May 23, 2011
I’m writing because my family and I were affected by the economic collapse of 2008, and we don’t want it to happen again.
One way to change the incentives so Wall Street doesn’t collapse our economy again would be for regulators to set up a way for shareholders to grab back ill-gotten gains.
If it turns out that the profits in a given year were built on shoddy practices that become clear in the out-years, those bonus payments should be forfeited.
It is not in the interest of our nation to skim off the best and brightest from our business schools and essentially turn them into a class of greedy, scheming thieves. Capitalism works when there is an infrastructure in place to curb excesses and to outlaw immoral practices such as the plundering of an entire economy. We need to get that infrastructure in place or our nation will be destroyed. It is not right that a very few should benefit to the tune of millions and billions at the expense of everyone else. In time, a system that permits and condones such practices will destroy itself as a democracy; and turn ever so swiftly into an oligarchy or a monarchy. We cannot allow this to happen to America--the hope of mankind.
Please adopt rules that can return order and common sense to our financial system. Let's get the thieves out of our financial institutions and larger financial infrastructure and into some other line of endeavor that does not have the ability to bring down the nation. We'd be better off if they all just went back to being bank robbers or pirates on the high seas. That is where their ilk belong. The government should be protecting the welfare of the whole, and the thieves need to be forced out into arenas where the government can deal with them through its police forces, its FBI, its national guard, and its armed forces. This can be done by insuring that financial institutions can no longer be operated as engines generating obscene wealth for the few. That will incentivize the thieves to turn elsewhere for their plundering. Don't leave the thieves in their current position as foxes guarding the hen-houses.
Thank you for considering my comment,
Loraine Parkinson