Write On: ‘We're Entitled To Your Money’

By PETER S. FERRARA<br>Record Columnist

What is the distance from Wall Street to Main Street? Based on what we have witnessed since the economy was looted, it's a long, long way. Wall Street has returned to its full, let's-reward-the-greedy-meaning-us mode. At the same time, stores and shops on Main Street continue to lay off workers or go out of business, factories close, jobs are outsourced to low-wage foreigners, and unions are busted.

How can Wall Street bounce back so quickly while unemployment rises, wages fall, the dollar loses its value, and whole sections of the economy are wiped out? The answer is this: our economy is rigged to reward the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the rest of us.

I can already hear the chorus of boo's from the "let the market decide everything" crowd. "Don't get in the way of our wonderful economic system with a lot of regulation," they say. "We can fix this thing if we can just stop the liberals from throwing the gravy train off the track."

Fix it? How? With our money, that's how. As long as the folks who work at the intersection of wealth and power were being left alone and trusted, they were free to devise scheme after money-making scheme. Some of these cash generating strategies were revealed as out-and-out scams. The Bernie Madoff-Ken Lay types who cooked the books or just Ponzi-schemed their way to vast wealth were so brazen that they got caught. But this was only because their bogus operations eventually toppled under their own weight.

For every crook who came to light, thousands got off scot free. You can't loot the entire world's economy without somebody, somewhere eventually catching on. Contrary to what you heard from the previous administration—that nobody knew what was going on—the truth is that many thousands of insiders and regulators knew exactly what the deal was. But as long as they were profiting, either by reaping unbelievable returns on their investments or through graft, bribery, and corrupt compensation, nobody was going to blow the whistle.

Well, the gravy train finally got derailed. The Enron's and Global Crossings were revealed to be as phony as the guy behind the curtain in "The Wizard of Oz." But those corrupt corporations were merely the tip of the iceberg. We learned the names of a host of other huge companies which were committing felonies to enrich their senior executives.

Halliburton was up to its ears in rigging its accounting practices even as its CEO Dick Cheney was being sworn in as Vice President of the United States. I'm not just singling Cheney out. He was no more or less corrupt than his cronies. But remember who we're talking about the next time you hear this crook slam the current administration's policies. It's like getting your medical advice from Typhoid Mary or buying a used motorcycle from Evel Knievel.

The list of corporate criminality goes on and on. From Adelphia Communications and Tyco Inte-rnational to Arthur Anderson accounting and Moody's Investor Services, it is obvious that greed isn't just "good" —it's irresistible. The notorious bank robber Willie Sutton explained that he robbed banks "because that's where the money is."

Today, the big money—almost all of it—is on Wall Street. One way or another every business start-up, every loan, every mortgage, every credit account, every bank deposit, every major transaction that involves money shows up on Wall Street. At every turn in the financial process, somebody on Wall Street gets a cut.

What has emerged is a very ugly fact indeed: Wall Streeters feel like they are entitled to make lots of money because there is so much of it flowing through the major exchanges and the entities that are supposed to protect the non-Wall Streeter—you and me. It ain't working and here's why: The insiders call all the shots. They always have. Nothing's changed.

We have seen that when their greed overpowers what can be looted, things fall apart. But what happens then? Does anybody really get caught beyond the most blatant and visible one or two super-crook's? No. Instead, we taxpayers get to bail the crooks out. And when the resources of the victims—the U.S. taxpayers—are not enough to pay off the bad debts Wall Street ran up, then what do we do? We borrow more money to fill the gap.

That's where the current huge deficits and bloated national debt are coming from. We the People, who profited not at all from the fiscal feeding frenzy from 2000 to 2008, get to pony up the trillions needed to keep America afloat. Think about that the next time you hear some tv or radio personality rail against what the government is now trying to do to fix the mess the "free market" crowd got us into. Our government is stepping in to shore up a few vital domestic industries to keep us out of a full-scale, 1930's type depression. That's not socialism, folks.

It may not be pretty, but it's the court of last resort. The private sector is not hiring, so the public sector must if we are to create jobs.

The chorus of critics and deceivers calling for an end to "Obama Socialism" really don't want you to learn the truth about how big business works in America. Instead, they are hoping that if they just keep repeating their lies loudly enough, we'll all believe them.

Unfortunately for our kids and grandkids, the shysters are right. I hear otherwise intelligent people echo the lies of the pundits all the time. The whole bizarre criminal enterprise is right before us in all its naked glory—if only we'd stop yelling long enough to just look at it.

For all the pain those who feel entitled to your money have put us through, they have so far paid nothing. Worse, we are looking today to the very people who enabled this disaster to somehow get us out of it. We have not passed a single piece of regulatory legislation to prevent a repeat of the crash we are in. Instead, we are distracted by war, health care, abortion, and gay marriage.

Under the bizarre notion that some businesses are "too big to fail" we continue to underwrite and finance the inmates who still run the financial asylum. Nothing will change until we stop listening to all the confusing, bogus, self-serving nonsense being shouted from every street corner. It's time to turn away from the ranting radio host, bias-driven blog, or mis-information and propaganda-spouting so-called "news source." We can do better than that.

The truth is that we need to find the courage to actually prosecute anybody who profited from financial wrongdoing. Lock up enough crooks in their $2,000 suits and things will begin to change. Pull the plug on off-shore based companies who pay no U.S. taxes and they will return to America. End our dependence on foreign energy perpetuated by oil men and their political puppets. Buy back our government by federally funding the election process, the only way to boot out the lobbyists with their legalized bribery. Get some real transparency into how Wall Street operates. Treat white collar criminals the same way we treat the jerk who robs a mini-mart.

If we don't act now, when public anger at how our current mess came about is still hot, we will miss the best chance we will ever have to save the sinking ship we call our economy.

But before we can do anything, we need to learn the real facts. I found one great place to start. It's an article by a reporter named Hank Gutman called "Dishonesty, Greed and Hypocrisy in Corporate America." You can find it on-line at "www.commondreams.org." Gutman lays it all out there for anybody to see. And to those who say we are only finding out about all this stuff now, I suggest they look at the date of Gutman's reporting. It was published on July 14, 2002.