Value: A House of Cards

It's really depressing and infuriating to realize that the economic crisis in our country--and the rest of the world--is largely due to unregulated and greedy decisions made at the upper levels of our financial institutions. The right likes to scream that our problems are all the result of ordinary Americans buying homes they couldn't afford. Yeah, many Americans bought more than they could afford; they were sucked in by easy credit, by a culture based on consumerism, and by unscrupulous lending practices. Then their mortgages were bundled into "assets" that were sold over and over, good mortgages bundled with shaky mortgages. The financial institutions handling those mortgages didn't even know their real worth. I get the impression the value was all made up. Recent news articles suggest just this. For a good explanation of the the mess at A.I.G. (American International Group)--which, we, the taxpayers, are bailing out--read Joe Nocera's article, "Propping Up a House of Cards," New York Times, 27 February 2009.(very thankful hat tip to Steve Benen) This once triple-A rated institution is now reporting "the largest quarterly loss in history" and is "most crippled of all the nation’s wounded financial institutions."

What have we seemed to value in this country? Not real work--but the ability to "game the system" in order to line one's pockets with "lucrative fees... risk-free money." But now the system has crashed, and the CEOs of these companies--and their well-compensated underlings--now depend upon the ordinary American taxpayer to foot the bill. These were our Titans; these were our gods: the great moneymakers of Wall Street, the captains of finance. And now we have to prop them up, little stick figures, on our own little handmade altars.