Deregulated idiots

"Oh my god," a year ago, that's all we could say. Those lucky enough to have substantial savings or retirement accounts looked up to see 50 percent missing. The value of our homes dropped just as quickly, everything we had planned on suddenly did not appear to be real. The headlines were filled with Ponzi schemers who soaked gullible millionaires for billions. The world, as we knew it, was in deep trouble and everyone was fretting over it.

Well, everyone who does not receive a government paycheck that is. Barney Frank pranced around Washington proclaiming an end to years of under regulation and a lack of any real policing of Wall Street and the investment community that had laid waste to the world economy. Things were going to be different the congressman from Massachusetts lisped.

Things did get different. A new president was elected, a lot of talk (and by a lot of talk I mean lots and lots and lots of talk) was used to describe in detail how new laws, regulations and government oversight was going to bring about the change we need. Almost a year later, nothing has changed, no massive new regulation, no police force roaming the money pit of Wall Street, nothing. Even sugar plum Barney Frank, who just last year was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal along side of Clint Eastwood in Brokeback Mountain.2, has grown strangely quiet. Oh sure, some days he throws a fit and screams from his perch on basic cable TV that his committee is working on something, will do something, something will come of all of this.

In the meantime, banks that just last year were too big to fail have grown even larger. Which means of course that they are even more likely to fail and then more desperate to seek public funds to keep them afloat because, really when you think about it, they really are too big to fail. More banks have been closed and taken over by the federal government and while the stock market is back up and running, there are plenty of economists who continue to shake their collective economic heads and wonder how that is happening while homes are being foreclosed and businesses search for new bankruptcy codes to hide behind.

Yet these is always a sense of possibility in the United States. While some states threaten to succeed and others teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, there is always a sense that this too shall be dealt with, we will develop news cars that will run on air and toothpaste, we will rebuild New Orleans and Detroit, we will be able to get on a train in New York and arrive in Los Angeles in 17 minutes. We are a hopeful and optimistic people. We landed on the moon, we developed an automobile industry a generation after moving out of caves, we created foods that not only have no nutritional value, but are fat filled and in some biochemical fashion they make you hungry after eating them. We can do anything, except regulate the industry that has been driving this society since 1776.