If we choose to continue a stagnation of political will, American’s children of the 21st century and beyond may not have to worry about riches that could crush their human spirit. Instead their children and children’s children may spin around in the summer’s fields and recall their ancestor’s macabre poems.
Ring around the bank moats,
Pockets full of bank notes;
Cash’s crashes,
We all fall down.
Or perhaps America could get on with cleaning up the rats’ droppings before they bring the plague of financial destruction upon us. Unlike the poor inhabitants of feudal villages that took for granted their lives had to be shared with pestilent rodents, we do not have to share ours with diseased vermin of Wall Street. We know the right course is to restructure the banks. In 1932, FDR restructured the industry in 100 days after his election. Today, we watch dumbstruck and carry our financial, job and mortgage dead to the front door steps for our law officers to cart off, while the ongoing financial shenanigans of these disease bearing rats continues to plague us after 3 years of stagnation that seems to have no end in sight.
Certainly, one can argue that the right thing for Hank Paulson to have done was to save the banks from utter destruction by massive injections of capital in 2008 when public officials had no clue the depth or breadth of the calamity before them. Yet now after three years, can we honestly say that we do not know the extent of the devastation, and if so, why? Does it make sense to sit helplessly by watching the banks trying to put out this monetary wildfire that has swept through their industry without trying to carve out a safe zone of financial capitalism that can survive when the whole thing comes crashing down? Rather than keep too big to fail banks in place while they continue to falter and continue to fail in their needed support of an economic recovery, perhaps America should once again act paternally to break up the banks and cull out the ones that have healthy balance sheets to help them to grow under the tighter restrictions of reinstituted banking regulations.
For those banks that continue to bleed with poor capitalization after such revitalization, they can continue to wallow in a sidelined non-lending stagnant existence or die as America gets on with its historical culture of survival of the fittest. There is no need for America to wait for the next financial virus to scourge all of Western Culture when we can instead systematically yet expeditiously put our financial house in order.
Clif Carothers
Job Voucher Plan 