At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, what good was Lehman Brothers, anyway? And if Merrill Lynch was so bullish on America, why is it that, despite the torrent of foreign investment that flowed in to Lehman, Merrill and their Wall Street peers over the past half-decade, so few jobs were created in America during that period of "recovery"?
During the late, lamented Wall Street boom, America’s leading investment institutions were plenty bullish on China’s economy, on exotic financial devices built atop millions of bad loans, and, above all — judging by the unprecedented amount of wealth they showered on the Street — on themselves. The last thing our financial community was bullish on was America — that is, the America where the vast majority of Americans live and work.
Over the past eight years, the U.S. economy has created just 5 million new jobs, a number that is falling daily. The median income of American households has declined. Airports, bridges and roads are decaying. Rural wind-power facilities cannot light cities because our electrical grid has not been expanded. New Orleans has not been rebuilt. And as productive activity within the United States has ceased to be the prime target of investment, household consumption – more commonly known as shopping – has come to comprise more than 70 percent of our economy.
The banks’ underinvestment in America was hardly due to a lack of capital. But even as petrodollars and China’s dollars poured into Wall Street, the investment houses directed trillions into new and ever more dubious credit instruments, which yielded massive profits for Wall Streeters and their highflying investors, and put chump change into efforts to improve, to take just one example, American transportation.
Yesterday, I got a letter from the RNC asking why I hadn’t renewed my membership in the Republican National Committee! I assure you, that was a mistake. I’ve never been a member of any such thing. The closest I’ve come was a few years back when someone registered my then dog, Henry, as a supporter of Dick Cheney as a joke. So we got a sea of letters from Dick Cheney addressed to our Golden Retriever – even after he died. I finally wrote back and said, "I am a Golden Retriever, now dead, who is was a staunch Liberal Democrat, but that I really appreciate them spending the money on stamps to keep my former owner up with the thoughts of 
Mr. Cheney, the epicenter of evil in America, so he’d know what to oppose." The letters stopped.
I similarly annotated the RNC letter and doubt that I’ll hear from them again. In fact, I’m sure of it [I just hope I don’t hear from the N.S.A. or the F.B.I.]. But in reading the letter, I noticed it said something like, "We’ve got to stop them! They’re going to undo all of President Bush’s reforms that you’ve fought so hard to get passed" It went on, "high taxes," "regulation," "Liberal," "government spending," etc. – the usual hype. It didn’t mention the trillion dollars we’ve spent on a senseless war in Iraq, or the billions we’ve spent bailing out companies whose greed and mismanagement lead us to the brink of a collapse of the Stock Market.
At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, what good was Lehman Brothers, anyway? And if Merrill Lynch was so bullish on America, why is it that, despite the torrent of foreign investment that flowed in to Lehman, Merrill and their Wall Street peers over the past half-decade, so few jobs were created in America during that period of "recovery"?
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