GOP deregulation led to greedy end

A Sept. 27 article in the business section laments a possible loss of $5,000 in donations to the nonprofit organization, N.Y. City Meals on Wheels, from Bear Stearns senior executives. It says Bear Stearns required senior executives to give 4 percent of their compensation to charity.

We all know that no corporation can demand how one spends their compensation, so there is more to that story. However, while some may react with concern for the loss to charity I just become more angry at the obscene smoke and mirrors game that the trickle-down economic theory has become.

At one time giving tax breaks to big business meant that they shared the wealth by expanding their operations, creating jobs and contributing to the economic strength of America. That ended when greedy CEO's began seeing this addition to their bottom line as their entitlement. They saw it in terms of golden parachutes and ludicrous compensation packages for themselves. They realized that they could create confusing nests of derivatives and paper business to cover their increasing greediness and, by heavily lobbying Congress, could get most regulations relaxed to give them free rein.

Most apparent in this article was that the philanthropic badge of honor attached to Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Merrill Lynch never mentioned the families on the street who had sacrificed their homes as participants in the sleight of hand mortgage business that created the wealth of these large corporations.

I wonder if it might have been better to have offered honest mortgages and those who could afford homes and those who needed to rent and save a little longer could have donated to the charities themselves. Maybe then we wouldn't have America's wealth inflated, and its economy crashing today.

So now we have the administration, Democrats, and a small group of ultraconservative House Republicans, who fear for their jobs lapsing in November, negotiating how to fix the problem they all participated in creating over the past two decades. Some want more controls back into play, the administration wants the problem to go away fast and tried their typical shock and awe moves, and the ultraconservative Republicans, who shoulder most of the blame for the current situation, want the government to become an AIG type insurer to insure the bad debt.

We all know how well AIG worked out.

Hopefully, by the time this letter appears a finger has been inserted into the dike and the damage has been contained. However, we should also hope that the disastrous Republican policies that stripped the regulations and allowed the greed to multiply like a virus will be ended Nov. 4.

Gail A. Talbot

Huntley