I don't think it's a grand conspiracy, as Skeets does, but rather a *system* by which insiders have bought and paid for a wink and a nod and can then profit enormously by playing the game. It's been a long evolution to where everything is bought and paid for. It started long before Bush, but he certainly put the final nail in the coffin by appointing so many insiders into the regulatory positions. For housing, the fervent desire to pump up the system resulted in no questions asked for years by the Fannie/Freddie misfits.
Just a game, and once the table was rigged, all sorts of NEW participants arrived on the scene and immediately began exploiting the setup for their own personal gain, e.g. massive bonuses for cranking out a gazillion mortgages regardless of what was going on. Soon, individuals and groups (within banks, or the entire mortgage company) figured out where nobody was looking and just looted like there was no tomorrow.
It's no different than when there is an event that puts regular people into a situation where they realize that they can likely commit crimes and not get caught. If there's that belief that they will get away with it, and they see others doing it, many more make the jump and do it to. This is loosely known as anarchy, and I'm thinking in particular about when the power goes out and emergency services (namely police) are elsewhere, and looting and worse happens. Katrina is a good example, with rape, murder, robbery, and looting rampant.
Is that part of human psyche left behind by social evolution long ago, or always lurking and ready to spring forth? I think not far behind at all, contrary to popular myth. The mortgage fraud I think is in that category, where some (not all, probably not even a majority) figured out they were *likely* to get away with crimes for profit, and so just DID. Financial looters, they were, who realized the power was out, that the police were sleeping (they had the big criminal, Martha Stewart, to parade in front of the masses), and so they could do as they pleased.
The bigger crime to me is that it's been two years since the meltdown, and this is just coming to light *now* ??? We've handed hundreds of billions of dollars of bonuses to these *same* crooks. That is simply incredible -- somebody needs to invent a new word that means "crony" except 100x more egregious.
At least we get to choose who will be our Lord of the Flies. |
