CommentsONE MAN’S OPINION-The above headline sums up our current national ills. But it was not always so. While greed is not new, as a national ethos, greed has not been at the pinnacle of our moral hierarchy.
As recently as the 1987 Michael Douglass movie, “Wall Street,” in which he claimed that “greed is good” was a repudiation of avarice.
Those quaint days are behind us. Back in the 1980s, we had vigorous prosecution of the Savings and Loan felons. The change from Keynesian Economics to Corruptionism with repeal of Glass-Steagall and the legitimization of credit default swamps in 2000 was more than a decade away. The Crash of 2008 was still two decades away.
We are now more than a decade past Wall Street’s crash of the national economy in 2008 and the Democrats and GOP have made certain that the felons who intentionally crashed our economy have not been prosecuted but rather have become vastly wealthier. But the rest of us are becoming increasingly poorer each day.
Let’s Get an Historical Perspective
According to a New York Times article, “After the crash of 1929, the Pecora Hearings seized on public outrage, and the head of the New York Stock Exchange landed in prison. After the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s, 1100 people were prosecuted, including top executives at many of the largest failed banks. In the ’90s and early aughts, when the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble revealed widespread corporate accounting scandals, top executives from Nasdaq bubble revealed widespread corporate accounting scandals, top executives from WorldCom, Enron, Qwest and Tyco, among others, went to prison.” After the 2008 Crash only one pipsqueak, Kareem Serageldin, was prosecuted and he did not even cause the crash.
As the above example shows, even though there has been a slide downward from early 20th Century capitalism – when the powerful elite imprisoned the head of the New York Stock Exchange Commission -- all the way to Obama giving Wall Street criminals trillions of dollars with one only Soviet-style show trial of a minor functionary of Arab descent, this was not a straight line of decline.
In fact, after the Crash of 1929, we enacted the Glass-Steagall Act to stop the criminal antics before they began. Everyone knew what disaster would result from allowing the risk takers in investment houses to have access to unlimited funds in commercial banks: a horrible crash of the world economy. Economics did not change in the intervening decades. During the Clinton Administration, the Dems and the GOP in Congress knew what would happen. But they did not care.
In a related warning, in 2006, Los Angeles Director of Planning Gail Goldberg predicted what would happen when there is greed without legal constraint: “Disaster.” Nationally, the disaster hit in 2008. Locally we are now dealing with disaster that we euphemistically term the Homeless Crisis. The origins of the Crash of 2008 and Los Angeles’ slide to the level of a third world country are the same -- people who have too much wanting more at the expense of those who have too little.
What is the real reason that prosecutions of Wall Street criminals have ceased? Judicial corruption. Its tentacles protect not only economic criminals, but those like Harvey Weinstein and Ed Buck who are spitting distance from the 1% and their DAs and judges. It took a virtual revolution with #MeToo to start these types of prosecutions (which ironically leave no room for the far more serious economic rape of Americans.) The 1% owns the courts. Even decent District Attorneys fear retaliation if they upset a judge who is friendly to the 1%.
Trump, the National Response to the End of the Rule of Law
The phrase “out of the frying pan and into the fire” applies. So does the admonition of “look before you leap.” Millions of Americans have been pushed too far by the corruptionism of both the Dems and the GOP, so they fell back on another aphorism, “fight fire with fire.” Corruptionism made enough Americans “mad as hell and they weren’t gonna take it anymore.” So, they elected a loudmouth mad dog to attack the rich and powerful who had been getting away with murder. Trump, it turned out, was no avenging angel; he was just another thief out to rip off all he could. However, all Trump’s supporters see is how much the 1% hates Donald Trump. And that is enough for them to support him.
Power Corrupts and Corruption Destroys
At this juncture, no one knows exactly where this funneling of wealth to the 1% will end. A bloody civil war is one possibility. Ignorance, however, both hastens and retards violence. When enough people realize that they live in a criminogenic society with no avenue of redress open to them, a revolution is possible. On the other hand, the human race, which is easily duped by absurd lies, can remain subjugated for centuries. Angelenos are still dumb enough to believe that the homeless crisis has nothing to do with the mass destruction of poor people’s homes. Rather, they believe that 110,000 empty apartments are not enough to house 36,000 homeless people.
People Who Have Too Much Want More at the Expense of Those Who Have Too Little
Behind each financial and moral crisis, Wall Street pulls the strings. In Los Angeles, it is an all-out assault on the middle-class ownership of homes in favor of corralling them into small apartments where they cannot gain land equity like homeowners. Even after the Black Plague in 1348, the poor became better off because the upper-class landowners were so financially devastated by the plague that the lower class could start owning land. In today’s LA, we see the reverse; the 1% owns more and more land and the middle-class ownership rate is shrinking faster than Alice after she found the bottle that said, “DRINK ME.”
Older Angeleno voters do not notice the shrinking ownership rate since the decline is due to Millennials not buying homes. Far less than 50% of Angelenos own their own home. Wall Street has discovered shutting out young people does not cause as much turmoil as throwing Grandma out into the cold. The economics are not complicated. When a family pays rent, the money goes to Wall Street and is lost to the family forever, but when a family has a home, much of the mortgage becomes the family’s largest asset. Thus, for Wall Street, stopping people from entering the home buying market is a wiser ploy.
What is the end of a society run by people who have too much but want more at the expense of people who do not have enough?
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
