RE: Mad Yet ? .... You Should Be.
Here is a great comment attached to the Wall Street Pay: A Record $144 Billion article, written by ted thomas:
Quote:Since I don't work on Wall Street, and have no first hand knowledge of how the game is played, I have to qualify my views at the outset as unprovable. However, as a systems analyst and one who makes extensive use of heuristics in my work, I have a few plausible theories:
- According to Lord Acton's aphorism: "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.", we may assume that our financial services industry is thoroughly corrupt, right down to the marrow, even if we can't describe the specific mechanisms by which they skim 2% of GDP off the top each year and put it in their pockets. One thing we can safely say: it's all about insider information. Given instant access to information about every company anywhere on the planet, stock picking is a suckers game. It's all about knowing who controls large blocks of capital, what they plan to do with it, and when.
- The banking system is centuries old, and dependent upon the preservation of various anachronisms which enable them to manipulate wealth. Currency is the most obvious of these, but the system is riddled with them. Central banking is another, and regulatory agencies yet another. Every aspect of the system which depends upon the discretionary behavior of a human being contributes to the corruption.
- For the first time in the history of banking, we actually have the means to create an honest global monetary system, and impose regulatory controls which provide 100% coverage, and do not rely upon the good intentions of any human beings to enforce. However, instead of dismantling the intrinsically corrupt practices and replacing them with incorruptible electronic neutral brokers, those with hegemony over the status-quo are using those electronic systems to exponentially increase their ability to plunder the wealth of Main Street investors (the sheep).
Until I happened to catch a re-run of a 60-minutes report on "High-speed Trading" this last Sunday, I did not realize how obscenely corrupt the system had become. The combination of elected officials, most of whom are too ignorant of what they don't know about data processing, to even vaguely understand how flagrantly the NYSE and other financial institutions have gamed the system using expensive data networks, and the conveniently naive financial executives who have no interest whatsoever in creating an honest electronic trading platform, have resulted in a global blood-letting system which virtually guarantees that a handful of financial moguls can and will continue to manipulate the global monetary and financial trading infrastructure to whatever extent they think they can get away with, as they demonstrated so clearly in September of 2008.
If we had an honest President, a capable Secretary of the Treasury who was not treading water in anticipation of his appointment as CEO of Citigroup, and a Congress with a fundamental motivation to restore the credibility of the United States as steward of the reserve currency of the global economy, we could fix this rather quickly. The United States, in spite of it's massive losses to date, still has the power to reform and re-tool it's own monetary practices and fiscal policies in a way which would force the rest of the world to follow suit.
I believe there is a massive pent-up demand in the global economy for honest exchange. The bloodsuckers who run the system today do so at great cost to all the rest of us, and by turning them out, we could probably erase most of our debt and gain the approbation of people and economies around the world, all at once. The problem is, the combination of near-term sacrifices that would have to be made by many of us, and the critical mass of greed addicted folks who have a vested interest in protecting business as usual, makes it a near impossibility.
![[Image: randquote.png]](http://truthdb.org/randquote.png)
|
