The “Big Zero” decade may be over, but there’s still no escape hatch from this pyramid scheme of an economy.  We’re still beset with deflated (if not vaporized) retirement accounts, paying mortgages that are more than the home’s worth, paying usurious interest and fees to the big credit card banks – to get by, paying premium health insurance rates to health insurance companies that will ditch you as soon as you sneeze, and keeping our chins above or below the water of record unemployment.

Essentially, what started off as “trickle down” economics and deregulation of the Reagan Era has spun (with the reversal of the Glass-Steagall act of the Clinton era followed by Bush era “go shopping” leadership and Greenspan’s interest rate reductions) into Wall Street alchemy :  while the middle class was studiously diversifying their earnings into:  1.   failsafe savings & mortgage; 2. insurances; 3.  retirement; 4.  (if affordable) investment; the boys in the smoke-filled back room stirred 1 through 4 (savings, insurance, and investment) into one big usurious, fraudulent bank.  Additionally, not only did they restrict the safety-valve (vest) bankruptcy clause out of the financial contract, our interest rates on our savings went bear-market too.  Trickle down economics has become a washed up economy.  We’re all victims of this economic Katrina.  Slavery may have been sanitized by exporting it to overseas sweatshops, but while we were charging up our credit cards with dollar-store tchochkes, Wall Street seduced our government into prostituting the middle class and delivering it into middleman slavery.

Obama may be President, but here is our Pharoah (Lloyd Blankfein, CEO, Goldman Sachs:  doing, as his holier-than-thou-self says, “God’s work”):  

This guy’s so enrapt with his financial jihad that he can’t see the water rising.

Fortunately, among the sentient, there is Elizabeth Warren rendering the financial fiasco for what it is with her article America Without a Middle Class.  Additionally, tune into Huffington Post’s “Move Your Money” if you’re interested in undermining the big bank alchemy and supporting local lending.

It surprises me that for all the  financial “talent” lost and dispersed from the big investment banks that closed down through the financial crisis (Bear Stearns et al) that no one has developed the infrastructure to facilitate microlending in our own country.  Between the gaseously high risk of the stock market and the one-point-something percent savings rate of CD’s, I’d love to help chip away at the big banks’ fangs and buy someone else’s debt at half (or anything better than one-point-something percent) the interest rate being paid – if there was some safe (for both parties – no thuggery), secure, insured way to lend money directly.  We have Paypal, we have Kiva Lending, why don’t we have something to help our fellow citizens out?  That’s REAL deregulation.

Happy New Year and New Decade!  Goodbye “Big Zero” (Blankfein), this decade the dime is ours!