We have a huge problem in the U.S. assigning value to work and accountability for mistakes.

by CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)

Today’s New York Times will infuriate you for many reasons but the most important is this one: we have lost all sense of common sense matrices for assigning value for a job well done or strict accountability for a job handled poorly. The American bankster is a prime example of this.

In this article entitled Banks Prepare for Bigger Bonuses, and Public’s Wrath we learn that just over a year since the October 2008 financial meltdown on Wall Street which was caused by Wall Street bigshots and for which you and I are still hurting in so many ways, American banksters are about to receive bonuses as big as they ever got.  That is a lack of accountabilty to the American people who bailed these institutions out with tax money. And once again American patricians are above accountability for their actions.     

This shows the raw power of the Patrician class in awarding itself bonuses resting on the foundation of a public money bailout from a disaster that they themselves created.  Nobles have not acted this way, with this much open and arrogant avarice since the Middle Ages.  Is it time to force a sort of fiscal Magna Charta onto the petty kings of Wall Street?  Is it time to demand an accounting from the robber barons, the banksters, the market manipulators that have caused the working class so much pain?

In an editorial entitled Are They Really? we learn that non-accountability is something of an expectation among our Wall Street elite.  They are above accountability.  Now what should we do about that?  A public hanging just doesn’t seem to get to the point.  We need that money back in public coffers. How do we get that done?

And it is not just banksters that are pissing us off.  Government is not doing so well either on our Hit Parade list of songs we wish we had never learned.

Maureen Dowd has written an Op Ed piece showing her extreme disatisfaction with Obama’s leadership style relative to crises management which affect every American entitled Captain Obvious Learns the Limits of Cool . I think it is a safe bet that Obama has lost her vote.

But the Times ultimately winds its way back to Wall Street today in assigning responsibility for American fiscal irresponsibility.

Frank Rich has written an Op Ed piece entitled The Other Plot to Wreck America in which we find that American banksters are actually much more of a danger to us than any terrorist ever could be. Here is an excerpt:

“What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.”

Wow!

And finally here is a chart outlining the losses in casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past year.  The piece is entitled A Year in Iraq and Afghanistan .  There are losses of all kinds everywhere.  That much is plain.  And the working class is bearing the full brunt of those losses.  The Patricians who caused all of this are above the pain.  And they know it.  So they have no reason not to cause it again…and again…and again.

We seem to be losing a lot of ourselves everywhere.  Now what do we do to stop the bleeding of all types of national resources across the full scope of the American psyche?