The End of Capitalism and the American Dream? Fix it!

How many times have you heard: "If you work hard and put your nose to the grind stone you, too, can become financially successful." We were told that to amass great wealth -- the American Dream -- you simply need to be good at what you do and work hard.

We've been told that to tax the rich is equivalent to "punishing people for their success."

If we've learned nothing else from this financial crisis it should be that this is complete and utter bullshit.

Look at the salary and bonus packages being given to CEO's of failing corporations. It's the height of rewarding failure. And it didn't just happen. Over the past eight years we have seen a stead stream of CEO's who on one hand will layoff tens of thousands of workers, while continuing to take multimillion dollar salaries and bonus packages -- and THEN have the nerve to appear before Congress asking for a bailout!

And they GET IT, with NO REQUIREMENT that they GIVE BACK the MONEY THEY HAVE STOLEN.

This greed has been so rampant for so long that our entire banking system is on the verge of collapse. American Capitalism as we've known it is disappearing.

The Washington Post reports:

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism.

Since the 1930s, U.S. banks were the flagships of American economic might, and emulation by other nations of the fiercely free-market financial system in the United States was expected and encouraged. But the market turmoil that is draining the nation's wealth and has upended Wall Street now threatens to put the banks at the heart of the U.S. financial system at least partly in the hands of the government.

The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks, buying up a portion of their shares to shore them up and restore confidence as part of the $700 billion government bailout. The notion of government ownership in the financial sector, even as a minority stakeholder, goes against what market purists say they see as the foundation of the American system.

Yet the administration may feel it has no choice. Credit, the lifeblood of capitalism, ceased to flow. An economy based on the free market cannot function that way.

The government's about-face goes beyond the banking industry. It is reasserting itself in the lives of citizens in ways that were unthinkable in the era of market-knows-best thinking. With the recent takeovers of major lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the bailout of AIG, the U.S. government is now effectively responsible for providing home mortgages and life insurance to tens of millions of Americans. Many economists are asking whether it remains a free market if the government is so deeply enmeshed in the financial system.

What began with Ronald Reagan has now culminated in a meltdown of our financial structure under George W. Bush.

One only need look at the behavior of Wall Street CEO's to know these greedy bastards must be regulated. Without regulation they simply take the money and run wild.

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