As if this hasn't been the operating principle all along. This get rich quick by any means necessary culture...so that I can have my house featured on Cribs and on the Rich and The Famous, and buy my teenage daughter a Bentley for her sixteenth birthday and have rented tigers for my son's birthday. Invest $1.00 and make $1000.00 on it. Anybody remember Hillary Clinton remarkable return on her $1000.00 investment which turned into $100,000? Anybody here remember Halliburton? Madoff? What do we think Hedge Funds are? All of these companies skimming off the profit and giving it to their top people and then come a-begging?
The Speculator as Hero indeed. You mean the Speculator as Highway Robber! Cramer is back on TV. Yes, that Cramer, even after the damning clip. The How to Fleece the Public by manipulating stock prices clip. On my way from MSNBC to CNN I saw Maria the Money Honey discussing Apple stocks and I literally cringed. CNBC should be banned from discussing stocks. Banned! So now we want to dump all of this in Obama's lap. "Obama is weak." screamed one poster. Really? All of this corruption started under his watch, did it?
Let me share something with you. Let me tell you how the system forces you to become corrupt and kills your idealism and leaves you asking, "integrity? What the hell is integrity?"
A couple of Citigroup's subsidiaries, Primerica and CitiCorp (CitiBank), advocate that their insurance agents and financial analysts encourage people to re-finance their home mortgages with them. They ask that you tell homeowners that they should not have mortgage companies pay their property taxes and insurance for them. "You should do that for yourself." Homeowners are to be told. "Rather than have these companies invest your money and keep the profit for themselves, you invest it for yourself. We will put your money in our money market fund and you watch and see how your money will work for you and not for these companies. After-all, do you really thing that they want to do you a favor? No. The only reason they collect this money from you is because it benefits them." And now the closer, "Money either works for you or against you. Let us make your money work for you." Sounds good, doesn't it?
Money Market Funds are usually relatively safe. BUT, there is the AGGRESSIVE GROWTH FUND which is tied to the stock market and guess what? As a financial analyst, the only way you can earn money from doing these transactions is to steer your clients money - you know that money to pay her/his property tax and insurance - into Aggressive Growth. Yes, you are literally forced to choose between your pocket and your idealism/integrity. You want to guess where the overwhelming majority of these financial analysts choose to put homeowner's money meant to be safeguarded so as to take care of something as important as property taxes and insurance?
So now the media is going into orgasmic frenzy. They want a full accounting from Obama and his administration as to what he/they knew and when. Laughable! See how they are all up in arms about the AIG thieves and slowly but surely, and ever so cleverly, it is now a story about Obama and what he is not doing. Didn't see this outrage about Cramer and CNBC. Let us face it people, we have lost our moral compass. It boggles the mind to even think about our many scandals. Keith Olbermann's "Bushed" or Rachel Maddows, "Wash, Rinse, Repeat" are only the tips of the iceberg.
And yes, before you even ask, I am an Obama zombie (if you want to call me that) and I resent like hell people dumping all of this muck on him. It is not fair.