USA's War against the Dollar

In this morning s post on "Some Assembly Required",  Mr. Michaelson's headline states that "The more money an American makes, the less actual work he or she does."

This shouldn't actually be news, as any new-hire in any business rapidly finds out. As a teller in the late '70's, it was hard not to notice all the Bank officers sitting on the platform, the assistant manager blowing bubbles while we counted our morning banks and prepared our cash for quick disbursement.

I never had a problem with this state of affairs. It seemed that although we did the actual brute labor for the branch, most of the risk was lodged in the responsibilities that came with being a loan officer, branch manager, and even new accounts rep. If it were true that everyone was promoted to their level of incompetency, the corresponding risk that one would lose ones job rose accordingly.

Of course, back then there was no competing industry in the shadows, hiding in doorways to say "Pssst", open their coat and show the wares they could offer at a steep discount to those of the bank. So the bread-and-butter revenue stream from home mortgage loans was sacrosanct and unassailable. Who else would offer a loan that took 30 years to be paid off?  Assuming that kind of stability required a Federal backstop on which no other industry could depend.

Meanwhile the hegemonic ascendency of the US was imperiled by a regime that had heretofore been content to do our bidding, as the Carter administration desperately tried to negotiate the release of the hostages taken in Iran.  Unbeknownst to whom the Reagan/Bush campaign was negotiating with them not to release the hostages until after the election, so as to ensure Carter's defeat.

That the grandson of President Carter should be the one to release the videotaped footage that would bring about the defeat of the man attempting to portray himself as another Reagan has a rather poetic ring.

And when you then consider, that the Republican candidate sits in his self-proclaimed, deserving center of the very shadow banking industry that brought about the  transformation that changed banking from the staid, conservative, cautious, unexciting business it had been for most of the century into the wild-west center of Ponzi finance and fraudulently-issued paper it has now become, it's hard for the blood not to boil as he exults in his ascendancy over the "moochers" and "entitled" electorate he wishes to place him in a position to complete their transmogrification into utterly dependent loan-burdened serfs.

Because, as the financial collapse demonstrated, the risk for which the banking industry's officers were compensated in reward for their stewardship of financing the housing industry, taken over by such companies as Bain Capital, was a risk that the entire nation was forced to swallow, yet it was only the privileged elite who were allowed to sit in their positions of entitlement and mooch in grand style off the actual work of the populace over which he now feels is his rightful reward to Lord over.

That the political Party most responsible for destroying the risk/reward relationship between position and accountability should nominate a party who considers the victims of that industry to be deserving of nothing but the utmost deprivation and Russian-like abandonment to their fate, all while running his campaign on a platform of fiscal responsibility, is testament to the total abandonment of justice for the smug, elitist mantra of "just Us".