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Gordon Gecko had a long run of it, but now the party is over. I’m talking, of course, about the character in the film Wall Street, that conniving titan of finance who would sell his mother for a buck and a quarter, and there is scant evidence that he had not already accomplished that goal. “Greed is good,” he declared.

Gecko began to have his heyday in the Reagan era. That’s when the “conventional wisdom,” fueled by greed, began to call for a supply-side economic policy in which financial benefits would be bestowed upon the wealthy and businesses in the form of tax cuts. And as the theory goes, the benefits would “trickle down” to the common folk. In reality, the result was more like “trickle on”.

Another hallmark of the Reagan era, which was perfected in the Clinton and Bush years, was the deregulation of the financial markets and other industries. Over the years, these policies were bought and paid for to the tune of $5 billion in contributions, given by Wall Street to Democratic and Republican politicians alike, to keep the government out of the gambling casinos, I mean financial markets. This led to the proliferation of exotic financial instruments called derivatives, which have turned out to be a little more than a high-tech, blue chip hustle. Unregulated, unmonitored, and getting their money’s worth, the banks were able to engage in predatory lending, sucking homeowners - particularly homeowners of color - into unconscionable subprime mortgages. When applied to the environment and food and safety standards, deregulation has resulted in salmonella- and rat-infested peanuts, E-coli tainted beef and climate change. >>> more