Audacity, not Character in High Finance

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/opinion/brooks-why-democrats-lead.html?_r=1&hp

You want to get to the root of it, Brooks? It comes from a famous letter sent by Lewis Powell to Eugene Sydnor of the Chamber of Commerce.

After serving as president from 1964 to 1965, Lewis Powell, Jr. became a Supreme Court Justice. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

http://www.webcitation.org/64jAmJkKB

Entitled “Attack on the Free Enterprise System,” it details a massive left wing conspiracy to destroy the United States free enterprise system and calls for a virtual war on all elements of the left, communists, socialists, hippies, college professors, students etc. all of whom aimed to bring down our economic system.

It called for the formation of pro business think tanks, lobbies, watchdogs and witch hunters and an all out propaganda war against these dangerous elements of our society.

Within a few years it build K Street into a monolithic lobbying bloc that literally owned the people’s representatives and regulators. Within a few decades they dismantled all the regulations intended to save the financial system from its own irrational practices and erected new barriers to prosecuting financial fraud.

Those dangerous university students became bankers and businessmen. High finance took on a whole new connotation and corporate powder rooms a new meaning as pot smokers in thee piece suits upgraded to better substances.

What destroyed the economy was not a cabal of communists, socialists, and new left literary theorists. It was a bunch of coked up bankers and traders dealing in an alphabet soup of fraudulent financial products and free trade advocates who shipped American jobs abroad.