As the autumn showers washed Bismarck this morning, I made a French press (w/ Starbucks great Pike's Place blend) and thought a bit about the state of Wall Street and D.C. There are legitimate Greed Captains in both places, and they command legions of Greed Lieutenants throughout the land. Greed Captains are a component of Humanity rather than being, say, the byproducts of what we know as Control-Market Communism or Free-Market Capitalism.
With that said, there is a bit of concern about the "lesson" any of these Greed Captains may have learned, especially after D.C. swooped in with bags of money (also see Good Old Boy Network). On the other side of it, we know the people at the economic bottom will suffer the most. We see this time and again, when a CEO drives some company into the ground and is "fired" with some massive compensation package, only to be hired aboard w/ a six or seven figure salary by some other company.
How, I ask myself, can I best get through to the Greed Captains to show them that crazed speculation (rather than just speculation) is not the way to do business? And especially with the money of others? And how can I get through to the American Neighbors in the Burbs who try and try again to keep up with the Johnson's and invariably get into unrecoverable credit debt?
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1 comment:
I don't know how, MFT.
The powerful protecting the powerful from the effects of the behavior of the powerful is a song of the "Elite" since the first gangsters walked this earth. Which is why in our Consitution so much emphasis, and careful thought, went into the attempt to construct a system which would make it difficult to have such concentrations of power that it would make this tendency fatal to the liberties and wellbeing of the people.
But we now have massive concentrations of power, breaking through any limits the founding fathers could conjure up [because how can you imagine a world so transformed as that of the middle 18th century and that of the start of the 21st?].
The seekers of power have had hundreds of years to seek out vulnerabilities in the system, to set up governmental structures and outside institutions which precisely make a Barney Frank and his Lover capable of such influence over what is the allowable conduct of so many.
We have a massive bureaucracy which now seeks to "run" this nation, and a political class that no longer even remembers what the constitution was for [other than vague references in an election] or has any respect for the notion of a limit to their power.
So there is Power, and there is no recall of integrity. A poisonous mix.....
I think Reagan will go down in history as the last President to respect the old notion of a constitutionally and intrinsically limited government [and of course, although in his first term he did try, this no more changed the course of governmental growth than than blasting a rocket off of Earth pushes the planet back from its course]. No one since then, or on the horizon as a serious candidate for President, is of that thinking.
Obama wows Planet Pepe, in his Imperator Obamaclesian way, precisely because he embraces with full gusto the coming Suck.
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