"Bankers are like 5-year-olds," said Barry Ritholtz, a New York money manager who writes the Big Picture economics blog. "If you leave them unsupervised with a bowl of candy, they will eat it all and throw up all over everyone. Volcker got that."
Indeed - so all the bankers and their shills in government who helped bring about the 2007-2008 financial crisis have been held accountable?
Uh, not really:
Consider the extremes. President Obama is redesigning his administration to make it even friendlier toward big business and the megabanks, which is to say the rich, who flourish no matter what is going on with the economy in this country. (They flourish even when they’re hard at work destroying the economy.) Meanwhile, we hear not a word — not so much as a peep — about the poor, whose ranks are spreading like a wildfire in a drought.
The politicians and the media behave as if the poor don’t exist. But with jobs still absurdly scarce and the bottom falling out of the middle class, the poor are becoming an ever more significant and increasingly desperate segment of the population.
...
President Obama and his sidekicks climbed into their spiffy new G.O.P. costumes and promised in humiliatingly abject tones to shower the business world with whatever government largess they could lay their hands on. The first order of business (pun intended) was the announcement that William Daley, the Chicago wheeler-dealer and former Clinton administration official who landed a fat gig at JPMorgan Chase, would become the president’s chief of staff. Mr. Daley was a loud critic of recent financial regulatory reforms and has been obsessed with getting Democrats to be more subservient to business.
The poor, who have been hurt more than anyone else in this recession, don’t stand a heartbeat’s chance in this political environment. The movers and shakers in government don’t even give a thought to being on the side of the angels anymore — they’re on the side of the millionaires and billionaires.
Nearly 44 million people were living in poverty in 2009, which was more than 14 percent of the American population and a jump of four million from the previous year. Anyone who thinks things are much better now is delirious. More than 15 million children are poor — one of every five kids in the United States. More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are poor.
Are we doing anything about this? No. Our government officials, from the president on down, are too busy kissing the bejeweled fingers of the megarich.
The above words, written by Bob Herbert in his latest NY Times column, are all true.
So let me ask, if the megarich in business and on Wall Street are screwing everybody in sight after nearly sending the economy into a death spiral in 2007-2008, why are we not only allowing them to continue to run financial policy in this country, why are we also letting them expand their power into education policy as well?
Actually Bob Herbert himself loves it when some bankers and megarich are sitting on the board of a charter school and squeezing profits out of government largess and nonunionized labor.
But when he expands his view beyond schools to the larger country, suddenly those very same megarich crooks he likes sitting on a Harlem Village Academies board he doesn't like running economic policy from the White House.
Therein lies the problem.
If the banksters, hedge fund criminals and Wall Street types cannot be trusted to run their own companies without oversight and strict supervision (and if the tech bubble, the real estate bubble and the credit crisis of the last ten years tell us anything, they tell us that), why should they be allowed to make so many of the calls in education policy?
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