Blame for financial mess starts with the corporate lobby

[roseBudd]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/steven-pearlstein-blame-for-financial-mess-starts-with-the-corporate-lobby/2011/08/08/gIQA3zMlDJ_story.html

Want to know who is to blame, Mr. Big Shot Chief Executive? Just look in the mirror because the culprit is staring you in the face.

You helped create the monsters that are rampaging through the political and economic countryside, wreaking havoc and sucking the lifeblood out of the global economy....

My own bill of particulars begins right here in Washington, where over the past decade you financed and supported the growth of a radical right-wing cabal that has now taken over the Republican Party and repeatedly made a hostage of the U.S. government...

The more successful it was, however, the more you put in — hundreds of millions of the shareholders’ dollars, laundered through once-respected organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, phoney front organizations with innocent-sounding names such as Americans for a Sound Economy, and a burgeoning network of Republican PACs and financing vehicles. And thanks to your clever lawyers and a Supreme Court majority that is intent on removing all checks to corporate power, it’s perfectly legal...

Somewhere along the way, however, this effort took on a life of its own. What started as a reasonable attempt at political rebalancing turned into a jihad against all regulation, all taxes and all government, waged by right-wing zealots who want to privatize the public schools that educate your workers, cut back on the basic research on which your products are based, shut down the regulatory agencies that protect you from unscrupulous competitors and privatize the public infrastructure that transports your supplies and your finished goods. For them, this isn’t just a tactic to brush back government. It’s a holy war to destroy it — and one that is now out of your control.

[meow2u3]

1. The truth finally comes out--after all these years!

The selfish corporate interests created this political and economic monster and now it's coming to bite them where the sun don't shine.

[Citizen Worker]

2. The republicons had a more than ample number of democratic party co-conspirators and the democrats

continue to take money from the same cast of thieves. There's plenty of blame to go around and NOTHING will be done to correct the systemic corruption until we have a viable second political party.

[roseBudd]

3. This was written in August shortly after the debt ceiliong impasse caused the downgrade...

I suppose there are some schnooks who actually believe that those wild swings in stock prices last week represented sober and serious concerns by thoughtful, sophisticated investors about the Treasury debt downgrade or European sovereign debt or a slowdown in global growth. But surely such perceptions don’t radically change each afternoon between 2 and 4:30, when the market averages last week were gyrating out of control.

The only credible explanation for that is speculation, herd behavior and market manipulation by traders looking to make a quick million — financial wiseguys who could not care less what impact it might have on the real economy. And other than J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, I didn’t hear a peep of protest from you on CNBC, or a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago or even a simple letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. A cameo appearance at the White House doesn’t quite cut it.

It’s not just that you have remained silent as the financial sector has sucked away much of the profit generated by the private sector, stolen away much of the nation’s best talent and transformed the process of capital allocation and formation into a casino. Even worse, through organizations such as the Chamber and the Business Roundtable you reflexively provided them with crucial political support that allowed them to beat back regulators who tried to restrict their growth, curb their risk-taking or put a stop to the kind of fraudulent activity that nearly sank the recovery, and from which it will take years to recover. Given your role in society and in the economy, your silence amounts to complicity.

The truth is you’ve become them. Instead of focusing your attention and ingenuity in developing new products and services, you’re spending most of your own time on financial engineering — buying up companies at one moment because of synergies and cost saving, then spinning them off the next moment because they no longer fall in to your “core mission.”

[meow2u3]

4. Financial wiseguys is right

Wall Street boardrooms have been conducting business like Mafia bosses, only by different names. The comparisons are chilling.

• Mob bosses have become corporate CEO's


• Underbosses have become the COO's, CFO's, and executive vice-presidents


• Consiglieri have become the high-priced lawyers hired to ghostwrite the laws


• Capos are now professional lobbying firms the mob set up in Washington


• Enforcers are the lobbyists infesting Congress at an average rate of 6 to 1


• Soldiers are the Republican politicians


• Associates, who are not full members, have become the Republican-lite, DLC and Blue Dog Democrats (DINOs)

Do you see a pattern here?

Crimes by financial mobs include extortion (the TARP bailouts and corporate welfare), bribery (unlimited, secret campaign contributions), blackmail (e.g., outing Anthony Weiner in the sexting scandal when in fact he committed no crime, just to humiliate him for bucking the banksters), securities fraud, foreclosure fraud, control fraud, etc.