Taking On Wall Street!

       There's a new initiative afoot and it's bi-partisan. Well at least folks from both sides of the isle claim to be in favor of action on this front. It has to do with curbing Wall Street. Sort of pulling Wall Street's fangs, you might say. Ideas like eliminating the carried interest deal whereby hedge fund traders get to pay much less in taxes than you or I do.
       Now every group or industry has the right to have lobbyists to plead their cases in Washington, but nobody is more successful at it than Wall Street. Why is that? Its because that's where the money is. Just look at the record. After the recent blowing up of the economy, aka "The Great Recession", the record stands at 47 bank employees from the ten largest banks were charged with crimes but of those only one was a boardroom level employee. But the banks did pay fines. Its the cost of doing business, I guess only banks break laws, apparently not bank executives.
       So anyway, there's a new push to reign in these financial cowboys. Elizabeth Warren is leading the charge for "Take On Wall Street", a plan and call to action to force some common sense into the banks and real oversight over them. Split up the banks. Let the gamblers have their fun, but not with your or my savings. Savings banks would have to behave as though they were acting as protectors of our savings by investing in home and auto loans and the like and let the cowboys gamble with their own money.
       Making bankers responsible for their actions instead of simply paying what amounts to a petty fine, and believe me when I tell you that a couple of billion for these huge banks is nothing more than a petty fine. Such fines are more of an incentive to do more of the same than it does to discourage bad deeds. But it'll take a lot of hard work to pull this off. The question is do we want some honest reform? Are we satisfied with bankers getting away with financial murder or do we want our economy protected from them? Remember 'Taking On Wall Street' isn't just a slogan, its a real need for protecting ourselves.