Losing sight of what got us here

We’ve lost sight of the problem. In our zeal to trim budgets and slash public retirement benefits, we have forgotten about what got us here. It was not Government spending that caused this economic crisis. It certainly wasn’t school teachers’ pensions or Planned Parenthood. It was greed on Wall Street. It was the weakening of financial regulations and regulatory bodies. What have we done about out of control executive compensation and, more importantly, loose or non-existent regulation and oversight? Well … Obama appointed people like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to advise him, people at the center of the financial meltdown. He kept Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The financial sector has successfully fought off any real reform. Maybe everything will be OK if we can strip away bargaining rights from teachers, close down Planned Parenthood, and stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.