Soap, Children and War

I was watching a story on CNN on Saturday morning about a guy who, in his travels, came upon a group of children who's survival rate was horrible. From volunteer medical staff he learned that part of the problem was a lack of soap for hand washing. In fact, the kids simply did not wash their hands. He decided to do something about it and organized a group of hotels to give him all of the bars of soap barely used by guests. Those were melted, reformed, cut into bars and given to the children who had to be taught how to properly wash their hands. The project is now quite large and, according to the story, has made a difference in the health of many kids.

This story was followed by one on the Afghanistan war. The correspondent noted that we are spending $2 billion (that's a "B" folks) a week on the war. It also pointed out that our supposed ally in the region, Pakistan, had arrested five people who assisted us in locating Bin Laden. This is the same Pakistan who receives American financial support.

A third story, later in the day, concerned street kids; kids sold into the sex trade; kids abandoned by everyone - how they got there; what they did just to eat....just to survive.

All of this on the day before Father's Day.

It seems to me that somewhere along the way we've gotten our priorities mixed up. I don't care if you're a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or you don't even bother to vote because you are so fed up with the political landscape - you can not have watched the stories without a real concern about how we spend our fortune.

Where is the public outrage ?

A week does not pass without another revelation of unsavory activity in the mortgage mess and the subsequent near collapse of our economy. The latest is revealed in a new book, "Reckless Endangerment", by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. Ms. Morgenson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning business reporter and columnist for the NY Times. Mr. Rosner is an expert on housing finance and, according to Katie Benner, a writer/reporter for CNN Money, he was one of the first to question the lax lending standards in mortgage origination ["Prophets of the Credit Crisis", July 17 2008]. The book continues to show us how absolute greed permeated the major Wall Street houses and how their activity was facilitated, in part, by the head of Fannie Mae, James A. Johnson, who personally earned about $100 million. The authors write that Johnson and his successor, Franklin Raines, channeled some of their profits to members of Congress via campaign contributions and patronage positions to relatives and former staff. Goodness gracious me - Congress hasn't done anything to punish anyone. Go figure!

Where exactly did Fannie Mae get the mortgages they packaged into trash securities? Why from Country Wide Financial. You remember them - no income, no job, no problem - and their overly tanned leader, Angelo Mozilo who had the audacity to say that he told his people that it appeared credit standards were being ignored. Naturally that was the end of that- didn't want to cut off the hands that fed him.

Last week, HBO premiered a new movie "Too Big to Fail" based on the best selling book of the same name by Andrew Ross Sorkin. If you missed it, I'm sure HBO will be showing it again. It's a must see if you want a look at how inept our regulators were leading up to the disaster and how the main characters - Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner - were flying by the seat of their pants in trying to prevent a total melt down. Lehman Brothers, an icon on Wall Street for so many decades, is run into the ground by the greed of it's leaders. Their cash position is so perilous that they will not be able to open their doors on Monday morning. What does our group do, spend the weekend trying to get someone to buy the firm. When no one will do so - big surprise - the firm fails. Let's not forget the backgrounds of this gang of three.

Paulson was the head of Goldman Sachs beginning in 1999 when some of the most toxic deals were being created. Goldman received hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and, no doubt, Paulson was handsomely rewarded through his firm's ill-gotten gain.

Geithner was the head of the NY Fed at the time. If you honestly believe that he did not know what was happening on Wall Street at that time, I have a couple of thousand shares of a penny stock I bought twenty years ago that I'll sell to you quite reasonably if I can find the stock certificate. Tell you what, if he really did not know that trash was being packaged and sold as prime rib, he was the most inept Fed head of all time. And now, he's the Secretary of the Treasury.

Bernanke came from academia to become a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in 2002. In 2006 he became the Chairman and holds that office today. It's difficult to blame any part of the disaster on Bernanke. But, you have to wonder how such an educated man and respected economist failed to see the tide rising before it crashed over the sea walls.

And so, lets look at who has had to pay for their misdeeds. That would be NO ONE!  Not one major officer of any of the Wall Street firms involved; not the yo-yo at AIG who allowed his firm to issue guarantee after guarantee against any losses in the trash securities; not one regulator who knew or should have known what was going on and looked the other way. Instead we allowed Paulson and Geithner on the bailout team. Perhaps that wasn't so bad. With their intimate knowledge of exactly how fraudulent these securities actually were they probably knew all of the players and how to minimize their damage. I know I said this before but it bears repeating - Timothy Geithner is still the Secretary of the Treasury.

Congress isn't going to do anything about this. They would much prefer spending their time at each other's throats instead of doing the people's work. We are completely to blame. We put them there. A half hearted attempt at a financial reform bill squeaked through so watered down it will do little to prevent the same thing or something very similar from happening again. And when it does, we'll hear the same BS we heard this time around - I had no idea that was going on. I really thought the market would police itself.

Folks, unless we all get so enraged by the lack of action against the players who are - make no mistake about it - responsible in good part for where the economy is today, nothing will be done. Want to know why employment is so difficult - look no further. I'm not a tea-party person but maybe that kind of engagement is what's necessary to force something to be done. Maybe those of us who are members of AARP need to get our organization behind this effort. If nothing else, and you agree with me, post the link to this blog entry on your Facebook page or, if you Tweet, send it that way. This needs to go viral and......

someone other than us needs to pay.