Web Letters | The Nation

Web Letter

Wall Street executives are punished for reaping rewards given to them by presidents Reagan and Clinton, and by the Democrats and Republicans who supported these elected leaders.

Deregulation/privatization rewards the powerful and ignores the needy. The Obama Administration has already promised the drug industries that that the price for prescription drugs will not be regulated under Obama's health care initiative. This rewards the CEOs and corporations with unlimited profits, but punishes consumers who need the drugs with high costs.

It is cynical to punish people who benefit from privatization/deregulation. Rather, the Obama Administration needs to regulate the marketplace. Iceland and the former Soviet Union has, and had, respectively, millionaires, which proves that greed can survive severe regulation.

Regulate the marketplace, the banking system, the healthcare system, mining and nuclear power plants, and the war against the greed on Wall Street will have sharper, stronger teeth. Until serious regulation takes effect, it's business as usual.

Web Letter

The "socialism" label isn't sticking because of repetition, as much as from observation of Obama's own behavior. He exhibits a continued preference for bureaucratic rather than efficient market actions. The people are neither blind nor stupid in their reactions.

Web Letter

"Yet the real culprits, the Wall Street executives who drove the economy into the ditch, have walked away largely unscathed." You focus on executive pay. The real culprits who caused the finacial collapse, or have driven the economy in the ditch, are walking away unscathed, since they have been put in charge of fixing it.

And they are in Congress still: Barney Frank, Maxine Waters... you know who they are. Plenty of video and their speeches available.

Web Letter

Well, OK. Bam didn't cause the financial meltdown or the implosion of the economy. But how did the mark-to-market accounting rules get changed?

It was that single action more than any other which raised the stock price of the worst actors in the financial industry. That change, as I understand it, reduces the level of reserves required and masks the true financial condition of those institutions, which in turn artificially raises the stock price.

Obama was already in office when that rule (mark-to-marker) was relaxed. He must have approved it.