Pity for a Devastated Wall Street

Paganplace:

I have yet to see an American evangelist who sounded remotely like Ayn Rand....

And these drug-pusher-like corporations were not doing business ala philosohy of Ayn Rand either.

There are few in America brave enough to advocate true liberty. We're a gutless nation.

I agree with AgentG's remarks above.

Johm Mark Reynolds's religion seems to be a political alliance with conservative rich people, and Republicans. While he is all hung up on benign and harmless issues like sexual orientation, he is completely blind to the influences of morally inferior people, whom he has allied himself with, and whom he apparently admires.

I agree with AgentG, and furthermore, say that conflating the teachings of Christ and Capitalism produces a weird, hard, mean-spirited hybrid monstrosity of a religion which runs far afield from the teachings of Christ, and in the end, ain't Christian at all.

Mr. JOhn Mark Reynolds, I wish there were some way that you could sit down in a quiet spot, and think over these things, so that your eyes would somehow be opened.

another examaple of why we should not use the Bible as a moral signpost.

GiGi says:
"You are right in that the court systems are not perfect...and by the same token, perhaps a regulatory system run by the government to make sure that nothing like this happens again may not be perfect either, but it will help contain greed...NOT make it illegal as is your worry, but manage it."

Ummmm...we *had* that - put in place after the Great Depression to prevent just this sort of thing (Glass-Steagal Act). It was dismantled by the Republican "small government" deregulation-besotted neocons (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act).

Sarah Palin's comment on our addiction on "OPM" --- other peoples money, was really poignant.

Here's a blogpost about that and how we all share in the blame:

http://redletterbelievers.blogspot.com/2008/09/our-opm-addiction.html

The real sin wasn't greed, it was hubris. They thought they had repealed the economic laws through their use of derivatives. Rather than reduce risk they merely hid it.

There is nothing in the bible against being rich. The danger is in the moral traps that lie hidden in that territory. Both Job and Abraham were rich. The problem is when you are rich and forget who God is and who you are.

There are many good people working on Wall Street. Unfortunately the system itself puts people in the position of agents of sin when they are just trying to do their job. Usually they don't even realize that they are part of the problem. For instance there are good people in marketing who are just trying to win more business for their employer, but the net effect is that I get 20 credit card offers a week, and my 19-year old daughter gets 5.

At one time the bankers on Wall Street were a conservative lot, always measuring risk against reward. Somewhere along the way they became reckless, thinking that the old rules no longer applied to them.

I have a line of credit that I have been paying on diligently. Its under a corporate name from a failed venture. I am liquidating my assets to pay it off. Suddenly I get a notice that they are tripling my interest rates because accounts with my payment patterns have a higher default rate and because of the turmoil in the credit markets. I long ago made the commitment to pay it off in full, even though I was going to have to dip into personal assets to do so. Now I have a situation where they are trying to force another $5000 out of my pockets. While they have every right to do this, is it wise? They are forcing those who are honest and can pay to cover the payments of those who either can't or won't, hurting their best customers while rewarding those they shouldn't do business with. I thought maybe they were just trying to liquidate a lot of loans this way, but since I still get advertisement from them I am not sure what they are doing.

I have decided to stick with my original commitment to pay off the principal and an appropriate interest, but not to pay the higher rate and the penalties that will start stacking up. I cannot reform their morality, but I can hold to my own.

A hurricane is an act of God.

Unregulated speculation is an act of Man.

There is an article in today's WaPo, "We aren't going to be rich," that sympathetically outlines the woes of young hopefuls on Wall Street. Apparently there may be fewer thousand dollar business lunches or five hundred dollar bottles of booze. Many will no longer look forward to early retirement (35) and many will have to live in smaller mansions than they expected to. My heart goes out to them. Never having tasted a two-hundred and fifty dollar steak, I can only imagine their suffering.

Job was innocent of any wrong doing and well known for his righteousness. His friends (undoubtedly early puritans who belived material success went hand in hand with said righteousness) were wrong to tempt him to doubt both the Lord and his own faith. However, the present financial crises is the result of evil doing (greed being one of the seven deadly sins) and I feel you are making a mistake to compare political finger pointing to foolish questioning of God's intentions. Also, "things not turning out the way you like," hardly begins to describe what is happening to millions of ordinary Americans who will suffer (and pay) for the actions of a few.

Greed should not be illegal and you are right not to want to legislate morality, it must come from the heart. But if you want a religious revival on Wall Street it must begin with repentance, yet I see little evidence of that now and have little hope of it appearing spontaneously.

I also question your finger pointing at politics and the media. You weaken your own argument against blame calling by doing so yourself within the same article. Is this a plea for pity or an attempt to shift blame? It should be one or the other. Washington and the media have failed us too, but at the moment they are separate issues. You are only confusing things by conflating them.

Obviously, I am not very sympathetic for those I regard as rich and powerful, perhaps it is a shortcoming on my part as a Christian. However, I take no joy in their downfall. The truth of the matter is, that for the price of a Wall Street lunch I could feed several hundred homeless people who are undoubtedly as innocent as any one on Wall Street. And there is something about that which makes me feel very bad inside.

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Well the jerk store called, and they're running out of you!

I am an ordinary citizen and a main street investor...I think that the analogy to a hurricane, a "force of nature," is off. It was not like Wall Street had no control over the meltdown--they did, but they were blinded by greed. And "pundits on the payroll of media conglomerates" are NOT piling on just now. Some of them may be--but early on, quite a few business writers (some in the Post, in fact) had been alerting the public that there was something very wrong with the way Wall Street was forever repackaging mortgages into such esoteric securities that were too difficult to analyze and were probably highly unsustainable.

You are right in that the court systems are not perfect...and by the same token, perhaps a regulatory system run by the government to make sure that nothing like this happens again may not be perfect either, but it will help contain greed...NOT make it illegal as is your worry, but manage it.

I think by and large the Wall Street traders--Christian or non-Chirstian--most of them were indeed blinded by greed.

CCNL. "The correction beings!"
You mean revenge that is based on hatred, right?
Where do you get that "burning someone" is correction? It is called murder.
Gasoline is expensive. I was in advance auto today and a guy came in reeking of the smell of gasoline. Three people in the store comment on it including the store manager. I was so bad that the manager was ready to ask the gut to leave.
Ironically, one of the people in the store was someone that I know, haven’t seen him for a long time but it was nice to see him again. Jim said to me that gut smells like he has been rolling in gasoline, that’s when the manager said he was going to ask the guy to leave because he smelled so bad. The guy in the parking lot said his engine caught fire from a gas leak and that he poured water on it and it didn’t stop the fire, he was in a black truck, and I could recognize both of them. The guy in the truck was talking about burning his wife to death with gasoline. I told him that he would go to jail for murder and that I would be a witness to what he said. He also told me that he has hidden cameras in his house to spy on his wife with microphones and that he put a GPS system on her car so he could track her whereabouts. I told him that he will go to jail for doing these things and he laughed and said I won’t get caught. I said the very ones that think that they are above reproach are the ones that get caught. He said he didn’t care that he had people to do it for him and that they would lie for him.

The guy said “she has to pay for what she did to me.”

I mean, pity? I pity the foo who bet on the largesse of their theocratic corporate Neocon overlords and called everyone that warned them about it a 'liberal whiner.'

That's what I pity.

"I respectfully submit that Mr. Reynolds, and a wide swath of American evangelists, appear to align themselves more closely with the philosophy and ideology of Ayn Rand than the teachings of Jesus Christ."

I second this! Less respectfully! And less submissively!

Was that over the top?

Seriously, this Reynolds is the same kind of Neocon who called the people the finance industry screwed out of house home, life's work and credit rating 'A nation of Whiners' ...now they want us to pity fatcats who laugh all the way away from the banks they crashed to their private estates?

Then call 'community organizers' 'elitist?'

Forget about it.

Mr. Reynolds appears to represent a curious type of American religiousness that confuses capitalism and individualism with the teachings of the Bible.

It hard to understand how religious leaders like Mr. Reynolds cannot stand up for social justice, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that society's captains, infected with blind ideology in markets, have inflicted grave damage to those very markets. If you look closely and earnestly, you cannot escape the conclusion that the powerful in this nation have gamed the system to their advantage and have precluded any kind of fairness in resource distribution for the vast majority of their fellow citizens and taxpayers. We have turned our fellow countrymen into labor commodities, to be replaced and squeezed like lemons at will.

Thus, the present crisis represents a dramatic failure of the ruling class, for willfully ignoring their fiduiciary duties, and not simply a failure under a good faith effort. Where is Mr. Reynold's outrage at this overwhelming corruption of Christian values?

I respectfully submit that Mr. Reynolds, and a wide swath of American evangelists, appear to align themselves more closely with the philosophy and ideology of Ayn Rand than the teachings of Jesus Christ. As I remember, Christ's morality was not limited to the laws of his time, but included compassion for adversaries, respect for labor, guardianship for the earth, and yes, a healthy contempt for the overly rich.

But Mr. Reynolds appears to have conveniently forgotten about the camel passing through the eye of the needle. Interesting how literal interpretations of the Bible are never mentioned when they do not fit into the free-market world order.

Privatization of *profit,* that should read, above. *shaking head at self.* My concentration blows today.

Then again, if it's a bad pain day, I guess I should just pity those people who've consistently refused to 'pity' people who could have used some health care, if it weren't too 'Godless Commie' not to make such things all about profits for competing insurance companies.

Oh, the devastation!

If only we'd given these same people our Social Security fund to gamble with, too, like McCain and Bush wanted to, perhaps their fragile and humble dreams of avarice would not have suffered so!

Or... Maybe the 'pitiless' masses would *really* be up a creek.

Wha?

We should pity those who gambled with the people's money, voted for the privatization of risk and pushing the losses off onto the taxpayers, either way transferring wealth from the many to the very few?

This was a 'dream that failed?'

When the dream was 'succeeding' it was bad.

Pity?

They're still rich, ...the head of Lehman brothers got paid almost a hundred million for getting *fired* after all this.

These are the policies of the moralistic Religious-right endorsed candidates come home to roost, sir.

And it's not the Wall Street bigwigs who suffer.

While we get beggared by a bailout plan because we let Wall Street hold so much of our American life *hostage.*

This is obscene. Hundred of millions of average Americans will suffer through no fault of their own, and you compare Job to Joe Bagomoney, Wall Street Billionaire. The Devil's Advocate in the flesh. Thank you, Henry Potter.

This is a thinly and ineptly disguised apologetic for laissez-faire capitalism in 'the world of liberty that God created'. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, God created the Free Market and He expects you not to fiddle with it. Reminds me of Al Franken's 'Supply-side Jesus'... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK7gI5lMB7M).

This is a thinly and ineptly disguised apologetic for laissez-faire capitalism in 'the world of liberty that God created'. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, God created the Free Market and He expects you not to futz with it. Reminds me of Al Franken's 'Supply-side Jesus'... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK7gI5lMB7M).

The Money Changers gives some interesting perspective

Then and now.

http://coinage.me/coinage_the_money_changers.htm

Victoria:

How do you know all the thousands of people hurt (directly) by this Wall Street mess were "conscious and greedy exploiters?" Isn't that kind of generalization dangerous?

As for usury and the Bible: in an ancient culture whose economy was agricultural and where wealth was tied to land, it was forbidden for good reasons. The Lord Jesus in his parables clearly recognizes (and even) commands investment at interest in a different kind of culture (more like our own).

Usury can be exploitation, but some forms can lead to a good economy. We would have to examine each case closely to see which is exploitative and which is not. That is . . . to paraphrase a great US Senator . . .above my economic pay grade.

I do believe the Bible . . . and would be happy not to believe in usury if the case were so simple, but you are just wrong about the status of the Biblical evidence.

We should condemn greed. I do suggest that we wait to see who was actually greedy before condemning a whole class of people.

John Mark

What a ridiculous and circuitous rationalization you make,Sir.

These are not innocent victims whose house fell down- these are conscious and greedy exploiters who have sucked and fed on a systmen that is inherently corrupt form a biblical perpsective.

Usuray is disallowed in the bible- unless you are deliberately in gross denial of your own contributions and over-consumption and credit risks- and not honoring the bible you claim to believe in and follow-

How DARE you draw equivalency between the corrupted greed mongers who have created this problem with their deregulation policies to real victims and suggest that we are wrong to condemn their greed!!!!!