Free market guys have values not vision. The market is blind, a technical onslaught driven by demand, ever widening, ever grasping and integrating technology, comfort, ease, perks, products. Vision? Please.
There is one exception: a pervasive, all-encompassing sense of entitlement, a right-of-wealth, a celebration we call greed, parsed as “I-did-not-run-that-company-whose-filings-I-signed-off-on-except-retroactively”–although I was paid $100K a year for less work than a day laborer. That vision has put billionaires in the Russian senate, the Saudi Royal family paying itself billions in salary monthly, and is the raison d’etre for Mitt’s offshoring 23 accounts.
So on a bad trading day, JPMorganChase loses $6 billion (and climbing!); HBSC launders $1 billion or more for drug cartels and scrubs cash for terrorists; a drug company pays a $3 billion fine for pushing dangerous and untested usages; financial firms settle mortgage improprieties for $26 billion. The top 100 federal contractors received $276 billion in contractors last year–and paid $25.3 billion in penalties.
Have lunch with a banker, David. Ask not about a vision, but about the numbers. Peek at the GOP-driven vision of the balance sheet. See record profits and record unemployment? I see a vision of a government and an economy made smaller, by growing corruption and greed.
