Posted on 02/12/2009 5:27:01 PM PST by Kaslin
Most historians agree that earthquakes, droughts or barbarians did not unravel classical Athens or imperial Rome.
More likely the social contract between the elite and the more ordinary citizens finally began breaking apart — and with it the trust necessary for a society's collective investment and the payment of taxes. Then civilization itself begins to unwind.
Something like that has been occurring lately because of the actions on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. The former "masters of the universe" who ran Wall Street took enormous risks to get multimillion-dollar bonuses, even as they piled up billions in debt for their soon-to-be-bankrupt companies.
Financial wizards like Robert Rubin at Citicorp, Richard Fuld at Lehman Bros. and Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae — all of whom made millions as they left behind imploding corporations — had degrees from America's top universities.
They had sophisticated understanding of hedge funds, derivatives and subprime mortgages — everything, it seems, but moral responsibility for the investments of millions of their ordinary clients.
The result of such speculation by thousands of Wall Street gamblers was that millions of Americans who played by the rules, and put money each month away in their 401(k) plans and elsewhere, lost much of their retirement savings. Many likely will have to keep working well into their 60s or 70s, and delay passing on their jobs to a new generation awaiting employment.
Yet most disgraced Wall Street elites will retain their mega-bonuses and will not go to jail. Their legacy is having destroyed the financial confidence of a society that depends on putting capital safely away to be directed for investment by responsible overseers.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
Doesn’t this have to do with (business) schools and universities in general chucking Christian values and ethics and choosing instead situational ethics and the dollar as the bottom line?
Aren’t these folks all liberals?
Well, it is why MY kid is not at Harvard.
let the companies collapse. the market will correct a lot of faster than any kind of govt action will.
And now, in addition to the corruption and incompetence on Wall Street we have corrupt and incompetent overseers of our Investment Capital named Obama, Pelosi and Reid.
We are Effed unless this situation is reversed!
Some of the most visible people in our society could be justifiably identified as amongst the best and brightest, but the majority don’t qualify. That’s just reality. Does anyone here actually think the best and brightest become President?, Senators?, Judges? etc. etc. We will not be able to avoid the continuous mistakes we make until we get beyond the concept of ‘celebrity’.
Men, in the end, only do the right thing because they love God or they fear their fellow man. An atheist society thus ALWAYS fails, because there are always the Red-Headed Irish telling the authorities just exactly what they can do with it.
A successful society needs laws with teeth, coupled with a population raised in the love of God as its foundation.
Not really.. What happened was/is when America became too cowardly to use the 2nd amendment to revolt.. The MEN became addicted to TV, football, beer and pizza and would NOT take a chance on having their lifestyles change..
You know... by all the bloody GORE of an prolonged armed conflict.. and the WOMEN..
well the women (most of them) just became too stupid..
The Men too addicted to entertainment and the women became(or remained) eye rolling droolers..
VOILA!... the fall of American civilzation..
>Most historians agree that earthquakes, droughts or barbarians did not unravel classical Athens or imperial Rome. More likely the social contract between the elite and the more ordinary citizens finally began breaking apart — and with it the trust necessary for a society [snip, on purpose].
Constitution anyone? And mayhaps if it wasn’t being used as toilet paper by our ruling-class... I mean, politicians.
No. It has to do with socialism. The banks felt safe in taking more risk to earn greater returns because they had the "insurance" to do so. That is when they loaned money they split the loan up and divided among themselves so if the loan went bad, the hit to any one institution would be minimal. The only problem is when a lot of loans go bad, the whole system implodes.
In the old days, banks would blow up all the time, but the damage to the system was minimal. Today, the banks socialized the risk and when one blows up, they put the entire system at risk.
>A successful society needs laws with teeth, coupled with a population raised in the love of God as its foundation.
Well then, isn’t it high-time we hang traitors, like say Congress for confirming the Elector’s Votes w/o knowing if he was eligible? What about the USSC, for shutting down all the court-action trying to make sure the Constitution was followed?
...inbreeding between government, business and academic folks. It’s retardation starting to show behind the reigns of our mercantilism/oligarchy/plutocracy. ;-)
Well, with their millions they no longer see themselves as citizens of the U.S., but of the world.
The best and brightest criminals lapses will be a prelude to their fall.
“The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means that a small number of financially “powerful” states stand out among all the rest. The extent to which this process is going on may be judged from the statistics on emissions, i.e., the issue of all kinds of securities.” - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
“But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”
“Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.” - Frédéric Bastiat
...ever wonder why those blonde government/bailout employees in Escalades are such brutes? ;-)
My sentiments exactly - thanks for putting them so clearly!
Recipe for trouble:
Insist by law that banks MUST lend money to anyone who can ‘fog a mirror’, because ‘it’s a right to own a house’.
Follow that with the attorney general- Janet Reno- threatening banks with discrimination lawsuits if they don’t keep sending more money down the rat hole.
Let banks create all kinds of new ‘paper’ with fancy names to push to problem all over the globe.
Block every attempt by the sitting President to get more oversight of the operations of the bad lending and other practices of the banks.
Have a senior Senator (Chuck Me Schumer) let it ‘slip’ that a major bank is in trouble—IndyMac.
Act surprised when people do a run on that bank, and then hit all the banks you can with rumors and innuendos about how solid they might be.
Create ‘committees’ consisting of the members of Congress who got the biggest donations from the failed institutions—literally leaving the fox inside the hen house.
Badmouth auto company executives— so you look good to your Union member supporters— and tell them how stupid they all are for building cars that the public does NOT want to buy when the cars that were built were conceived in Congress—not in Detroit.
Run a totally inexperienced mid-state Senator who never likes to take a position on anything and loves to vote ‘present’ , pump him up with media whores and allow donations from all over the world to support a 2+ year campaign.
Refuse to demand even a legitimate BIRTH CERTIFICATE from this candidate.
Blame the sitting President for not getting legislation past the opposition controlled Congress, who have a steroid use problem of their own based upon what they think should be spent from Washington.
Let the looters elect a deer-in-the-headlights empty suit who doesn’t know how to say anything he means, and who says lots of things- but his promises of honest and transparency are not in existance.
Surround him with power mad sycophants.
Appoint law-breakers of every type thru out the entire Cabinet and Administration.
Have a Leader of the House of Representatives who refuses to give the other party members a copy of the $800 BILLION legislation they are trying to shove down the taxpayers throats.
Hammer everything the producers do and provide—thinking the producers will NEVER fight back and just plain QUIT producing.
Go after the supporters of the 2nd Amendment, so you can jackboot your hidden agenda down every citizen’s throat, despite the fact that socialist policies have been proven wrong all over the world...even in the poorest of countries.
Executive Orders being used heavily to bypass the Congress and any discussion and dissent.
Did I leave anything out?????
Please fill in the blanks for me.
Do I recall bin Laden threatened to attack western financial markets in his video released before Sept. 2008? Did he manipulate hedge funds or have enough pull to withdraw hundreds of billions from US money markets?”
Bin Laden comes from one of the weathiest families in the entire world.
I think he could do alot of manipulation.
The firm of Obama, Pelosi & Reid will be investing our funds in a pair of sure moneymakers -- ACORN and MoveOn.org.
We are so screwed.
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