Writing from the epicenter of the fiscal crisis that's causing a major recession, Lupica argues that unbridled greed is what's brought us to the edge of the depression precipice:
Now almost every day, we pay the check in the city and the country for systemic greed that flourished under the outgoing President and his men -- so-called leaders who missed all the warning signs on an economy about to crash the way they missed warnings about planes about to crash into our buildings.
This is the country that George Bush hands over to Barack Obama in a few weeks, one that has lost its way. It is a country where greed has gone unregulated through one presidential administration after another, all the way back to the boom years of the sainted Ronald Reagan.
So here we are, with a fraud like Marc Dreier, a pathetic New York celebrity groupie, accused of defrauding hedge funds out of as much as $400 million. And with Bernie Madoff, once a respected Wall Street name and a founder of Nasdaq, accused of being one of the worst thieves in American history.
Unlike most pundits, Lupica does some shoe-leather reporting, talking to Don, a retired widower with an MBA from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, who sells scarves and hats on the street in midtown Manhattan because he wants to keep busy.
The street-level wisdom of Don includes:
You can't be surprised by greed in a country of greed.
All people have wanted in this country, for a long time, is more. So they kept saying "yes" to everything as long as the money kept coming in.
Fifty billion dollars. Everybody kept saying "yes" to this guy Madoff until the law told him "no."
Lupica writes that the eternal GOP theme of blaming poor people, in this case for buying too much house, way misses the point:
When the bottom fell out of the mortgage business and all these banks, we were told again and again that this was all the fault of poor people who overextended themselves to buy houses they could not afford; that somehow the poor sunk the economy and all these huge companies by themselves.
But these things never happen in a vacuum, not with bums like Madoff, allowed to run wild in a world of money without nearly enough transparency or regulation, until it is too late.
Maybe it can begin to change for the better under a new President. It was never going to change under George W. Bush, whose mission has always been to redistribute the wealth in a way that made rich Americans much, much richer.
After this bit, Lupica inserts a brief comment from Don on the street:
A country run by amateurs.
For another month or so, anyway.
As a sports guy, Lupica makes a unique connection between the greed that is sinking the economy to New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.
(Steinbrenner is quite ill now, but he remains for many, like me, the archetype of the asshole sports team owner. Personally, I was a lifelong Yankees fan until 1981, when Steinbrenner dissed Reggie Jackson [aka Mr. October, when he helped the Yankees win World Series in 1977 and 1978], weirdly apologized for losing the World Series to the Dodgers, and even more weirdly claimed he had a fist-fight with Dodger fans in an elevator. I became a Mets fan that year, and have suffered more downs than ups since then, but at least the Mets owners stayed out of the papers.)
Lupica recalls Steinbrenner's suspension from baseball for "conspiring with a known gambler, Howie Spira, ... to get some dirt on Dave Winfield, for whom Steinbrenner had no use."
Here's the nut, for Steinbrener and for too many on Wall Street:
(Baseball Commissioner Fay) Vincent said at the time that Steinbrenner had heard no moral alarm because "none sounded."
There was no moral alarm for Bernie Madoff as he systematically ruined fortunes and pension funds, and ultimately lives, and didn't get stopped until now. He is the biggest thief we know about, but only for now, because he is caught. You wonder how many more like him end up in orange jumpsuits before this is over.
Madoff was a huge figure on the grand, mythical place known as "The Street." But on another street yesterday, on his own corner of Fifth Avenue, the old vendor from Bay Ridge shook his head.
There was also no "moral alarm" for Wall Street bankers who packaged suspect mortgages into now-practically-worthless bonds, for ratings agencies that AAA-rated those bonds, for government regulators who looked the other way, for politicians of both parties who depended on Wall Street for political contributions and let that affect their oversight, and for media that cheerlead for their advertisers.
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