Criminology

All animals are equal, but a few are so much more equal than others.
George Orwell, Animal Farm

Criminology Overview
Criminologists suggest that ultimate source of white collar crime lies in culture of competition that pervades American society, one that also embraces an economic system which extols, indeed is based upon the same traits and principles (i.e. capitalism).  After all, it was Adam Smith who extolled the virtues of the free market, which is all about competition, not to mention the basis for unregulated capitalism, again reinforcement, theoretically, of competition, in The Wealth of Nations (Smith 1776).  As Smith describes the process, he uses the analogy of the hypothetical greed of the individual, in this case a common grocer, which would lead him to seek out new products to serve his customers, offer his goods at lower prices to differentiate his wares, creating competition, and that corresponding competition would naturally occur from other grocers in response, thus providing consumer choice.  Voil.  Competition.  The clichd invisible hand of the market argued Smith, precluded the need for government regulation, as markets regulated themselves naturally through this process.

This is how Smith has traditionally been interpreted, although a closer reading of his work betrays that this is not quite what he implies. (Smith, 1776)   However, America from the time of Smiths writing and this conventional interpretation has created a fundamental paradox in the core of American society and life  in that this country was founded by deeply religious people who believed that greed (the founding driver of Smiths system) was one of the deadliest of all deadly sins. It is this paradox between ethics, religion, money, competition, the conquering of the country (also known as the slaughter of the indigenous peoples who were here before the European invaders) that has led to periods of unregulated greed littered with white collar criminals who practice capitalism at its fullest and purest form (usually marked with equally high levels of criminals of the common variety).  After all, Joe Kennedy was a mobster and a bootlegger who bought his way into respectability with the profits he made as an illegal drug lord and bootlegger during Prohibition who bought his way into respectability, and his sons way into the Presidency with the wealth he now had under the Roosevelt Administration.

These cycles of corruption and white collar crime waves (usually created by a coalition and cooperation of white collar criminal activity between corporate and government officials) is interspersed, historically throughout American history with retrenchment and rebuke, and great movements for social reform.  Or interesting mixes of the two, such as members of the Temperance Movement also being leading members of the Abolitionist Movement.  Or after a major disaster occurs, bringing in a wave of greater government control, reform and involvement in the economy, such as new regulations on certain industries or across the board of the American business landscape (such as those reforms and regulations implemented during The Great Depression in the 1930s after the Stock Market Crash of 1929, including Glass-Steagall and the grilling of the titans of Wall Street at the time under the Pecorra Commission).

But the financial world is not the only one to feel the hand of government descend to impose new rules, regulation and oversight after a major disaster in an unregulated industry.  The shirt Waist Fire in New York in 1910 brought in major national reforms in worker safety.

But the reason that it usually takes a disaster or a spark of a moment, like Rosa Parks refusing to move from her front row seat aboard a Montgomery Public City Bus, and thus starting what would become the beginning of the organized Civil Rights Movement, which, dont let anyone lead you astray, is also about white corporate criminals, (they were known as Plantation Owners and the members of Congress who supported them) is because too often, despite the paradox between the concept of greed as a deadly sin and Greed is Good, as in Wall Street Gordon Gekko style, in a society where social status and success is judged on consumption and wealth acquisition, and conspicuous display, it is the latter instinct is the one that too often wins.  There is no honor in being poor but ethical.  Not to mention it doesnt pay the rent.  To a certain extent, when society gets to a point where corruption is so endemic, the average everyday citizen is almost forced to participate in white collar crime to survive, becoming in effect a white collar criminal by default.  Nowhere is this better illustrated for example than the S.E.C.s prosecution of whistleblowers, which is not only stupid, but runs counter to the whole purpose of Whistle blowing law and protection.  Not to mention the appalling record of the S.E.C. itself in catching white collar corporate crime in the world of finance.

But the urge to consume, even if it was beyond ones ability to do so, was irresistible to most, particularly in the world immediately before the crash, where images of conspicuous consumption were everywhere.  Surround sound advertising to consume.  And during the housing bubble, the American public did just that at unprecedented levels and at unprecedented amounts beyond their means.  That too is a measure of a white collar society.  Advertisers create the urge to consume.  And while consumers are not innocent victims here, they were being led to believe that America was riding an economic high that would go on forever, just like the economy would always expand, and were conned into all sorts of consumption, from risky mortgages to goods they had no business buying and could not afford.  Every salesperson who engaged in such activity is a white collar criminal.

Societal Causes

White Collar Criminals, Selling Financial Snake Oil
Another trait in a culture of white collar criminals and the environment which they create and thrive, where the demarcation between whos honest or not, much less whether one can be at all, much less what a good investment is, (and the Goldman Sachs fraud case is a perfect example of the latter, explained  HYPERLINK httpwww.huffingtonpost.com20100420jon-stewart-takes-on-gold_n_544102.html here (Stewart, 2010) very well, albeit humorously)  has gotten ever harder to distinguish, just as who is really serving the public as a public servant instead of lining up their next lucrative gig in the private sector in a market they helped to create (and both Robert Rubin and  Larry Summers are perfect examples of this).

And nowhere was this clearer than in the actions of those on Wall Street, who didnt care about the effects their actions might have on homeowners if their deals went bust.  They justified their actions, if they thought about them at all, by thinking about their killer bonuses at the end of the year.  And thought of peoples biggest investment and home as an instrument to be traded, sliced, diced, rated, insured and sold.  And thus completely divorced themselves if not dehumanized what they were doing. Next deal up please  Kaching, kaching, kaching.  That is the mentality of a corporate white collar serial killer.  Particularly when people began to really know rather than just suspect what they were doing was wrong and even losing money for their firms, as Citi did in 2006, but rather than ringing alarm bells, individuals at such firms still engaged in criminal or fraudulent behavior purely out of self interest andor the market would right itself, justification.  Which is a bit of a canard to say the least (outright lie might be more appropriate), because by 2006, even the internal economists at most Wall Street banks were ringing the alarm bells with regularity about the imminent collapse of the housing bubble.

Racism is just another part of unethical behavior that feeds and is part of a culture of criminality that overrode ethics, common sense, oversight, even their own economic analysis and economists predictions that drove Wall Street to continue to do what it had been doing until the system literally collapsed.

That is what happens in corrupt organizations.  And is yet another nail in the coffin that proves that Wall Street Firms have become places where criminals thrive.  It is literally part of the culture of the business.  And that is not only why reform is going to be so hard, but why perhaps another paradigm might be sought.

The environment thus created by the legislative environment in Washington, merely since 1998 in terms of just the financial industry, created increasingly bigger mergers, larger corporations (in every vertical), multinationals, and even started causing massive corporate scandals and failures OUTSIDE the financial industry (but of course financed by them) as early as the financial elite and Congress were destroying Ms.  Burns career, only to be repeated AGAIN less than three years later in 2001 (with Enron, which was basically about the same kinds of issues that created the Wall Street crash seven years later) that came-back-to-haunt Americans post crash 2008, in the phrase too big to fail corporation. (Astore, 2010)

Despite the increased adoption of said philosophies over the past thirty years however both as a way to spread the American way and an economic system adopted by default with the fall of Communism,  the idea of unregulated capitalism has always been attractive in America, where big government is distrusted, combined with a sense of competitiveness in general, given that this is a country that could easily be called an Imperialist Democracy, founded and literally conquered by brute force and if you will competitiveness, that is as much a part of a traditional Western heterosexual male gender identity as economic theory (and the finance industry is both notoriously sexist and in fact the numbers of women in it have been dropping rather than increasing for the last fifteen years.

The reality is that the Crash of 2008 is just a continuation, if on a macro scale of issues that lie at many unresolved issues, indeed the paradox at the heart of America, since its inception that we have never really solved as a nation.

From the myth of the American Pioneer, bedrock of our culture that most Americans celebrate at Thanksgiving, without realizing that this is also the symbol of the slaughter of millions of indigenous Native Americans to establish The United States.  And was done with deceit, violence, and outright robbery and murder.  All tools of the typical mobster, if not White collar criminal,.  Creating policies to stop vast numbers of people from their homes through predatory lending, sub-prime mortgages, or outrageous ARMS that people do not understand (i.e. they would face ballooning mortgage payments) and that the above policies would literally displace tens of millions of Americans, is the kind of thing that corporate criminals in America have done since the founding of this country.  In its own way, the housing crisis we face today is no different from a modern version of The Trail of Tears, literally a Presidential negation of a land treaty with the Cherokees because gold had been found on their reservation in Georgia, (a commodity which the Indians owned but which white speculators wanted for their own without paying for it  also called stealing) forcing the Cherokee to move to a barren reservation thousands of miles away in Oklahoma.  The devastation of the tribe was enormous.
                                                               
Figure 1  Artists rendition of The Trail of Tears
President Andrew Jacksons backsliding perhaps still remains the most brutal legal historical documentation of Americas decision to reallocate (also read steal) valuable resources from its poorest and weakest residents to the richer population, a situation we are seeing today.

The Cherokee, as a nation, never recovered, but their ordeal remains a reminder that while this paper will address the white collar crime of a particular industry today, the behavior exhibited and described by Wall Street herein is not an aberrant behavior absent from American society historically, but rather an inherent part of it from the beginning of the modern nations inception, albeit concentrated in a particularly virulent, toxic and destructive way in a certain industry vertical at a certain moment in time (the crash of 2008), because of the amount of money at stake, certain societal factors, including socioeconomic issues, outright discrimination, and because of a coalescence of other less tangible factors to be discussed herein.  But if one asks a displaced homeowner whos just lost a home to repossession if they feel any different than a Cherokee force marched across the country, after being promised security and a home for life, only to find out that thanks to the actions of powerful people who were playing a sophisticated game in secret, that promise that meant so much was merely a bald faced lie, I doubt the answer you will get will differ greatly.

Furthermore, because we, as a country are a capitalist and consumer based economy, or at least were until the crash of 2008, America is a country that at least since the 1980s, but really since the 1950s in the modern era, celebrates consumption without a corresponding emphasis on legitimate or counter normative means to achieve wealth, no matter how religious we claim to be.  Or at least the old economy was that way.  This will be changing in the paradigm shift to a cleantech economy which is environmentally friendly, and carbon free.  While most people do not realize this yet, the way we used to live is not only gone forever, but unsustainable.

However the blatant exploitation in America of those with power and money of those without, as a fundamental core of our society socioeconomically to the board room, is a theme that runs consistently through American business writing, both academic theory and even in fiction, throughout American commercial history.  Not to mention in real life.  There is an element to which America as a whole is a criminal society (the first settlers after all were religious fanatics seeking the right of religious freedom, and criminal elements as the Europeans cleared their cell blocks).  This was one of the more controversial themes for example that is a consistent theme throughout the work of Melville, in particular Moby Dick, (Melville, 1851) but also his lesser work, and something that some believe contributed to his commercial failure while alive.  Simply, Melvilles father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, was one of the most reactionary, yet powerful state judges in the history of the United States, and whos precedent setting decisions, including many that set the legal framework if not precedent for business law, among other topics, including workers rights and racial equality, were still in use NATIONALLY until the last of his racist decisions was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education in 1959, almost a hundred years after Shaws death.  His decisions on workers comp slowed down even introduction of that employee protection for seventy five years, and associated healthcare reform, such as it is, until the year 2010, almost two hundred years after his death.

Yet outside the symbolism used on the pages of literature, no better example exists than the use of slaves up until the Civil War and exploitation of immigrant labor even today, the continued discriminatory workforces of corporate America, again a product of a culture of white collar crime.

Labor, particularly in an era of the information economy, consists of workers whose intellect is the most valuable asset they can contribute to a corporation.  If the corporation is a company of criminals, where workers ideas are not compensated, or the ideas they come up with are fundamentally criminal (which is a perfect snapshot of Wall Street and the buildup to the crisis, with its ever increasingly complex financial instruments, particularly in the situation of the Goldman Sachs fraud case, discussed  HYPERLINK httpwww.huffingtonpost.com20100428stewart-rips-senate-for-i_n_554873.html here, (Stewart, 2010) where members of the Firm KNEW the products were selling were fraudulent andor worthless andor impossible to price, and therefore not liquid, not to mention widespread mistreatment of the workers themselves at such institutions (a story rarely reported on but true for the vast majority of employees except of course for the superstars) is also a sign of a white collar criminal culture which runs rampant but has not even begun to be addressed.

So in essence, white collar crime is actually bedrock of American society.  Simply because its components are actually elements of our cultural values as a society, its often so hard to catch and often so clever.  It is also why judges and politicians are loath to enforce stiff penalties, thus discouraging future similar activity.  Like, for example, in this particular round of Wall Street reform, impose real caps on compensation.

Furthermore, with this mindset of competitiveness and wealth being tied to self identity and some kind of moral superiority as a societal value, white collar crime always will be hard to counteract, stop and even punish.  In fact as argued it is precisely the cultural values of American society that encourage it, even with the new frugality forced upon the vast majority of the population after the crash.  Even among professional women of a higher socioeconomic demographic and minorities who do not realize the hidden cultural barriers to obtaining the key to the golden kingdom of The American Dream, and thus continue, however much anger there is today towards Wall Street, to aspire to such riches.  And therefore have no fundamental deep seated desire to dismantle the system because one never knows.  Ones luck might just change if you work hard enough.  In other words, one can buy ones way to class and respectability if you have the means, and there is still a way to do just that.  This is how pervasive the illusion is.  This is what lies behind even those who had no deliberate intention of letting Wall Street and a host of other corporations continue to outrageously break the law but were lulled asleep at the switch because they could not believe that such rot could and did exist within the very heart of the system they were supposed to be watching and overseeing.  No better example is the ongoing fraudulent schemes of Bernie Madoff, whose scams were repeatedly reported to the S.E.C., who in turn, repeatedly refused to investigate these tips for over 16 years  even though they came from a variety of sources. (Ross Sorkin, 2010)

Yet even so, despite the carnage, the concept of the nouveau riche, once so despised as somewhat tacky, and certainly while classist and elitist in and of itself, has disappeared.  The ideal is to be riche no matter what.  Americans are not stupid.  They understand that in todays society, money rules everything else.  And in that milieu, despite the pain, unless it gets far more severe, the extreme overhaul and regulation of both Wall Street and the business culture of this country, indeed our core cultural values, will not change  leaving the door open for another scenario of exactly the same proportions, if not worse  from happening all over again.  Only this time, it may happen much sooner than anyone expects, with far more devastating results.

Modern American Societal Culture and Business Trends

Hybrid Corporate Criminals
Now, there are those that could say that there is a level of very subtle white collar crime that is a kind of hybrid corporategovernment mix that occurred during this period, in that the housing market boom was deliberately encouraged by the policies of the Bush administration and Congress along with certain elements in American society that allowed it to occur and fed off of it.  While the societal trends that caused the elections of political officials whose policies might make them white collar criminals are not crimes, the individuals who actually created the policies are.  This paper will look at both societal trends that created a culture of corruption that bred so many opportunities and hotbeds for white collar criminals to thrive, and identify who they were and are, not to mention their victims, and possible reforms and solutions.  Because failure to diversify the economy is such basic economic reality and governing strategy that failure to do so, at a time of increased outsourcing, can only logically lead one to think that this was a deliberate strategy known as structural unemployment.  In other words the government literally conned people into consuming through various different ways to distract them from the reality that there was no more real economy in America any more, while creating a distraction called the housing boom.  Except Wall Street of course.  A strategy both created to maximize corporate profit, while keeping the economy humming with consumer spending on cheap goods bought at Wal-Mart (made in China) and financed by the equity they had in their vastly overinflated house value, driven ever upward by the boom which was supposed to last forever, or that was what the American consumer was told over and over.   To deliberately undermine an entire economic system, not to mention destroy an entire generation while conning them into believing they are on track to a life time of prosperity, is the ultimate white collar crime.  Its called fraud and deception.

A Breeding Ground for Corporate Criminal Activity
Certainly the atmosphere of increasingly oligarchy in this country over the last thirty years, and most certainly the last fifteen in this milieu, have created even more opportunities for criminal behavior, and it flourished quite spectacularly.  In fact one might even say it was the order of the day, particularly on Wall Street.  To quote Oscar Wilde, most people can resist everything but temptation.   And the boys (and most of the people who work in finance still are, which only further adds to a culture of competition and macho one-upmanship which creates further pressure to sell and make profits no matter what) could certainly not resist.

The Culture of White Collar Crime Meets Greed Is Good, Gordon Gekko Wall Street
But in a culture of white corporate criminals, the sociopathology of those who make up that culture are focused on different goals and results.  The goals of those who worked on Wall Street were not to perpetuate responsible or even efficient functioning of the market.  Or selling a customer a well or fair priced or even benchmarked good.  In fact one of the issues at the heart of the Goldman Sachs fraud case is that literally the traders knew and actively discussed that the products they were selling were questionably valued if not essentially worthless.  But they, just like Citibank, who sold sub-prime mortgages even after they knew THAT market was in trouble, did so because they were functioning as criminals in a criminal environment, not to mention a highly competitive workplace where their own bonuses depended on sales per annum.  The functioning of Wall Street during most of the naughts was a mix of hocus pocus shell game marketing psycho babble and equations drawn up by equally off the wall if unethical quants who were also relying on market assumptions that were completely incorrect and unsustainable that even they knew were wrong.  And sold as we know you cant understand this stuff but its profitable and it works.  That is the classic carney con game in an Armani business suit.
The truly amazing thing is how many people got duped by it.  The truly tragic thing is how many people it either has already destroyed or will.

A Blowback of Corporate White Collar Crime From The Cold War
The last time that happened was in the early nineteen sixties.  When the issue of race and gender equality was finally addressed.  And a redistribution of wealth in society occurred that led to a limited social safety net, so that nobody ever fell completely through the cracks.  This is the definition of a civil society.  The antithesis of one run by white collar corporate thugs.  That said, even then, this was largely both domestic and a ruse, since under the policies of the Cold War, American foreign policy supported business interests who certainly perpetuated that culture around the globe.  Its just that most Americans never knew about it.

For example, American support of the horrifically brutal regime of the Shah of Iran, because American oil companies operating in the country, got special concessions.  Its almost as if we have imported those concepts and cultures into American companies back home after the fall of Communism.  A blowback to use a CIA term, (although more conventionally used in terms of national security and secret ops) of white collar criminal culture and activity back into domestic turf.  Nevertheless, twenty years after the Great Society ideals of John Kennedy, which promised to further move America forward in terms of both racial and gender socioeconomic equality, the deregulatory, free wheeling, market mantra, which is fundamentally counter to this ideal, using the conventional interpretation of Smiths work, went back into overdrive.

Voodoo Economics  The White Collar Criminal Shell Game as the Trigger of the Tragedy
It entered with the election of Ronald Reagan, accelerated with the fall of Americas Cold War economic nemesis, The Soviet Union and the so-called fall of Communism, was helped along its merry way by Clinton (who was the President after all who destroyed one of the most important anti-trust laws overseeing the banking industry (Glass-Steagall) while allowing for the introduction of what Warren Buffet calls financial weapons of mass destruction, (unregulated derivatives) and this trend, along with the accompanying ones of increased and bigger mergers, the increase in mega multinationals, and the relaxation of anti-trust law and regulation, only further went into warp speed under Bush II.  This, in conjunction with economic policies set by the government (such as lending rates) created the housing bubble and the introduction of what was called sub-prime mortgages.

This was the point where the criminals swung into action.  Because this is where the real X on the carpet and the scene of the crime occurred.  Over and over, all over Wall Street.  Because it was the subsequent creative repackaging of these very risky loans into a different kind of security that looked and was sold as a higher grade asset, creating essentially hocus pocus financial smoke and mirrors, that is what brought down the house of cards and is what is also so illegal.  This is what is what makes what happened fraud.  Because the people who created these vehicles knew all along that what they were creating was complete fabrication and hot air.  The fact that they were so profitable however, made them irresistible to Big Swinging Dicks as Michael Lewis once described the denizens of the cut throat, competitive world of Wall Street in his book, Liars Poker, (Lewis, 1986) created the perfect breeding ground if not storm for a sort of mass production line of white collar crime on a scale never before seen, and with consequences of global implications never before felt by human kind.

Into the Eye of The White Collar Crime Perfect Storm
So between the end of the Clinton administration and the beginning of the first term of Bush in the late nineties and early naughts, Wall Street White Crime began to breed like larvae on steroids as a result of little to no regulation of the financial industry, much less corporate America by the political elite, many of whom acted as political white collar criminals themselves, at the same time that corporations had grown ever larger and more powerful in size.

At the same time, these same multinationals had access to the new megabanks created in the fall of Glass-Steagall, to finance even more deals, mergers, and what came to be a new and huge unregulated dark market of unregulated derivatives trades that were highly profitable, but as it turned out, frequently were fraudulent and often literally financial hocus pocus and worth nothing.  As one author wrote recently There is Fraud In the Heart of Wall Street.  And it was done deliberately, knowingly, at a widespread and even high level, and for much of the last decade.

Institutional Factors Leading to Industry Predisposition to White Collar Crime

The Chattering Classes
The traditional media, whether TV or print, or even now, with new media overtaking it, is traditionally financially illiterate.  Even supposedly financially focused outlets like Reuters and Bloomberg.  The destruction of Glass-Steagall, one of the most important banking anti-trust laws in the United States, barely made a blip on the news.  There was no extensive analysis or reporting of what it meant.  During the housing boom, the media focused on the go-go housing market, rather than an unsustainable boom.  Whole Reality series were based on house upgrades.  Real Estate was hot, whether flipping it for a profit, investing in funds for ones 401K, or just finding a way to get into the game in the first place, was the story of the day.

With the exception of the scandal at Fannie Mae, which again barely got media time, but again was an alarm bell that nobody paid attention to, the media watchdogs were either asleep, watching their own stock portfolios, marveling at the rise of the market without doing any analysis on what was fueling the boom, not to mention what was behind it, or if it was sustainable, which is inexcusable, considering the amount of information available to financial reporters starting as early as 2004 about the obvious housing bubble, and continued to waive their pom poms in the face of a looming disaster.

The Rise of a Class Based Society and Increased Income Disparity                                      
One of the reasons that the political elite, specifically Barack Obama, who made a point during his campaign of stressing both his and his wifes humble origins (which in his case were mostly fiction and in hers are vastly over exaggerated) are so removed from the opportunities both had, not to mention the pain faced by the vast majority of Americans today, is the increase in an oligarchical, class based society, based on income disparity, which has widened dramatically over the last thirty years.  And Obama has no intention of stopping the trend.  While not ostensibly criminal in nature, the growing gaps between rich and poor create many opportunities for exploitation simply based on things like lack of education, or no access to capital, which is actually yet another sign of a white collar criminal society.  Why  Because such wealth disparities are created deliberately by political decisions.  And the ruling elite is as already discussed, just as much a white collar crime driven racket as the companies they are supposed to oversee and regulate.  It is sort of a fox guarding the hen house proposition.   In the days of Prohibition, to make an analogy, only the special friends of the owners could get into the illegal speakeasies..

The Growing Influence of the Banks  Corporate Criminal Culture
There are those who would argue that this is also a direct influence of the growing power of the banks in every aspect of the American economy and politics.  But for the administration, much less Congress to even think of hoodwinking the American public that banking reform means limiting Wall Street Executive paychecks when top executives are actually paid more in bonuses and other compensation, is so cynical, it shows that this administration has no real intention of serious financial industry reform.  Not to mention the disparities between what Wall Street executives get paid vs. the average salary in America.

Given Wall Streets massive wrecking of the global economy, and its sole source of outrageous bonuses being sourced by the Fed, not to mention ruinous legislation and other economic policies that benefit them ahead of everyone else, its hard to argue that they deserve to be compensated as the best and the brightest no matter where they went to school.  Or what gender they are.  They dont seem to be adding much value to society.  In fact quite the opposite seems true when looking squarely at the damage theyve already caused and are arguing strenuously to be allowed to commit some more.  In fact this is the damage, in terms of the life blood that the banking industry has done just to OTHER COMPANIES, in turns of the toll it takes ON THEM.  If the profit margin between Wall Street Banks and other kinds of companies is so disparate, one can only think of the Wall Street Banks as a culture of White Collar Criminal Vampires, sucking, literally, the life blood out of almost every aspect of America.  In other words, serial corporate killers.
                       
Part of the problem to real reform is that those who should be doing it, are loath to do so because they are part of the same elite as those they should be punishing.  And the elite dont like punishing each other, since by definition, the elite seem to think they are above the law.  Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the actions and indeed words of Mr. Obama, even though he stresses his modest roots, who entered Harvard with both minority and legacy advantages, not to mention had a grandmother who worked at a bank to cosign any additional necessary loans (a situation unavailable to almost everyone so his tale of hardship and exclusion is an illusion already) believes that Wall Street executives who are mostly white, privileged men, born to wealth, and graduated from highly expensive private schools (from the time they could walk) and thus is how they get hired in the first place, earn their pay, since they are truly the best and the brightest merely by occupying a cubicle.  Not to mention are his societal equals because they all went to the same exclusive schools.   It is at once both the ultimate hypocritical snobbery, but also a sign of something worse.  The rise of a class in society that thinks it is above the law just because they are rich or have the outer trappings of the elite.

But apart from being extremely elitist and hypocritical, Mr. Obamas attitude is also utterly stupid and ultimately suicidal, hardly the mark of a leader and certainly not that of a President, but rather the actions of a man lining up his next gig when the one in 1600 Penn is over, considering that these so-called Masters of the Universe just caused a global meltdown.  The white collar crime syndicate has their best friend in the form of the highest elected official of the country.

Discrimination
There is also another issue to this tragedy that has not been analyzed or discussed at all, and that is the double discrimination and its implications of the disaster on people who could least afford it.  The first is that the people who were hit the first and hardest were people who were sold products they couldnt afford and didnt understand finance.  Specifically, rather than being the greedy wanna be homeowner of the McMansion that created the subprime disaster, the real seeds of this mess were sewn at places like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two semi autonomous government loaning institutions, set up to allow lower income people long left out of the housing market due to discrimination, and thus with credit that was less than stellar due to a life time of low income paying jobs, no access to education, and all the other problems of entrenched racism, to own their own homes.  The opportunities offered by Fannie and Freddie however, were quickly co-opted however into something else, even within these two organizations, which had a noble intent and mission, but unfortunately within their walls, a white collar criminal mindset had taken root.  The organizations were led by the same kind of business elites that often came from Wall Street (in fact theres a revolving door there too, so there should be no surprise to find financial Al Capones in either place) who then sold products to people who didnt have the education to understand the dangers of the products (i.e. adjustable rate mortgages or ARMS) that they were being sold.  And the people doing the selling knew that.  That is also known as fraud, and white collar criminal activity.

Furthermore, the down the line actions of further chopping and slicing and dicing such risky loans into something else that looked like a Triple AAA security, creating investment portfolios to fail (as was done at Goldman Sachs) and the deliberate movement to quickly foreclose on struggling homeowners who had never been adequately warned (again a tails you  lose-heads I win proposition for the banks) was fueled by a fundamental elitism, if not racism by those who perpetuated these business strategies and sold such products that belied a deep seated philosophy of those who engaged in such activity as  seeing the victims lives as worthless (or not even thinking of them as victims at all) that led to such wanton carelessness with ultimately peoples lives.  Bankers were merely dealing with assets, and products and CDOs and another form of cool new derivative to boast about in the Masters of the Universe culture that rules the world of Wall Street.  And in DC, politicians got to boast about the economic boom.  This racist attitude even carried over into the early days of the bust, when poor people were initially blamed for the meltdown by buying houses they couldnt afford, before the true underpinnings and widespread fraudulent activity of the banks began to surface.

Role Of Government

The Stealing of The Presidential Election 2008  Another White Collar Crime
On top of this, while inevitable, the timing of the crash itself was suspicious as it happened literally two months before a presidential election, and handed the presidency in an increasingly tight race, to Obama.  The fact that Obama never publicly disclosed that the bank that benefitted the most from the Wall Street bailout, 100 cents on the dollar, and the only Wall Street firm to do so, while being his main Wall Street campaign contributor, before voting for the bailout bill, could be called conflict of interest.  It could also be called covering up fingerprints at the scene of a well coordinated government and executive white collar crime.  Of exactly the same kind exhibited by the evil demon CEOs of Wall Street.  And in fact cooked up by both them and their candidate.  Obamas failure to disclose his connection to Goldman Sachs is both unethical and deceptive but not necessarily a crime, although it might violate campaign finance laws.  However it will have an implication on his decisions on how to regulate and clean up the mess as President.  And so far the record is abysmal.  However, seen from a broader perspective, it also implicates the President himself as part of a broader white collar criminal culture and syndicate of the political and corporate elite that leads to widespread corporate criminal behavior if not directly perpetrated by him directly.

The President as White Collar Criminal
But Obamas failure to disclose his connections is far more insidious than even this.  All this administration has done to date, which makes the above theory even more credible, is following the same economic strategies of the LAST administration.  Which is almost no investment in Main Street, lots in Wall Street, despite lip service to the contrary during the campaign of vast amounts of spending on public infrastructure, both in terms of maintenance and patching, but far more important, building out the new carbon free, cleantech infrastructure and economy.  So in other words Obama is rewarding the perps and punishing the victims.  Thats what white collar criminals do.

The graph below shows the boon that Obamas failed economic policies just to help struggling American homeowners are doing to those with mortgages on the brink.  He moved like lightning to save Wall Street, but is letting Main Street sink.  That is a deliberate decision that benefits him both personally and politically, no matter what the pundits say (whos going to fund his reelection for one thing, not to mention his future career), and one that helps people who are already identified as white collar criminals because every repo benefits the banks.  And if The Masters of the Universe are corporate white collar criminals, then anyone who helps them so much is one too.  Particularly if what they consistently do is create legislation and shape policies that create suffering like this for so many home owning (barely) Americans.                                  
                                       
Bushs policies were deliberately to create a housing bubble to mask the fact that there was nothing else left in the economy except consumer spending based on the borrowed equity they took out of their overinflating home worth.  Which was both an illusion, but also an increasing necessity, as the real policies of the Bush administration emerged.  People were often eating into their equity just to make ends meet because they had no choice.  Bush speeded up the outsourcing of jobs started under Clinton, except in a surprise to most, a lot of outsourcing started to go to China as well as India, as well as the beginning of a wave of cheap imports from China began to hit the American shores.  Again, a white collar criminal in action.  Creating literally a corporate criminal culture from the very top.  In politics. business and finance.

This is a collusion of thugs, thieves, bandits and con artists dressed up in their Sunday best.  The ultimate corporate white collar criminals who not only are beyond the law.  They both are the law and they create it.  That is called trickle down, white collar crime.  And it affects almost every part of American society today.  Far from being Change we can believe in Obama is turning out to be Bush III.  Not a retrenchment, which is what reform is really all about.

Obama capitalizes on a very American ideal that embodies competition, and indeed at least pretended during the campaign to embody at the same time a value system of ethics Americans needed, broaching that historical paradox in American culture and society at a time of massive
disenfranchisement with the way things were and need to find real Mr. Smiths to go to Washington.

In fact, he has turned out to be a fraud, which is again a tool of every criminal, but in Mr. Obamas case, because he is an executive, and therefore white collar by nature, this is a white collar crime itself, as it was precisely this image and fraud that helped project him into the White House.

Furthermore Obama even calls himself a tabula rasa upon which people project their hopes and dreams.  Otherwise interpreted this could also be an admission of a man with no morals, a core character trait of a criminal.  In fact, to date, his actions indicate he is a political sociopath who has created the economic means to consolidate control under the brand he is creating, whether he wants to admit it or not  and the reality is that he doesnt (thus the firing of Desiree Rogers, who had the stupidity to project that image in print, while upstaging the Missus.)  Not to mention revealing very clearly, for those who didnt already get it what he had done to help get the president elected.  The fact that the Chicago Crowd as the Administration inner circle is called is also the home of some of the most notorious mobster criminals of the twenties, albeit today they wear designer suits, is merely, in the face of an increasingly criminally minded, corporately run Presidency, no more than every day mobsters, with Ivy League Degrees.  Al Capone and Crew, dressed up in Armani.

But the idea of a branded presidency is extremely dangerous.  And itself an idea created by the capitalistic culture Obama himself came to adopt in an Oedipal rejection of the ideals and directly, economics, espoused by his mother, and those which caused the fights between her and his stepfather, who through aside idealism, and attachment to the native culture and rights in Indonesia, and went to work for the oil companies, as he writes about in Odacity of Hope. (Obama, 2006)

Then again, what does a political or white collar criminal care after all  The psychological profile of course is that of one very close to Hannibal Lector.  A psychological narcissist, who would literally sell his soul to the devil.  He calls it pragmatism, and shifting his position.

Some would call it outright lying to get elected.  Those who are more level headed would take a slightly more measured approach.  There was an old saw that seems particularly appropriate here.  It was said, If you dont stand for something, youll go for anything.  Its clear Obama will go for anything that will benefit him, now or in the future.

The Buying of Congress
While the largest and most powerful intra governmental lobby on Capitol Hill is the one that wears a uniform (DoD), the financial lobby is easily the Goliath of them all.  There are approximately FIVE lobbyists representing the financial industry (from individual firms to trade groups) for every member of Congress.  Thats a lot of PAC money and influence.  And influence it does.  Just the graph above showing the revolving door of key players in the last two democratic administrations shows that alone.

If there is fraud at the heart of Wall Street, along with a culture of white collar criminals, the same exists in the hallowed halls of Capitol Hill.  Unfortunately Americas political elite have given up any pretense of being for the people.  For one thing, with maybe one or two exceptions, literally, they are all millionaires, if not wealthier.  They all benefit from the corporate interests they are supposed to reform and regulate.  That is not only the fox guarding the proverbial hen house.  It is white collar corporate criminal activity that is almost completely invisible to the American public.

And it is these issues, among others, that not only created the crisis in the first place, but seem to indicate that real reform will not take place.  The crash of 2008 did not happen by accident, or in a vacuum.  If Congress had listened to Brooksley Born ten years ago, when she testified in front of them, defying the trifecta of Larry Summers, Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan, who ultimately overcame her and ultimately ruined her career while convincing a not too hard to convince Congress that unregulated derivatives were both dangerous and potentially catastrophic for the economy, the meltdown in 2008 never would have happened.  But Congress had both no idea what derivatives where at the time, and were being actively lobbied (i.e. specifically financially benefitted from supporting the creation of such Frankensteins) and so they didnt listen a decade ago. (D. Dayen, 2010).

So it took another decade for disaster to hit.

Unfortunately.  Given the damage it has created, and will continue to create for years into the future.  Much longer than most people realize.  The damage is that great.  And despite the mea culpas from the powerful, it wont save peoples lives, houses, jobs, or the other damage the elite have caused but are themselves largely shielded from.  Its easy to say Im sorry, especially when your mistakes dont directly affect you.

Elitism  Oligarchy In DC  What School Are You
There are very few places where having the right connections and the right school, and the right parents, count more than Washington.  With bank accounts to match of course.  Even interns have to have the right look and an Ivy League Degree to get in the door.  Monica Lewinsky was hardly poor.

When you look at the backgrounds of who makes the decisions in both the banking industry and the political elite, they are just the same.  Theres a reason that Congress is not going to be a good place to regulate the financial industry this time, just as it wasnt the last time around.  The current stalling of the industry in Congressional hearings, and the apparent lack of Congress to do anything about it, is a perfect example of Congress lack of ability, short of passing draconian reforms (which they wont do because its not in their best interest financially or professionally) to effect real reform.  Not to mention that most of Congress, despite what the public thinks, is financially illiterate.  A decade ago, most of them didnt even know what a derivative was when they let them loose on the world.  They just figured, in the fight described below, that men knew more about finance than the woman who opposed them.  Because in the late nineties, Congress was in a direct position to have stopped this global meltdown from happening in the first place.  It was precisely because of what they did not do and understand, combine with what they destroyed, that caused the current pickle we are in today.

The Warning Bell That Was Disregarded
In the late nineties, Brooksley Born, the highest ranking woman in official Washington with a role in economic policy, battled against the tripartite of Summers, Rubin and Greenspan over deregulated derivatives, before four separate Congressional hearings and publishing a report on the danger of said instruments.  To further give weight to her warnings, at the same time, a hedge fund called LTCM went belly up for its dependence on such instruments, precisely the scenario that Ms. Born had predicted.

Just as they were debating the future of an unregulated derivative world, and destroying Glass-Steagall, Congress was told, in a rather chilling echo from the past, that if LTCM were not bailed out and done so in the space of four days, the future of the entire American financial system was in peril of complete collapse, language that sounds almost exactly the same as the wording used by fellow Goldman Sachs alum Mr. Paulson in the fall of 2008 when the entire financial industry on Wall Street suffered the same fate because of their same reliance on the same kind of financial product.

In the late nineties, however, LTCM was passed off as a fluke, Ms. Burns predictions dismissed and the Real Men in the room dealt with what they claimed was a one off problem.  Again, a sign of such crooked corruption and deceit, one can only call the preps white collar criminals, whether they worked as ostensible public servants (because within a year Mr. Rubin would be gone to the private sector and a bank, Citigroup, he helped create with his tenure in government service and Mr. Summers would depart shortly thereafter, both to very lucrative gigs in the financial world of Wall Street, and both benefitting from their decisions and deals on Capitol Hill just a few years prior.)  If that is not criminal white collar crime, what other term can be used to describe it  Its called setting up the heist...

The deal worked out by Rubin and Co. in the case of LTCM, was that 14 major banks would step in and bail the firm out.  Case closed.  But they also shut down Ms. Born at the same time.  They convinced Congress to strip her of her power, which of course they did.  She resigned shortly thereafter.

But in 2001, the same thing happened all over again with Enron.  Again, Congress did nothing.  This time of course the players in the administration, with the exception of Alan Greenspan were different, but the philosophy was the same.  Nothing was done to awake the watchdogs or regulators.  In fact they were either deliberately further reduced, defunded, or fed additional figurative sleeping pills.

The fact that the same players have shown up again in a new administration promising change that hasnt done anything yet, and is still refusing to regulate derivatives, continues to dally with regulation, does not support the re-introduction of Glass-Steagall, is playing semantics about executive pay caps, and in short refusing to call the industry to heel, is a sign that the administration is both off course and those in power have not learned their lesson yet.

Deregulation
On April 7, 2010, the so-called Cassandra of the Crisis of 2008, and the woman who both relentlessly tried to stop it from happening in the first place only to have her career destroyed, faced one of the men who not only was responsible for the Crash, but also her professional ruin at a hearing on Capitol Hill.

Brooklet Born, former head of the CFTC or Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a dedicated civil servant and lawyer with a star studded academic and government career, faced Alan Greenspan, and declared his tenure at the head of the Federal Reserve an unmitigated disaster to his face.

To those who believe that revenge is a dish best served cold, Ms. Born certainly got her just deserts, a decade late, although those in power had two previous warnings that she was right  one right before they stripped her of her power, and one in 2001 when Enron went belly up.

Today of course, everyone knows she was also absolutely right, although she personally and many other Americans paid a high price for the tone deaf ears of two previous administrations and Congress for the last decade.  Not to mention the appointments and economic decisions being made by THIS administration.  It was under Greenspans watch as head of the Fed that both Sarbanes-Oxley, the Depression-era anti-trust law breaking up the huge banks that caused the Depression of 1929 was repealed, but that unregulated derivatives were set free in the financial world to wreak their future destruction.  It was also under Greenspans watch that the regulatory agencies, particularly those meant to oversee the financial markets and firms, essentially went from merely snoozing at the financial switches during the Clinton years to full blown narcolepsy.

The agencies Greenspan was responsible for overseeing and setting policy for, also failed to prevent the housing bubble (many have argued that his monetary policies caused it, along with Bushs failure to diversify the economy and invest in Americas infrastructure), failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal, and ultimately caused the conditions which led to the economic meltdown of 2008. (Dayen, 2010)

In reality, it was a little more complicated than that, although Washington loves both soap opera and scapegoats, despite the fact that Greenspan certainly played a leading role in all of the above.  As did his successor to the post who Obama just renominated to the post, despite some very big problems with Bernankes performance, even just since Obama took office.  This includes the policy of allowing what many are calling essentially the Fed allowing legal theft by Wall Street of taking riskless, no interest loans to recapitalize itself while making huge profits through its policies.

And the cover-up and lack of transparency of the agency itself, which is coming out in small pieces of information, however shocking.  One of those is the fact that despite the administrations claims that the banks are on the road to recovery, it has come to light, that the too big to fail Wall Street Banks are undercapitalized and hiding those losses, as much as 30-40, from the public. (Kelly, McGinty, Fitzpatrick, 2008)

This combined with lack of any action to restore Glass-Steagall, or break up the mega banks, not to mention a major push for significant wide sweeping financial reform is what led to the President of the Kansas City Federal Reserve, the longest serving, voting member of the policy section of the Fed, and a highly respected member of Americas financial elite, recently coming forward and demanding major change.  When something like that happens, you know that Washington is not doing its job.  When somebody like that, a majorly respected, senior member of the establishment comes forward in such a public way, it is a sign that the culture of white collar crime has taken over government, and that government, along with Wall Street is made up of the same class of white collar criminals who are destroying this country.

Another key player in the meltdown was a man by the name of Robert Rubin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, who became Treasury Secretary under the Clinton Administration and was instrumental in destroying Glass-Steagall, paving the way for the creation of the mega-banks, including Citigroup, a bank he went to work for as chairman of the executive committee after his career as a public servant came to an end in 1999.  His compensation for such arduous work in the private sector was 126 million spanning the next eight years  or 43,000 per day.  To quote Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone Magazine, for explaining what seems like outright bribery if not conflict of interest in this transition, they dont call it bribery in this country when they give you the money post factum. (Housel, 2010).

The Revolving Door
While Barack Obama made a big deal about no lobbyists in government as he ran for the Presidency, there is no doubt about the fact that he has fundamentally failed as President, particularly in even addressing the financial crisis, by who he hired as his senior economic advisors and team to deal with the mess they inherited.  And far from change you can believe in Obama in fact just followed the same pattern as his predecessor.  If not has engaged in duplicity as bad as the Wall Street criminals he says, in his pretty speeches, he is supposedly going to regulate and cut down to size.

In fact, when the crash first happened, in September 2008, the head of the Federal Reserve was a man by the name of Frank Paulson, who also used to be the CEO of Goldman Sachs  a firm long known for its revolving door between top firm officials and top government posts.  At the same time, Tim Geithner was head of The New York Federal Reserve.  To further add to this mix, Goldman Sachs not only was the largest campaign donor of any Wall Street firm to Obamas campaign (a fact he never revealed before voting for the fiscal bailout of the banks, which is a blatant conflict of interest), but Goldman Sachs, of all the banks, was the only Wall Street Firm who escaped unscathed from the crisis  receiving 100 recoupment of their losses.  Later details would reveal not only why (fraud on the part of Goldman Sachs in betting the market would fail, leading to current considerations on the part of the American, British and German Governments to now sue the firm for literally fraud), but also that Mr. Geithner told AIG, the insurer the government also bailed out, to deliberately withhold key details from the public about overpayments the Fed made to all of the Wall Street banks, most notably Goldman Sachs.

The fact that the American government however, is considering a lawsuit of fraud against the firm is a particularly cynical piece of theatre when one examines several key points.

The first is that the revolving door hasnt stopped its just operating under the radar in the administration.  Top financial executives, from particularly Goldman Sachs, now occupy top positions at Treasury and throughout the administration.  This isnt a new trend.  Its one that has been going on since the rise of the Wall Street banks.  Theres always been a strong and ongoing revolving door between the top echelons of financial management and government economic advisors and officials.

And then of course theres Congress and top Agency Officials to consider too.  As this  HYPERLINK httpwww.huffingtonpost.com20100428stewart-rips-senate-for-i_n_554873.html humorous video segment illustrates extremely well, clearly, albeit humorously, (Stewart, 2010) the incestuous nature of the relationships between Congress and Wall Street too (from receiving campaign donations to the revolving door to the next gig when the stint as an elected official is over) often makes real reform hard.  And is another factor contributing to white collar crime, not to mention a culture within both the industry itself and the government that is supposed to regulate it, that encourages such behavior and abuse.  Added to this is the unbelievably slow pace of any kind of financial reform of the banks themselves, including still any debate in Congress on whether or not to regulate derivatives, not to mention the fact that the banks dont even seem to fear Washington, let alone Mr. Obama, to the point that the CEOs of the big TARP recipients on Wall Street, didnt bother to show up in DC to attend a mandatory speech by the President due to weather in late April 2010.

The chart below shows not only the key players in the meltdown and where they came from, stretching in Greenspans case all the way back to Reagan, but most of the key players were actually in government during the Clinton Administration, took advantage of their connections to do a very profitable stint on Wall Street, and are now back, like the revenge of Frankenstein.  Does anyone really believe that reform can happen in this kind of scenario  To quote the much clichd but certainly applicable saw in this case, its like allowing the proverbial fox to guard the henhouse.

It was enabled by the revolving door between the political elite and corporate America, in particular Wall Street, that has always existed, was rampant at certain times in our nations history (as in the Roaring Twenties for example, but also at other times of massive expansion and growth in the economy) but has grown increasingly fluid, as wealth, power, and corporations themselves, from Wall Street to other kinds of verticals have also increased in size, over the past thirty years.  And a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to an ever smaller elite, creating today, the largest disparity between rich and poor since the beginning of the last century.                                

That too, however, is not accidental.  And part of a deliberate political strategy that is driven today by the same motivations as it was a century ago.  Namely Imperialism.  Access to large amounts of capital for Americas largest multinational corporations and allowing the growth of financial powerhouses on Wall Street to create such access, has become a way to cement Americas hold on global dominance.  And has been since America first had a Navy.  It was certainly the strategy of North America as it ventured into the Southern Hemisphere, with varying degrees of success, particularly during the Cold War.  And certainly since the fall of Communism, this has been a critical part of Americas foreign policy strategy of global domination.  A policy that has led to increased privatizations in countries and regions that never would have tried it.  That said there has been a retrenchment from such a straightforward march since the crash, although the UK is apparently still looking to privatize both water and utility rights (a disaster if there ever was one, and again, a perfect place for corporate white collar criminals to flourish, just as they did in the U.S.A.)  Both Enron (which blackmailed the state of California over outrageously raising utility rates) and now Pom Wonderful (who is going to court to protect its backdoor privatization of public water rights in the most important publically held reservoir in water starved Los Angeles) should at least shine a flashing red light to STOP, to the British Government.  Particularly with Goldman Sachs announcing that water is the next oil, and both utilities and water rights apparently selling at a discount because credit is so hard to come by.
                                   
Impact on Victims
The impact on the victims of the mess, from the ever widening income disparity to the transition of America from a Democracy to an oligarchy the ascendancy of a celebrity branded politician who adjusts his position from being a man of the people to an elitist who has more in common with the worst and most corrupt elements of a culture, and in particular an industry he is supposed to reform once in office, to the long term effect on every day Americans lives, has yet to even be properly understood or measured, much less analyzed.  From the long term impact of losing a home, lost years of careers and incomes, lost educations, lost opportunities, and even lost lives due to no health insurance are all collateral damage in one of the worst cases of corporate fraud ever to hit the American and global marketplace.

Legislation
The fact that both the White House and Congress are as much white collar perps as both Wall Street and much of the corporate elite does not bode well for the recovery of the American corpse.  Every single piece of legislation passed since the collapse of the economy has in fact benefitted Wall Street and big business, but primarily the former, since 2008.  That includes
Health insurance reform, which primarily benefits the medical industry and Wall Street.  While a whole paper could easily be written just on this issue, the problem is so bad that a couple of points are worth mentioning.  Medicaid does not cover neurological care, a fact that most people are not aware of, and of course is never mentioned.  While this is data from 2008, its only going to get worse, since traumatic brain injury is the so-called signature wound of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and more vets died thanks to lack of health insurance that year than members in active service. With diseases like Parkinsons, Alzheimers, diabetes, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis falling under the rubric of neurological diseases, and many who have them not being able to afford brand name drugs thanks to their patent extension granted under the new law, not to mention no price controls on either insurance or pharma costs, under the new healthcare reform bill, many consumers will be unaffordable to afford life saving drugs even under reform.  And those who can, will pay more for the privilege in an economy where government provides fewer services because its broke thanks to bailing out Wall Street, salaries are flat thanks to a down economy, massive unemployment, no easy access to credit, and inflation across the board for other goods and services, not to mention a potential VAT tax that Obama is now considering with no additional tax reform on the upper earning income set.

The war economy (Obamas military budget is the largest in history, and Bush II ramped up military spending more than any other President in history), which by definition is the least redistributive and most wasteful economic policy for any country to follow

Obamas continued opposition to the federal legalization of Marijuana, even as it is being tested by the FDA as medicine for a variety of different neurological diseases and it is now legal as medicine in 14 states.  This does not benefit Wall Street or the Medical industry of course, because it is mostly small business that does the growing, selling and distribution.  And you dont need a bank loan from Wall Street to set up a grow farm.

Obamas massive retrenchment from a transition to a clean tech economy that generates clean energy to one where he just authorized continued coal refuse dumping on public land and, in a move not even George Bush could pull off, authorized offshore oil drilling.  The supposedly anti-nuke president also authorized the first new nuclear power plant in the United States in over twenty years, when from even just a political and international relations standpoint this is stupid.  Studies have shown that in trying to convince burgeoning nuclear states to disarm, there is no better policy for the United States to follow than to give up nuclear power, even for peaceful energy generation up, altogether.

Structural Unemployment  There is an argument that the continued high jobless rate is not an unintentional policy.  Small business has always been the driving force of the U.S. economy.  Yet the administration waited over a year to even turn its attention to the issue.  Access even to SBA loans is nearly impossible and the administration has yet to set up its special SBA fund, since the banks (see the graph above) that the taxpayers bailed out, are still unwilling to extend credit back to the same people who saved their own businesses.  Yet at the same time most of America starves, losses their homes, and experiences record high numbers of both unemployment in general and record long term unemployment, not to mention unmitigated suffering which even the administration is admitting will continue for years into the future, both Wall Street and Corporate America are reporting profits, in the former case record profits and bonuses.

Flyover Country Economies  Americas Heartland Victims  The chart below shows exactly who is suffering and where.  The official unemployment rate is an average.  As you can see, in some parts of the country, the pain is much worse.  Yet the administration has not done anything to address this.  Why not

Regulatory Reform In General
The American people deserve a massive overhaul in regulatory reform and oversight in almost every area of government today.  From the FDA that was sued last summer for not properly following its own testing procedures to issues that are far more complicated such as opening up the wireless spectrum to allow market entry for smaller players to enter the clean energy space through wireless distribution of clean energy, not to mention even things like oversight of Medicare, Medicaid and welfare fraud (and there is no bigger fraudulent agency in DC than the Pentagon which is in such dire need of oversight and has never gotten a proper audit because of continual excuse after continual excuse of national security which  Congress always buys) the American people continue to be scammed by the white collar criminals who comprise Americas political elite.  Many of whom, while they personally cannot profit from the legislation they pass, have spouses or relatives, or in some cases friends or political donors, who directly benefit from the legislation they pass or vote for.  Often at the direct expense of the American public.  The victim.

Legal Issues
Appointments
Obamas appointments have caused many to question his true inclination to reform the system or merely obfisticate the issue of reform while paying lip service to it and only continuing the policies of the past.  This includes the promotion of the former deputy of the DEA to now run the agency, despite Obamas promise to stop raiding drug dispensaries in states where marijuana is legal (now 14).  In fact last year, marijuana busts in the first year of the Obama Presidency were higher than in any year under Bush.  The following are just a few of the most disappointing Obama appointments that will continue to perpetuate a government culture of white collar government criminals

To the surprise of many, despite what everyone knows are massive problems and fraud in the Medicaid and Medicare systems, Obama waited a full year to nominate the head of the agency at the federal level to oversee such investigations.  To put this in perspective, just in Texas, which has traditionally one of the, if not the lowest spending per capita per resident on Medicaid per resident of any state of the resident, elected a DA in 2004, who decided to make Medicaid fraud a top priority.  In less than six years on the job, his team has collected more money, thanks to successful prosecutions, than the entire budget spent on the program statewide for X years.

Obama has also appointed the former chief corporate counsel of GE to the leading environmental litigation post at Justice, a highly questionable move when one considers that GE is the largest polluter in America outside of the U.S. government.  And GE is partnered with Google, a presidential advisor and contractor, in cleantech development, including energy generation, which is often not environmentally friendly.  And unfortunately, government agencies find too many ways, particularly for White House friends and corporate campaign backers to manipulate environmental impact data, studies that are used before such projects are launched.

Obamas nomination to ODEP, the Department of Labors special section on people with disabilities is so discriminatory that she officially believes that a population with a 90 unemployment rate (which is 20 of the country), mostly lives in poverty, has no affirmative action, has no proper access to healthcare, housing, literally has lesser contractual value, and even the government discriminates in such blatant ways that less than 1 of the federal workforce has a disability (working on average 2 grades lower, at grade 8 than their able bodied peers) and whos unemployment rate is never recorded in official unemployment figures by the Federal Department of Labor because this population is considered so worthless, and inferior, stated publically that the disabilities community is treated no differently than anyone else.

Obama nominated, and Congress then approved, a man by the name of Andre Davis to the 4th Circuit Court of appeals, who had only once ruled in favor of a plaintiff in an ADA employment case in fourteen years on the bench.  He had also done things like thrown out a plaintiffs case who missed a filing deadline based on an EEOC mistake (which by law he is not allowed to do), and in general has been so hostile to the law, that a supposedly pro disability president, who made such a big deal about Soto Mayers appointment to the Supreme Court because SHE had a relatively mild disability, when most ADA cases never even make it to the first round of court in the first place, much less the Supreme Court, is not only cynical, but actually criminal.

Obamas entire financial team needs to be replaced.  Enough discussion of the people who comprise it has already occurred to repeat their names, but their mere positions of power and decision making in this administration represents not only continuation of further failed policies, not to mention no Change we Can Believe in, and smacks of further corruption, white collar crime and conflict of interest.

And finally, while there are many other issues that could be discussed here, from Obamas continuation of Bush policies which undermine Constitutional rights (including FISA, habeas corpus, privacy, and even rights for people with disabilities) one of the more disgusting Obama adjustments on his position is the continuing raids on pot pharmacies in the states where it is legal, even when he promised not to do so.  Apparently the President thinks hes above the law.  That is the recipe for a white collar dictator.

Deliberate delay and lack of funding for EEOC
The EEOC, the nations top agency responsible for enforcing discrimination laws in the workforce is so overworked and underfunded, not to mention flooded with a historical backlog of cases, that the average investigation time at the moment is over three years from the time a plaintiff files a claim.  The legislative mandate for the agency is that they finish investigations in less than a year.  Not only has Obama waited for over a year to even ask for a minor amount of funding to help this process (i.e. hire new investigators), but his own hiring policies are so discriminatory that he actually had to ask his chief female advisors if he had a woman problem (all three senior women who actually work at the White House) and if there really was the much criticized boys club atmosphere at 1600 Penn.  Of course these women werent going to tell their boss, who also hired Larry Summers to be his chief economic advisor (famous for his comments on womens biological inferiority in all things having to do with math, science and economics).  The President decided to set up a working womens lunch to address the problem anyway.  He attended the first one to kick off the idea.  He hasnt attended since.  And promptly cut abortion funding out of all government sponsored medical insurance programs.  And this genius wonders why he has a woman problem

Despite Long term unemployment that is unprecedented in American history, Congress has decided to cut off unemployment funds at 99 weeks, when it is already clear that many people have already been out of work for much longer than that.  No discussion has even taken place about what to do about that situation.  It was a struggle just to get extension of additional unemployment benefits to 99 weeks nationally in every state.   And this in a country with no social net.  What is DC doing

Jails Over Schools
America has more people in jail than any other country in the world.  We spend three times more to incarcerate the average prisoner than we do to educate the American child (30,000 to 10,000 per annum on average per annum nationally).  Obama hasnt done anything to address this.

Wall Street Over Main Street
As the graphs here show, the economic policies being followed by this administration might be good for Wall Street, but they are both devastating to other industry verticals, those they hire (or cant as the case may be) and ultimately economic recovery.

Meanwhile, Wall Street, who is getting risk free loans from the Fed, is refusing to loan to anyone else, resulting in a lending pattern, even on commercial loans that looks like this (and this is data provided by the Federal Reserve).                                                          
                                                       
This in turn has led to not only an unemployment level far higher than the administration anticipated, but a long term unemployment picture that nobody has any plans on how to fix, with no pressure, or apparently money available to address, that looks like this (and this is a conservative estimate provided by the Department of Labor, which leaves many people out of its count).  Even with the passage of the extended unemployment benefits bill, most economists dont expect the economy to even begin to start adding jobs (outside the administration) for at least three years, and for unemployment figures to remain nationally at close to 10.  Regionally, in some parts of the country, they are close, if do not exceed 1930s era Depression era levels, right at the time when both state governments are cutting back services and apparently so is the Federal Government (except to go fight wars, another very profitable business for Wall Street).
 
This is a brief snapshot of what just the collateral damage is doing in terms of homeowner foreclosures THIS year, 2010, expected to reach 10 million.  Another policy guaranteed to benefit the banks, which profit off of reselling the repos.  Instead of actively putting resources into making sure banks were helping homeowners, the economic team tried to boost the value of homes by increasing FHA first time loan values to over 700K, a policy that only rewards the rich.  Apparently if you have a home and are about to lose it, the government doesnt care about you.

The Aftermath
The implications, two years after the Crash of 2008 are still being revealed.  Nobody knows for sure how deep and wide the damage is or even exactly what was done.  It is most definitely worse than any official report.  And probably worse than even some of the gloomier predictions of some of the more independent but usually quite accurate independent academic economists.  Like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich.  One thing is for sure though.  The beating heart of the American economy is still in ICU.  The banks are still on life support and arguing strenuously to be kept that way.  Most serious economists, and a growing grassroots movement across the country, are calling for their unwinding.  Too Big To Fail also seems to be an awfully good place for White Collar Criminals to hide because of the lack of accountability and oversight in such huge behemoths and the impossibility of oversight and management even within them.  Not to mention regulation of them.

While the current administration has been abominably slow in any kind of financial reform, which does not speak well of this administration, The White House and Congress have finally been pushed to act.

Prevention Methods Remedies
Banking Regulation
Breaking Up The Mega Banks
Massive Auditing of the Financial Industry
Major Reinstitution and Funding of Consumer Protection Agencies and Laws
Many of Obamas appointments to consumer agencies come from corporations with horrific consumer track records, a continuation of Bushs ideology that consumers seemed to exist solely as commodities to be lured into buying and consuming products and services.  The idea of protecting consumers as citizens has almost completely disappeared between legislative acts of Congress, judicial decisions and Executive Order, which is driving America more and more to a monopolistic society where monopolies rule, competition is stifled and market entry tightly restricted.  Not to mention the average American cant afford to sue anymore when their rights are wronged because of the evisceration of legal aid.  And most Americans cannot afford a lawyer, particularly now.  Obamas decision to give immunity to all government manufacturers of swine flu vaccination was much the same thing, particularly as it turned out that the FDA violated its own testing procedures in determining the safety of the vaccine, leaving millions of Americans potentially vulnerable to a dangerous product.

Long Term Reassessment of our economic and political system.  How representative is it to only have millionaires in Congress, who dont understand that if a family who owns their own home, that costs one third of their income or more to just live in, is hit with another twelve grand a year with health insurance costs (plus deductibles), plus the VAT and increased energy costs the administration is pursuing, not to mention other forms of inflation (i.e. caused by speculation on main street) in an environment of what everyone but the administration is admitting is well over 20 unemployment, horrific long term unemployment, drastically reduced wages upon finding re-employment after historically extended times of unemployment, lowered savings (if not completely depleted ones), lowered home values, if not foreclosed homes altogether, stagnant wages, stagnant fixed income for the elderly, and other forms of economic sadism the elite just seem clueless about.  This in the face of obvious displays of wealth and consumption on the internet, TV, the political, media, sports and other celebrity elite, and no way up the ladder of the fabled American dream, and one breeds the grounds that preceded a very fertile ground for Marie Antoinette to, as history claims that she did, say let them eat cake.

Again, while the political class is worried, in Washington Speak, this is solely limited to what the still high and much unanticipated unretrenchable level of unemployment will mean and do to voters behavior come Novembers elections.  Otherwise they couldnt possibly care less.  Their financial futures are assured, as discussed in this very good article explaining the intricacies of what has become the American oligarchy  or the revolving door between the political elite and the corporate one. (Astore, 2010)

But this is actually an issue that goes far further and is much more fundamental than this.  It speaks to the core rot that has been allowed to fester since really the rise in the predominance of an industry, the banking sector, that has literally become the puppet master of not only domestic business, which has its own problems, including still massive discrimination in the workforce, particularly against women and minorities in senior roles and outdated management and infrastructural problems in a shifting business paradigm.   The easiest way to explain this is that its cheaper to sell ones goods as a manufacturer online (wherever one is in the world) through an affiliate program using freelancers who sell said goods through their own e-commerce websites for a commission, on sites that their freelancer workers even build themselves, with a central warehouse to store said product, than to pay for the overhead of distributed storefronts with all the associated overhead and this is a reality faced by stores like K-Mart and Wal-Mart, not to mention everyone else who sells retail or even is a member of the professional class, such as lawyers, who are even being outsourced (for the relatively junior work) who are having to adapt to that reality.  With almost NO HELP from the government.  Whos given the vast amount of taxpayer dollars in terms of grants and bailout money, in the terms of Paul Krugman, although he was referring to the Mega Banks, the Walking Zombies of what used to be corporate America.

As Peter Drucker, the Father of Management predicted so presciently so long ago, over a quarter of a century in fact, a prediction that was widely ignored, we face a reality that has now come true five years after his death.  The modern corporation is dead (quote).

And again, to paraphrase him, it was the banking industry that killed it.  If in fact he was also right that governments themselves are in peril, then who oversees the banking industry

Do White Collar Criminals Really Ever Pay The Price of Their Crimes
Even the current browbeating and the first announcement of the first firm to walk the Perp Walk in the aftermath with the announcement of fraud charges against the first of the bailed out Wall Street Firms by the S.E.C. and subsequent grilling of the Firms executives in Congress, however, smacks of political theatre, particularly given who the Firm is.  As of late April 2010, the most white shoe firm on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, also the Wall Street firm most known for the revolving door between its highest ranks and high political office (like at Treasury and the Federal Reserve) was named for fraudulent activities by the S.E.C.

To add additional fuel to the supposed fire of a government doing its job, three countries, the U.S., Great Britain and Germany, were also considering filing suit for damages.  But this furor may not in fact be quite what it seems and the fallout may in fact be as ephemeral as the products Goldman Sachs created in the first place  simply because there are beginning to be doubts raised, however unbelievable, that while Goldman may have pulled a few financial rabbits out of proverbial Wall Street Hats, they may actually not have committed the legal definition of fraud.  This argument could only have come from a highly sophisticated securities lawyer, again, something that is essential in terms of constructing and maintaining a culture of White Collar Criminal Corporate Culture. (Columbo, 2010)  This is the newest development in a dance that no doubt will go on for months and the fallout is far from over.  And to the extent Goldman will suffer real damage, much less really reform its behavior has yet to be seen.  But just as the fraud or not argument illustrates so handily,  Goldman is so well politically connected (they immediately hired former and subsequently ousted Obama Chief White House Counsel Greg Craig to represent them, which should say something about both the incestuous nature of DC and Goldmans power and sophistication in defending themselves, both domestically and overseas), not to mention they were the main Wall Street backer of the Obama campaign itself, this smacks of political theater.  A sort of mock public hanging to appease a furious public that ultimately wont mean anything.  The Congressional hearings so far have been ludicrous.  Plus one has to remember Congress also has skin in the game on this issue too.  There are five financial lobbyists for every member of Congress, which means PAC funding for re elections.  Wall Street, followed closely by the Department of Defense, is the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill.

That is why language is still included about allowing any kind of derivative to be unregulated is still in some versions of financial reform bills.  And why the discussions about capping Executive Wall Street pay are so disingenuous, again to pretend that real discussions about reform are taking place, when in fact this is a farce to mollify a public that in general does not know that most Wall Street bankers, and certainly executives, make most of their money every year not from their salaries, but from bonuses, stock and options.  A fact that is never discussed, explained or even brought up as an issue to also be limited if real reform is to take place.

Are we to evolve from citizens to consumers at it seemed we were and this administration seems still consumed with trying to do, or do we finally put our feet down and say no more

The banking industry is just the culmination and concentration of rot at almost every large corporation in America today, as this graph below demonstrates very well.

While not every CEO may make as much as Jamie Dimon or John Mack, it was Peter Druckers idea that the average CEO should make no more than 20 times what the average worker made if for no other reason than to ground them, and to insure that the company both reinvested in itself and its community and that there was not this huge socioeconomic division that exists today between workers and management.  That disparity breeds a host of socioeconomic issues, from race, gender and class discrimination to a feeling that if one is a so-called Master of the Universe or a rising star, the law does not apply to you.  And that ethics and rules somehow apply to someone else.

Peter Drucker called himself a corporate anthropologist.  He saw the corporation as a vital part of a society that surrounded it.  He wanted to understand how it worked so he could understand how it affected the rest of peoples lives.

The kind of corruption and rot we have seen with the failure of government, large business, in particular the realization as one journalist finally put it Theres Fraud at the Heart of Wall Street, but many other places as well in American life, from other corporations to the family dinner table, where such values have seeped, is the ultimate price we all pay for the rise in power, not to mention criminalization of Wall Street.

The only way to combat this is to change the structure of our society, which ultimately, whether politicians and the general public have no choice in, whether its now or five years from now.  It wont be much longer than that simply because the course America is taking is fundamentally unsustainable from so many levels it will collapse.  As it already has begun to.  Sustainable economics is one answer.  A re-evaluation of our morals and the role of the individual in a civil and civic society is another.  Consumerism as a way of life and value system is a value that cannot and will not be able to sustain itself, simply because people cannot afford to consume products if they are out of work and homeless.  And consumer consumption, based on the assumption of ever increasing economic growth and income, has driven the American economy and theories about economics since the 1950s.  It is for that reason that we have seen the trends in the laws, the development of the economic philosophies, the increase in greed, not to mention consumerism (at least in America), at the expense of everything else.

As that falls away out of necessity, something new will emerge from the ashes.  We may not become the next Depression Generation, something vaguely hinted at by Paul Krugman in his book Depression Era Economics, but the way we were has gone forever.

Its just a matter of time before those most insulated from that reality catch on.

In the meantime, the average American citizen, depending on how insulated they were before the crash, will feel the heat, more and more intensely as time wears on, but even they, unless they are extremely well off, will not bear the brunt of this storm unscathed (in fact many have already lost everything with isolated incidents like the Madoff scandal).  Ultimately the socioeconomic and psychological scars of the white collar crime and fraud at the heart of both Wall Street and ultimately much of corporate America if not the rot of values and ethics that lie at the heart of American culture itself, a result of the absorption through media and other visual encouragement to consume in a capitalist economy, will not remain what they were before the crash.

And out of the ashes will arise the formation of something different. Perhaps a more traditional society.  Perhaps the form of a more traditional American one from the past.  Perhaps something new.  Perhaps a hybrid.  But the scars of the Crash of 2008 are so deep, widespread and cut to the core of every part of life for almost everyone on the planet in some way, that this event will change both our lives forever, and the way we deal with the cause of it in the first place.