http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM&feat…

And Barney Frank insisted, among others, that no oversight was needed when during hearings that turned political stereotyping on it's head, Republicans were demanding oversight while Democrats claimed the system was fine and didn't need it. (back in 2003 I believe).

Truth matters. We can't stick to the tired, partisan narrative that this whole mess is due to greedy, deregulating Republicans while turning a blind eye to the myriad Democrat do-gooders who interfered in free markets by requiring dangerous lending practices. We can't fix things until we're willing to look at the WHOLE rotten picture.

dr.e

The report documents a dozen distinct deregulatory moves that, together, led to the financial meltdown. These include prohibitions on regulating financial derivatives; the repeal of regulatory barriers between commercial banks and investment banks; a voluntary regulation scheme for big investment banks; and federal refusal to act to stop predatory subprime lending.

“The report details, step-by-step, how Washington systematically sold out to Wall Street,” says Harvey Rosenfield, president of the Consumer Education Foundation. “Depression-era programs that would have prevented the financial meltdown that began last year were dismantled, and the warnings of those who foresaw disaster were drowned in an ocean of political money. Americans were betrayed, and we are paying a high price — trillions of dollars — for that betrayal.”

“Congress and the Executive Branch,” says Robert Weissman of Essential Information and the lead author of the report, “responded to the legal bribes from the financial sector, rolling back common-sense standards, barring honest regulators from issuing rules to address emerging problems and trashing enforcement efforts. The progressive erosion of regulatory restraining walls led to a flood of bad loans, and a tsunami of bad bets based on those bad loans. Now, there is wreckage across the financial landscape.”

The report and excerpts are available at: “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America” at: <http://www.wallstreetwatch.org/soldoutreport.htm>

The corporate lawyers who won the legal right for corporations to be treated as if they had the same rights as individuals.

The deregulators: Reagan, Clinton, etc that allowed the……

The bankers and wall street: to package hedge funds without regulation, allowing the repeated reselling of something not worth the business descriptions they contained.

Alan Greenspan era: deregulator with a soft naive spot=== expected bank presidents to be honest>???????

The Global movement: which claims all bets are off vis-a-vis loyalty/experience, and the death of unions. An opportunity for employees of the most far flung sweat shops in the world to work for the USA……………for peanuts, while we lay off our own.

The rise of Corporate America as big and powerful as any government…………….complete with lobbyists and pay offs to politicians.

The demise of unions and workers whose salary has not gone up in decades, and in a shrewd move to satisfy the feminist movement, corporations simply absorbed female workers, still underpaying them, but getting two for one, as no longer would males be paid a salary sufficient to raise a family.

The television networks who as news creators pander to Wall street, unbridled capitalism, and who in the last presidential elections blatantly advocated making sure the upper class were taken care off. I'm thinking of the Stephanopoulos/Gibson interview, Fox news.

Talk show hosts like Limbaugh, who have destroyed words such as “liberal” or “socialism” for ever and who now appears to be the mouth piece for the Repubs………..

The rise of secrecy in government culminating in the last Bush government passing laws that will disallow us from knowing so much of what they did during those years.

And they all belong, are member of a certain club, as George Carlin once said famously, and I am not allowed to be a member of that club, and will never be, which I mean I decide nothing and should not kid myself as to the degree of empowerment I actually have.

Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west, near Hawtch-Hawtch,
there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee-Watcher. His job is to watch…
is to keep both eyes on the lazy town bee.
A bee that is watched will work harder, you see.

Well…

He watched and he watched. But in spite of his watch,
that bee didn't work any harder. Not mawtch.
So then somebody said, “Our old bee-watching man
just isn't bee-watching as hard as he can.
He ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher!
The thing that we need is a Bee-Watch-Watcher!”

WELL…

The Bee-Watch-Watcher watched the Bee-Watcher.
He didn't watch well. So another Hawtch-Hawtcher
had to come in as a Watch-Watcher-Watcher!
And today all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch
are watching on Watch-Watcher-Watchering-Watch,
Watch-Watching the Watcher who's watching that bee.
You're not a Hawtch-Watcher. You're lucky, you see.

(I have had the same question in dreams, who is the watcher that watches the dreamer?). . .but in the question you pose it is much more a phenomena in a collective nightmare i do believe. . .