Income inequality in the US

This video is an incredibly well done factual look at how income and wealth are being monopolized by the wealthiest 1% in the US.  You owe it to yourself to see it.

Wall Street Whimpers

If you had to pick out some of the principal bad guys in the financial meltdown, S&P would be high up on the list along with all the other rating agencies.  Their negligence allowed the Wall Street crooks to unload billions of toxic assets on the entire world, and finally the Department of justice is proclaiming they'll sue, along with a few State Attorney generals.  In January 2011, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission called the agencies "essential cogs in the wheel of financial destruction" and "key enablers of the financial meltdown."  The Senate panel released internal documents showing how Moody's and S&P failed to heed their own internal warnings about the deteriorating mortgage market.
 
The self-serving response by S&P is enough to make me angry.  They ought to be in prison by now.

Felons at large

I happened to see a news article about the Securities Exchange Commission getting about $300 million from JP Morgan for misrepresenting the toxic securities they were peddling before the 2008 crash, while neither admitting nor denying any wrongdoing!  Is this a victory for you and me, or a massive failure of the rule of law?  It is essentially a guilty verdict, but nobody went to jail for felonies that have wrecked our lives and our economy.  It gets worse, the SEC and the DOJ (Department of Justice) are just a jumping off spot to land a lucrative job in Wall Street defending the felons they once pretended to prosecute, or lobbying for deregulation.

The sad story plays out no matter which party is in power, it seems Democrats and Republicans don't like crooks, except the very rich ones that contribute to their campaigns.  They did finally get Bernie Madoff, but that was after he had blown billions and admitted his guilt, so there was no way the government could screw that case up.  The subsequent trial revealed that the SEC should have known he was a crook years earlier, in fact they had evidence as early as 2000, but they ignored it.  See the Wikipedia article on the subject.

We the people seem to be cynically resigned to the situation.  There have been films such as Inside Job that document the criminality, and Rolling Stone has been sounding the same alarm here and again here, but nothing changes, and that'll continue unless the victims turn up the heat.  I think it's time to clean up Wall Street and get the felons off the streets.  Public Citizen is a good starting point.