During the period from 1890 through the 1930's, before and after the Great Depression, the US government put laws in place to enable capitalism to perpetuate, because if it went unchecked it would get so large, it would implode.

For example, when some personal estates, like the Rockefellers', got so huge, it was apparent the family could not spend enough in a generation to keep the estate from growing exponentially.  T hese estates eventually will get to be so big, they will be bigger than the Gross National Product, and capitalism implodes.  So the government created estate taxes to put some of that money back into the government - just enough to make sure that personal estates cannot grow exponentially from generation to generation.

Similarly, after the Depression, banking regulations were put in place to help protect the overall banking system.  Capitalism encourages and depends on people and companies to maximize their profits.  Because of this, sometimes companies and individuals will do things to make more profit that ultimately will harm our system of capitalism.  For example, there are regulations that prevent lenders from giving out predatory loans - loans that either have gigantic interest rates or loans that they know the borrowers cannot pay back.

Now, skip to 2,000.  The housing market is booming.  The banks figure, why should the homeowners make all that profit from the appreciation of their homes, when we are the ones making it possible for them to own homes by giving them loans?  With a bit of help from the Bush Administration (this actually started with Reagan) and the Republican congress, they got congress to repeal regulations put in place to perpetuate capitalism.  They repealed the estate tax.  They ignored anti-trust laws.  They allowed the media to be owned by a few powerful people.  They lifted regulations that kept banks from using predatory lending practices.  They allowed banks to give loans to people with low interest rates for the first 3-5 years, and then baloon to a rate that they knew the borrowers could not afford.  The payoff for the bank was in huge points and fees when the homeowner was forced to refinance in 3-5 years.  These huge points and fees get tacked onto the value of the loan - essentially giving the profit from the increase in the value of the real estate to the bank.  Hopefully, there would be enough leftover to payoff the homeowner's credit card debt, probably to the same bank.  And since people were then able to buy houses that cost more than they could really afford, that helped to artifically inflate the value of the houses.

The whole system worked great for the banks (not so much for the homeowners) until the - predictable - cyclical downturn in the real estate market.  All of a sudden the homeowner did not have enough equity in their house to refinance and fold the refinance charges back into the new loan.  Once the houses were no longer increasing in value, the system broke down.  When this happened to enough people, even the financial institutions themselves failed.

That brings us to now.

The government is in a panic about these financial institutions failing, and they are willing to borrow $3,400 on behalf of each of us to bail out these institutions.

But they weren't willing to bail out the homeowners, which would have prevented the financial institutions from failing AND would have kept people in their homes.

And this is what makes me boiling mad.  We are going to have to go further into debt to bail out these fat cats that got fat by ignoring the lessons from the past, and they got fat by stealing our home equity to begin with.  We get thrown out of our houses ANYWAY, and the CEO's from these financial institutions are going to take their Golden Parachutes and move to Dubai.

I'm going to go take a walk.  Maybe when I come back I'll find that this was all just a bad-trip flashback, and this isn't really hapenning.