Wall Street Wins; American Workers Lose Big
America’s most recent “great-recession” of 2008 was (and continues to be) a horrific time for many Americans. Families lost their homes; workers lost their jobs; and American taxpayers were forced to pay the price of a banking and financial system gone rogue, with little concern for the impact of its decisions on everyday Americans, or the general well-being of the country at large.
In early October, 2008, the US House and Senate both voted to hand-over upwards of $700 billion to the banking industries in America. This was after several months of bankster claims that without government assistance, the whole American economy would collapse. The “doom and gloom” scenarios pushed by individuals such as then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson painted a picture of ultimate catastrophe.
The American people were coerced into going along with a bail-out that was fundamentally not of their own doing. Major media told of those who had made poor decisions and bought-into sub-prime mortgages, yet it ultimately ignored the complicity and purposeful poor decision-making by those within the banking and lending industries. In fact, the majority of these banks had signed on to mortgages that they knew had little chance of ever being recovered, only to then bet against these very same mortgages within private security firms. They were in essence selling bad assets for the purpose of then bidding against them within the speculative industry, without government regulatory control to tell them otherwise.
Much of this can be blamed on the Clinton administration, which worked to repeal the fundamental provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act (put into law in 1933), a set of regulations that forbid the affiliation between banks and securities firms. Essentially, commercial and investment banking were forced to play separately, for the sake of preventing such disasters as what happened in 2008. However, Clinton’s repeal of the law, along with a subsequent push for deregulation within the banking sector (starting in the 1980’s and continuing to this very day), have created a system which allows Wall Street and the banking sector free reign over American money.
The greatest tragedy of this entire event is that still, to this day, there have been no new regulations of any genuine substance pushed through Congress to prevent this disaster from happening again. Banks have continued to monopolize their control through extensive and ongoing acquisition, and the government has yet to step up and take control at any significant level of the situation.
What we need in this country are real regulations and laws passed to prevent the next wave of recession (or, as many have predicted, a more likely full-on depression). The American people can ill-afford to be held hostage by large banking industries unconcerned with their own long-term sustainability. The banking and lending sectors have shown time and time again that they cannot be made to self-regulate. Therefore, it is the fundamental right and responsibility of our legislators and our government to take charge of the situation and force preventative measures upon them. To ignore the situation any longer would be unhealthy, unjust, and entirely unsustainable.
(For those unfamiliar with or simply interested in revisiting the disastrous policies of 2008, I wholeheartedly recommend the 2010 Academy Award winning documentary Inside Job.)