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Think of parasites as an organizational pyramid or multilevel marketing enterprise. Maybe a better descriptor is Ponzi scheme. At the top of the pyramid are the liberal elite, the union bosses, trial lawyers, environmental gurus and political hacks that exhort Americans to sacrifice more, tighten their belts and stop complaining about higher taxes, loss of personal freedoms and economic opportunity.

At the bottom are the stupid schmucks that support and believe in the parasite elite, expecting to get something out of this whole pyramid scheme. They usually get the short end of the stick - a few handouts and some useless programs. The middle class gets stuck paying for handouts to the parasites, including the very top of the pyramid.

Let’s use trial lawyers as an example. When one of these parasites is advertising for slip and fall injuries or asbestos-related disease on television, they’re aiming at the bottom of the pyramid. They promise to get their clients big money awards with no fees and no risk. Obviously, they neglect to tell these poor folks, who indeed may have a legitimate claim, that they’ll receive just a small fraction of any award. The trial lawyers aren’t advertising to the upper middle class (aka the taxpayers). No self-respecting small business owner, corporate exec, doctor or professional would even consider representation by an ambulance-chaser. The trial lawyers aim their advertising at the poor, unemployed, hopeless and desperate. They are typically in financial trouble, uneducated and unfamiliar with how these legal parasites work their game. So, they end up signing away their rights in a class action suit or bundled case, and receive far less than they deserve. The trail lawyers, on the other hand, make millions, usually by overwhelming the court or the accused with hundreds of simultaneous claims. Just to the clear the docket, many judges will urge the accused to settle, even if they’re completely blameless.

Obviously, trial lawyers resist any legal reforms that would stop this gravy train. They invest heavily in the Democratic Party, donating millions. In fact, in most states, trial lawyers are the largest political donors. They have enormous influence.

Politicians work the system in a similar manner. They promise the poor, uneducated, hopeless or shiftless just about anything to get elected, knowing full well they can’t possibly deliver on those promises. Once in office, they create programs and laws that take money from working Americans and redistribute it to those who can’t or won’t provide for themselves. But, the government is incredibly inefficient in the redistribution of wealth. For every dollar collected in taxes, only 20 cents actually makes it to the person who needs it. The other 80 cents is used up by the government to ‘administer’ the redistribution. Wouldn’t we be better off with private charities doing this work? After all, even the least efficient private charity still delivers 70 cents of every donated dollar to the proper recipient.

Socialist politicians masquerading as Democrats don’t really want private charities to exist because they are competition. Instead, they want government to assume the roles of benefactor, parent, guidance counselor, personal financier, doctor and therapist in the name of ‘fairness’ and ‘compassion’. What’s really going on is that socialist politicians have been able to manipulate the poor and working class to their own advantage, creating a powerful voting bloc. That voting bloc is kept motivated by promises of even more government handouts at the expense of the ‘rich’, who truly don’t deserve their wealth no matter how hard they worked for it. By inciting class warfare, they keep themselves in office.

Much like the trial lawyers who promise big cash awards and instead grab most of it for themselves, politicians promise the poor and working class handouts and special privileges, knowing they can’t deliver. Instead, that money is absorbed by the politicians’ real constituency - huge government bureaucracies, the labor unions representing them and politically connected government contractors who are themselves unionized or generously underwrite liberal causes. There is one other, very important beneficiary of the redistribution game - activist organizations that directly engage with the poor, the disenfranchised and working poor or pretend to represent them in some way. Many, like the ACLU and A.C.O.R.N., receive direct government funding so that they can continue to foment class hatred and despair among millions of Americans, instilling in them a sense of entitlement instead of a sense of empowerment.

But it’s not just the poor and working class Americans who look to government handouts. Wall Street has snagged billions in taxpayer money to prop up billionaires and a culture of entitlement. Unlike the millions of poor and working poor that have only one vote to cast, the relatively small number of Wall Street honchos and financiers write big campaign donation checks. They buy their political clout, just like trial lawyers. Ask Democrats Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. When the Wall Street people overstep their bounds, when they truly screw up, these cobras lean on the American taxpayer. And the American taxpayer is completely unaware that the government, steered by politicians, dispenses money based on political considerations above all else. So, if billions are handed out to the poor, millions of poor each get a couple bucks. If billions are handed out on Wall Street, millions of bucks go to just a few people. The top of the parasite pyramid generally gets the same amount of money as the bottom of the pyramid - it’s just spread out among fewer people. And they have no problem taking it. After all, it’s free!

The last 6 months of 2008 will be marked as a turning point in America’s history and its status as an economic superpower. The real estate crash could have been contained had it not been for Wall Street’s unethical packaging of questionable home loans. Those loans were resold to other banks and governments as secure, rated investments. As housing prices corrected in the US, which does occur occasionally, those multi-trillion dollar investments became suspect. Once banks and investors lost confidence in these shaky loan packages, they were effectively worthless. No one wanted to buy them or guarantee them. Trillions of dollars evaporated overnight.  As a result, the global financial system was severely damaged and the world economy nearly collapsed. Someday it will be revealed how near the brink Wall Street pushed us for the sake of a sales commission.

The George W. Bush administration and Congress acted swiftly (pork-barreling nothwithstanding) to shore up the American side of the ledger sheet. Whether the initial $1 trillion was well spent is a matter for economists to debate. It provided a badly needed confidence-booster  and signaled to the world that America would attempt to clean up its mistakes. Since September 2008, trillions more have been pumped into the financial system. As of January 2008 that number stands at approximately $7 trillion. Just to provide some perspective: At 3% interest, that $7 trillion demands almost $1 billion in interest payments per day. At 1% interest, it will take almost a 1,000 years to pay off the debt based on our government’s past performance for loan repayment. America had already piled up $40 trillion in national debt before this most recent debacle.

Given the gravity of the situation and the magnitude of the destruction, it’s outrageous that no one’s been arrested, investigated or even pilloried in the press. Of course, Bush administration officials have been grilled endlessly, but what about the clowns on Wall Street who created this mess? What about Obama’s housing advisor Franklin Raines, who was a key player in the mortgage meltdown as CEO of Fannie Mae? The press has diverted attention away from the people who created this mess to an intense scrutiny of the people trying to clean it up.

What gets lost in all the noise is the hard fact that someone’s going to have to pay down this debt. It doesn’t appear that Wall Street honchos are going to cough up a nickel. Franklin Raines isn’t going to return his $45 million bonus. That leaves average working Americans to pick up the tab. That means a century or more of diminished economic growth, personal opportunity and personal wealth. It means more taxes, more inflation, a drop in the dollar’s value and a drop in our standard of living. And, adding insult to injury, Barack Obama wants to add an astounding 600,000 new government employees to the federal payroll. That’s insane. With pensions and benefits, it instantly adds another trillion dollars to this year’s federal budget, which is already a trillion in the hole. And it adds another trillion every year going forward forever. At what point do the wheels come off this gravy train? It appears that the only thing that can stop our government from spending money it doesn’t have is for the rest of the world to push our government into bankruptcy. And even then, our politicians and bureaucrats won’t be suffering one bit. That will be left to the taxpayer.

Bernie Madoff exemplifies the prevailing ethic on Wall Street - investors are merely marks. It’s all about the transaction, protecting the transaction and making money from the transaction, investor be damned. Madoff went a bit further than the average broker or manager.  But, the losses that his investors bear are a trifling compared to the trillions eradicated in the mortgage-backed securities catastrophe engineered by so-called ‘legitimate’ players like Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. Who’s the greater evil?

Bernie Madoff was well protected. No one, not even the SEC, could touch him. His clout with regulatory agencies was considerable and he worked his connections effectively. What brought the Madoff operation down wasn’t the investigatory zeal of any governmental agency, it was the collapsing stock market and the inevitable run to redemptions. But then, the big investment bankers, broker/dealers and bank holding companies were equally well protected and well connected. Madoff is a parasite. But that characterization can be applied to much of Wall Street and the banking industry given the awful mess they alone created and the way they’re now conducting themselves with taxpayers’ bailout money.

In that context, Bernie Madoff is not unusual in many respects. He is the logical extension of the largely unethical practices that make up too much of the day-to-day activities on Wall Street. What goes on has been dressed up in many guises, but it’s all the same. It’s the transaction - whether the investor makes money or loses money is immaterial. The broker-dealer, the underwriter, the investment banker or the adviser is focused only on the transaction itself. It’s the transaction that creates revenue. Everything else is eyewash.

Given the stupendous disaster created by mortgage-backed securities, no one seems to remember the mutual fund scandal and the hedge fund improprieties of just a few years ago. And before that, it was the derivatives scandal, preceded by the collapse of Long Term Capital Management. There has been an endless procession of financial chicanery stretching back 100-plus years. But, everyone does forget, and Wall Street counts on it. Eventually, the sheep forget about the wolves and go back to grazing. The hunt begins anew.

The size, scope and sheer audacity of the improprieties are expanding. There’s not even a pretense of transparency or accountability. Even pretending to be ethical and aboveboard has become inconvenient and boring for some of the players involved. To Wall Street, the rest of America are just marks, nothing more. Bernie Madoff just took it one step further.

The Obama administration, not yet fully installed, is already calling for radical changes to what it brazenly characterizes as the ‘failure’ of free-market capitalism. Given their way, Obama and his handlers would institute FDR-era programs liberally mixed with Johnson-era social engineering and the hopeless, self-limiting ideology of the Jimmy Carter era. This toxic cocktail would be forced down the throats of every American, even those who believe that bigger government is not the answer, and that we should rely on our own ingenuity and hard work to get out of the current economic disaster.

There is no doubt that Wall Street screwed up. Their greed and avarice blinded them to the enormous risks they were peddling to banks, investors, pensions and governments. It’s incredible that the CEOs and chairmen of Lehman Bros., Merrill, Bear Stearns and other big investment houses didn’t fully understand what was going on inside their own firms. Apparently, the need for transparency goes much deeper - into the very innards of these organizations. It’s strange that there are no arrests, no indictments and no large-scale investigations of the mortgage meltdown, the credit squeeze and the resulting economic catastrophe.

It doesn’t take a financial wizard to observe that mortgage-backed securities were created from pools of shaky borrowers, given an unrealistic rating and then sold around the world as investment-grade instruments. What’s even more difficult to imagine is that the same people who created these toxic securities bought them for their own accounts. Once again, it doesn’t take a wizard to observe that the executives didn’t know what people in their own organization were actually doing. Given these simple observations, one can only conclude that Wall Street executives taking home billions of dollars had no idea what they were doing, or just didn’t give a damn.

The alternative explanation is even more unsettling. One can also postulate that Wall Street execs understood fully what was going on. They understood fully the risks to the world’s markets and the potential damage to the American economy. But, they were making billions of dollars and their greed blinded them to the inevitable consequences.

Does this make free-market capitalism a failure? No. The basic concept is still the best possible system ever devised. But, it does bring into question the quality and scope of enforcing laws and regulations as they apply to Wall Street, banking and lending. There is also the matter of whether corruption, graft and influence peddling has compromised oversight and enforcement. This isn’t a Republican or a Democratic problem. It wasn’t created exclusively by either party or during any one administration. This is the result of a general erosion in ethics and personal responsibility. Wall Street is merely the canary in the coal mine.

Wall Street is synonymous with capital formation - raising money from investors worldwide to fund the growth of corporations. Wall Street is also synonymous with finance - raising money from investors worldwide to lend money in the form of bonds to business and government. And, Wall Street is synonymous with securitization - taking capital or lending risks and breaking them up into bits of paper that individuals or institutions can purchase. In all of this, Wall Street itself takes no risk - all of it is borne by investors in one form or another. Wall Street firms make money from the transactions, the creation of the paperwork and the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, commercial paper, derivatives and so one. Wall Street firms make money whether the markets go up or down, whether the dollar is rising or falling, whether the economy is growing or shrinking. The only thing that affects the well-being of Wall Street firms is volume. The money made on a huge volume of transactions is what keeps those billion dollar bonuses going.

Wall Street is all about the transaction. The people running these firms, the people offering Americans investments don’t really care if their customers make any money. It’s all about the transaction. It’s about getting a piece of the action, a little bite out of that stream of cash. It’s how they make their money. That’s why Wall Street is constantly inventing new ‘products’ to sell investors, each one more toxic and risky than the previous one. And in each case, there’s a cut for somebody on Wall Street. Unbelievably, these are the ‘legitimate’ offerings. In addition to these decidedly predatory and parasitic practices there are the out and out frauds who work alongside the ‘legitimate’ broker-dealers, advisers, investment banks, underwriters, analysts, ratings agencies, traders and the rest of the Wall Street apparatus.

Bear Stearns was infamous for its cozy relationships with shady stock promoters, bucket shops and boiler rooms who regularly fleeced small investors. Bear Stearns handled the securities paperwork for these frauds because they weren’t licensed to do so on their own.  Bear Stearns took a healthy fee for its part. The profits from the transactions were so lucrative the firm was willing to take the heat and scrutiny from the SEC and the New York Attorney General’s office. The shady operators would go in and out of business, in and out of jail, but Bear Stearns just kept on handling their paperwork. This kind of mentality permeates Wall Street.

Unfortunately, the various watchdog and governmental agencies that are supposed to oversee Wall Street aren’t doing their respective jobs. Wall Street doesn’t need any more regulation. What’s needed is for those already charged with the responsibility of oversight to actually do their jobs. Bernie Madoff is a prime example. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to speculate that Madoff was able to manipulate, intimidate or buy off individuals within the state, federal and industry regulatory entities that could have spotted this scam many years ago. How someone so visible can conduct a Ponzi scheme of such magnitude for decades is unfathomable. But then, of course, it’s all about the transaction. Was anyone else getting a piece of the action?

Hank Paulson, Jr. has the unenviable task of trying to shore up America’s economic system after it was looted by his compatriots, with the help and encouragement of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party played a supporting role, and George W. Bush just happened to be in the White House. Poor timing on his part. Mr. Paulson didn’t need the job. He was very comfortable in his post at Goldman Sachs. But, when his country called, Paulson answered and shouldered the load as Treasury Secretary. This is a scary, stress-laden job with huge downsides and incessant second-guessing by politicians and media types thathave no idea what they’re talking about. There are hundreds of moving parts and thousands of possible combinations that can end in disaster. And, there’s probably no single person in the entire country that’s better suited for this responsibility than Secretary Paulson.

But, we have to consider his mindset. Although he is tough, direct and dedicated, he operates reflexively within the Wall Street mental paradigm. And his moves are anticipated by Wall Street, the banking system and the Fed. For example, the bank bailout bill he championed had a provision to buy toxic loans from banks, entitled TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) which spurred stock brokerages to immediately apply for federal charters as bank holding companies, and therefore eligible for free money from the government. Even Goldman Sachs, his former employer, has asked for an expedited charter as a bank  holding company. Secretary Paulson deftly maneuvered around his Wall Street peers, choosing instead to buy equity in troubled banks, rather than buying their loan portfolios. It’s a smart move. So, instead of praising the man for making fast, effective decisions and changing the plan to reflect reality, Congress and the media are jumping all over the guy because he changed his mind and didnt’ let them in on his strategy. Had he done so, the morons on Capitol Hill would have called their buddies in order to give them an unfair advantage.

Henry Paulson is doing a good job, given the circumstances. What’s truly scary is the prospect of Secretary Paulson leaving his post, to be replaced by some Democratic ideologue that will surely drive this country over a cliff. If President-Elect Obama has any sense at all, he’ll retain Secretary Paulson until this most acute state of economic distress eases up.

At simple interest of just 3% the Wall Street and bank bailout package incurs $287,687,232 in interest per day. Not a nickel towards repaying the principal - just interest. $287,687,232 in interest per day. Get your mind around it: 3,000 people, laboring for a year, each paid $90,000 annually, is equivalent to one day of interest on the bailout package. Take those same 3,000 people and tax them at 40%. That’s $36,000 each to be put toward one day of interest. It would take them 2-1/2 years to pay one day of interest. What about all of the interest and all of the principal? Let’s assume these same 3,000 people give up all of their earnings to the government. It would take them 1.6 billion years to pay off the principal and interest IF we stopped counting interest after just 10 years.

Another way of looking at is that every man, woman and child in the United States, all 300 million of them, legal and illegal, just got stuck with $11,666 in new debt. That’s right. Each and every one of them gets to pay this off. Oh, but it won’t really work that way. No, that wouldn’t be fair. Only the top 5% of taxpayers will be handed the bill. That means fewer than 3.8 million people will pay nearly $5 trillion, once interest is figured in, over the next 40 years. It works out to about $1 million per person. That’s in addition to current government expenditures, the existing government debt, bonds, and whatever else President Obama cares to hand out to constituents.

And so far, not a word, not a peep, about any indepth investigation or analysis as to how, when, where and by whom was this mess engineered.