At the demand of health insurance companies congress authorized the take over of the medical treatment decisions and procedures by insurance executives.
- To benefit politicians who insist on spending foolishly congress permits earmarks and massive deficit spending absent accountability to anyone.
- At the demand of wall street traders congress authorized speculation on gasoline, oil, natural gas and other critical and once regulated commodities.
Neither Al Qaeda, Russian intransigence nor Chinese ascendancy to power threatens our nation as broadly or as seriously as our failures to deal with our own internal decline and decadence.
We must begin by addressing our polluted, or failing, economic, political and journalistic institutions.
