These Are Not Accidents

The financial crisis was not an accident or series of accidents, as has been proclaimed by its progenitors and the involved industries and even much of government itself. It was the logical outcome of releasing large corporations from any sane regulatory restraint, and worse, in many cases writing new regulations specifically allowing and encouraging extremely risky behavior.

With other people's money. And they got to keep all the profits. Personally.

Then there was the housing bubble, an intrinsic part of this grand theft of unsurpassed proportions, actively inflated by the Bush administration from pretty much day one of operations. The giant financial corporations and their many ill-spawned children were directly involved in creating a mortgage morass that now has companies foreclosing on homes they have no legal claim to, using an evidence free bald assertion process in letters to homeowners and the few courts in which they've been challenged to prove their "rights."

Which leads the ever spot-on Paul Krugman to note and ask:

The accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom dispelled the myth of effective corporate governance. These days, the idea that our banks were well capitalized and supervised sounds like a sick joke. And now the mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective contract enforcement — in fact, the question is whether our economy is governed by any kind of rule of law.

In fact, it is governed by a kind of rule of law, the law that the rich and powerful create on the fly and assert behind the cover of armies of lawyers trained in the arcana of the regulations these same corporations wrote in rooms just off the floor of Congress in the late 1990s and all of the 2000s. And Krugman is also correct when he talks in that same cloumn about the essential character of every Obama response to the banks, mortgage companies and other criminal organizations and their leaders - utter deference in all things.