Grandpa and Wall Street gamblers

As it turns out, my grandfather had the right hunch about the stock market.

Andrew Herman Horsey was not a stock analyst or a high roller. All his life, he was a working man -- a butcher, a Teamster, a policeman, a game warden, a cannery foreman. Every dollar he earned came from hard, physical labor. Maybe that's why he did not have a high opinion of those who made their money from manipulating money.

On weekends, when I was a little boy, my family would head up to Mount Vernon to visit my grandparents. Evenings, we'd all watch the nightly newscast together. Every time the stock report appeared, grandpa would get mad. "Why do they put that on?" he'd say, "It's just for gamblers!" And, every time, I'd feel a little embarrassed for him. Even as a grade school kid, I thought the stock market couldn't be just a big game.

Now, I'm thinking Grandpa was more right than wrong.

As the federal government moves to bail out Wall Street with $700 billion added to our national debt on top of the $500 billion already spent, I'm wondering when Americans are going to become as outraged as my grandfather -- outraged at having to cover the huge, foolish bet made by the too-smart-for-their-own-good hedge fund magicians and leveraged-buyout geniuses who figured they could keep getting richer by running an intricate investment scheme based on bad housing loans that should never have been made.

Let's put this in perspective: The price of the Wall Street bailout is two times what has been spent so far on another bottomless money pit -- the Iraq war. If we stole all of Bill Gates' billions, we'd be able to pay just one-fifth of the price tag on this financial implosion.

The truly disgusting thing is that this is not like a hurricane or a flood, not some unpredictable, unavoidable disaster. It didn't have to happen. If the doctrinaire conservatives who have been running the show in Washington, D.C., for the past decade had not made it an article of faith that regulation is always a bad thing, if they had not longed to uproot the New Deal safeguards that were put in place in the wake of the Great Depression, this bill would not be landing in every one of our mailboxes.

And, if the new breed of financiers who have come to dominate the market had a shred of social responsibility instead of an unchecked streak of greed, they would be a little less rich but we would not have to pay for their burst bubble.

The apostles of deregulation wanted to unleash the financial sector to create new wealth. Well, a mountain of paper wealth was created and it paid for plenty of private jets and massive mansions in the Hamptons. But it was all a sleight-of-hand trick. The clever and cocky moneymen and women devised new "financial instruments" that were simply a convoluted repackaging of big debt.

Five years ago, Warren Buffett, a guy who has gotten super wealthy by trading in more traditional ways, called derivatives -- the product of these Byzantine money manipulations -- "weapons of financial mass destruction." Buffett has been proved absolutely right. Wall Street has been nuked and none of us can escape the fallout.

At the beginning of the summer when the first financial mushroom clouds were blooming on the horizon, I had a long talk with an old high school buddy of mine named Rich Budke. He's a very successful businessman who, I'm pretty sure, votes Republican on a regular basis. But he has little respect for anyone who goes into business simply to get wealthy.

Rich believes a businessman should focus on serving his customers, providing useful services and creating quality products. Do that, and the money will follow. He looks at the Wall Street manipulators and he sees avaricious souls with nothing real to sell, no service to provide and only one goal: making themselves filthy rich before their house-of-cards schemes fly apart.

In a rational world, Rich and I agreed, someone would be going to jail for the crime against the country that has been perpetrated. I doubt that will happen. I'm not sure many laws have been broken because the necessary laws were not in place.

Instead of living in a fantasy world of unfettered capitalism, our political leaders should have provided wise regulation and oversight, not to stifle the free market, but to keep it from turning into a gambling den. Now, the gamblers have run off with their winnings, the casino has collapsed and the working people of America are left to clean up the wreckage.

Grandpa would be mad as hell.