Egos and Immorality

[Gerald]

In the wake of a devastating financial crisis, President Obama has enacted some modest and obviously needed regulation; he has proposed closing a few outrageous tax loopholes; and he has suggested that Mitt Romney’s history of buying and selling companies, often firing workers and gutting their pensions along the way, doesn’t make him the right man to run America’s economy. Wall Street has responded — predictably, I suppose — by whining and throwing temper tantrums. And it has, in a way, been funny to see how childish and thin-skinned the Masters of the Universe turn out to be. Remember when Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group compared a proposal to limit his tax breaks to Hitler’s invasion of Poland? Remember when Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase characterized any discussion of income inequality as an attack on the very notion of success? But here’s the thing: If Wall Streeters are spoiled brats, they are spoiled brats with immense power and wealth at their disposal. And what they’re trying to do with that power and wealth right now is buy themselves not just policies that serve their interests, but immunity from criticism. Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/opinion/krugman-egos-and-immorality.html?_r=1

Note: May 24, 2012

[Skybird]

I no longer think that the current twoisted and lobbied and hijacked system can be reformed. That is like leaving it to cancer cells to find ways of how to prevent their growth and spreading in an act of self-regulation. After all, politics that want to regulate the system, far too deeply are involved in that system and are directly benefetting parts of it.

The system must be replaced. The roots must be pulled out. And no, I have no idea how to acchieve that, and by what to replace it.

Occupy certainly is not the answer. The confessing anarchist heading that movement (Graeber) to me is a big intellectual vacuum in denial of history, the meaning of material and financial value, and human nature. He says we should simply delete all debts, since that would be moral to do, while it is immoral to expect that debts, now or in the future, are to be payed back.

He obviously ignores that then nobody would lend you money if he knows that he is not to demand you paying it back. What graeber talks about thus is a fairy tale Garden Eden where only gifts and presents are changing hands and all value and money just rains from heaven while people dance in showers of milk an honey.

Frightening, that such a Zero can become so popular.