With the election of Ronald Reagan, the regulatory system began to be dismantled while leaving the inherent psychopathology of these corporations not rehabilitated. When Glass-Steagall was repealed and the Future Commodities Trading act was approved under Bill Clinton by psychopathic financial giants in his administration, “we basically let the psychopath off its leash,” says Bakan. “We’ve let it run amok. We’ve taken away all the constraints that were in place.” The illusion that deregulation would improve the economy from the top down is as irrational as giving a crack addict more cocaine to reduce his habit. Now Wall Street firms and large corporations can essentially self-regulate, which is the same as saying there is no regulation at all. Bakan poses the question, “would you ever ask a psychopath to self-regulate himself?” But that is exactly what we have today and the consequences are self-evident as we witness the erosion of Constitutional rights and the emergence of a distinctly postmodern police state indoctrinated to protect corporate interests over the needs and demands of the American public.
The idea that Wall Street and policy experts surrounding the president are among the “best and brightest” in America is a deceptive ruse of propaganda spin. When Dr. Bayer applies his evaluative model to his Wall Street patients, the bottom line is that the revenues they generate and who they succeed in influencing in order to protect the firm’s interests is all that matters. The prestige of a person’s alma mater, ZIP code and family background is of little consequence. Speaking about Manhattan’s financial community, he described it as “an insane den of elitism and money mongrels, frankly, and people are competitive and actually believe they are special.”
The TARP and subsequent taxpayer bailouts of the banking industry during the Bush and Obama administrations may be one of the largest economic crimes ever committed by American presidents. These bailouts are indicative of just how dysfunctional and subservient to the power elite our nation has become. Since the 2008 derivative collapse, the economic gap has steadily widened and the middle class is sinking to its lowest point in history.

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