5 Ways Wall Street Continues to Screw Up the Economy for the Rest of Us and How to Fix It

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-ways-wall-street-continues-screw-economy-rest-us-and-how-fix-it




The shocking thing about the financial collapse of 2008 is not that Wall Street excesses pushed us into the worst economy crisis since the Depression. It's that the same financial system has been propped back up and that elites are getting richer than ever, while the effects of that collapse are continuing to sandbag the rest of the economy. Oh, and most of this aftermath happened while a Democrat was in the White House.

Consider:

The biggest banks are bigger and more concentrated than ever.

Subprime (subprime!) is making a comeback with interest rates of 8 to 13 percent.

Despite Michael Lewis's devastating expose of how high speed trading is nothing but a technological scam that allows insiders to profit at the expense of small investors, regulators are not moving to abolish it.

The usual suspects are declaring the housing crisis over, even though default and foreclosure rates in the hardest hit cities and states are upwards of 25 percent.

The deficit is falling, now just 2.8 percent of GDP, thanks to massive cuts in social spending. Isn't that reassuring?

Meanwhile, back in the real economy, good jobs are far too scarce, incomes are stagnant, while 95 percent of the gains go to the top one percent.

Last month, President Obama belatedly decided that the global climate crisis necessitated action to reduce carbon emission caused by coal. He authorized the EPA to issue draft regulations requiring utilities to cut carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal plants by up to 30 percent by 2030.

[LuvNewcastle]

1. Sure, the people who we elect to deal with these matters should be working

for us instead of the big banks, but all of us are really at fault for letting this shit go on as usual. We don't get change unless we demand it, and so far, hardly any of us are speaking out on this issue. The information is freely available to anyone who cares to notice it, but we're too busy stuffing our faces and reading Facebook and watching The Bachelor to bother ourselves with anything serious. We'll bitch about it when we watch the news, but that's about it. When people ask me in the future why this all happened, if I live that long, I'm going to tell them that the people allowed it to continue, so it did. And that's the truth.