When Greed and Ignorance Eliminate Truth

Miles Fiedler (Dallas Roberts), a fictional think tank analyst at a fictional New York City based federal intelligence agency on AMC's new show, Rubicon, in a frenzied state, said something like, 'When you incentivize sons of bitches should it be any surprise the world's going to hell', and right there, he summed up what's wrong with our once great nation.

After decades of  encouraging  greed, power and profit to trump everything else, it's no wonder our financial system transformed into something that only works for those at the very top.  As John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard says, “We have turned an industry of stewardship and turned it into a industry of salesmanship”.

Greed has replaced the integrity of the marketplace. Our financial system is now a financial industry whose agenda includes making the ignorant more ignorant, which in turn makes the wealthy, wealthier.

Questions are not stupid; the stupidity is in not asking them. Once you engage yourself and start inquiring, every effort will be made to make you feel stupid and worthless. Just know, the more stupid and worthless you are made to feel, the closer you are to the truth.

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." -- Adam Smith. (1776). Wealth of Nations

"Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speech in Philadelphia on June 27, 1936

"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936 speech