The Gangbanksters of Grab-it-All Street

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Yankee Doodle went to town, Riding on his crony,

He stuck a feather in his hat, Yet knew it was all phony,

Yankee Doodle keep it up, Yankee Doodle Dandy,

Mind your def'cit & your debt, 'Cause you'll run out of candy!

Old American Folk Tune - Adapted for the zeitgeist. (C) Anon.

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Head We Win, Tails You Lose

Karl Marx once said capitalism contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. We might further riff on his 'seminal' allusion by speculating that it's on Wall Street where those "seeds" are being genetically modified. Like their counterparts in the globalised agribusiness and food industry, the folks engineering the metaphorical modifications in the financial sector appear to have little idea, and even less interest in or concern for, how their reckless jiggery-pokery with the commonsensical order of things might play out down the mountain.

Again to name-check Marx, the Gangbanksters of Grab-it-All Street are akin to 'sorcerers.... [who are] no longer able to control the powers of the nether world [they] have called up by [their] spells', whilst remaining increasingly at pains to preserve the illusion business as usual is a good thing for all. Yet although they long ago lost any battle upholding the fantasy they have anyone else's interests at heart but their own, this has yet to reflect itself in sustained, widespread discontent in the heartland, certainly not enough to effect the change that might come close to proving Marx wrong.

There are any number of reasons why we need to continue holding the blowtorch to the belly of Street mob, not least because of their ongoing fraudulent and reckless practices, their continuing resistance to meaningful reform measures, and with systemic risk being greater than as it ever was. Moreover, with the next presidential race looming and the U.S. economy still teetering, there'll doubtless be many folks -- those who have not quite given up the ghost on the American Dream -- hanging out for some serious, long-term solutions to an economic malaise that at least might help restore a measure of faith in said Dream. But as the saying goes, 'good luck with that'; the quadrennial 'game of thrones' that is the presidential election promises much but delivers little. Barack Obama is living, breathing proof of that. The best they can hope for is that the U.S. economy doesn't experience another near extinction level event.