The Gangbanksters of Grab-it-All Street

In the Land of Bilk 'n Money

The American Dream has long over-promised and under-delivered; this is not a new revelation for those folks inclined to look beyond what the MSM and the powers that be tell them to look at and what they should be grateful for. The GFC brought this reality home big-time. It was the end result of a Ponzi scheme to top all such schemes, facilitated amongst other factors by a mad scramble by every president from Reagan onwards to dismantle the legislative and regulatory foundations of the financial system, [to] privatize, outsource and/or downsize everything that quacked like it was owned, funded and/or administered by government, and find new and innovative ways to tip the scales in favor of the banks, the corporations and the wealthy at the expense of those populating the Great American Heartland.

As for the GFC and its aftermath, the bad news at this point may be that there's no end in sight. If there's any 'good' news, it may only be because we can't see that far. And the fatal flaw of the deranged, deluded, dangerous deregulators may have been that they had convinced themselves they were smarter than the rest of us, [they] could see 'that far' and because of [that] we didn't need to even try. And their fatal flaw it seems may have become for us more so than them, a highly regrettable and, up until at least a few years before the Crash, utterly avoidable fate.

As for the Gangbanksters, in the final analysis they weren't too big to fail after all; as we all know they did so in spectacular style. But it seems in the final wash-up, unlike the hapless Bernie Madoff -- whose scam only affected a relatively small number of players and involved a minuscule amount of money -- a lot of Bernie's former partners-in-crime on the Street were just too big to jail. The GFC adversely affected just about everyone in the heartland, with the exception of the 'perps' themselves, their direct beneficiaries and their accomplices, and all the other 'chancers' who correctly identified a once in a lifetime, 'step right up' opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow Americans, their economy, their country, even their own precious national security, to say nothing of the rest of the planet.

Come to think of it, when it comes to global, existential and/or national security threats, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Harum et. al. ain't got nothin' on these guys. Bring out the pitchforks I say.