1981–1989
President Reagan and his staff broke the unions and brought deregulation. Laws exist for two reasons, to take your money or your land. Corporations exist for one reason, to take your money. With no regulations and no oversight to protect the commons, the common wealth, or the common people, the Church of Corporate Greed stole from all of us, didn't go to trial, didn't have to plead guilty, no one went to jail, and they profited.

Both Reagan and the economist Milton Friedman believed that the American economy was hampered by excessive economic controls. "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." They opposed government regulation of many types and supported school choice. They had a large influence on economists such as Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve's response to the financial crisis of 2007-2010. All these policy charges did was strip protections away for the commons, common wealth, and common people. There was no evidence that there was any truth that any of these changes. [ FAIR TRADE Chasing Slave Labor and Human Rights in China ]

Republicans and Corporatists have always hated Unions.
They hated them in FDR's day, and they hate them today. They hate them because unions stand in the way of gross exploitation and obscene profit maximization. If there are no unions around and no government regulation, employers can treat their workers as shabbily as they want and pay them as poorly as they want, and we'd be back to the Grapes of Wrath.

BRIDGE FROM THE 1980s TO THE CURRENT DECADE

Whose Moral Relativism?
As Zakaria pointed out that Wall Street was not alone. "Most of what happened over the past decade (1990's) across the world was legal. Bankers did what they were allowed to do under the law. Politicians did what they thought the system asked of them. Bureaucrats were not exchanging cash for favors. But very few people acted responsibly, honorably or nobly (the very word sounds odd today). This might sound like a small point, but it is not. No system capitalism, socialism, whatever can work without a sense of ethics and values at its core. No matter what reforms we put in place, without common sense, judgment and an ethical standard, they will prove inadequate. We will never know where the next bubble will form, what the next innovations will look like and where excesses will build up. But we can ask that people steer themselves and their institutions with a greater reliance on a moral compass."

On Wall Street, if you commit a massive crime, if you steal not a thousand dollars, but a billion dollars, you get to walk away from it. You get to give a little bit of the money back, and then you get to walk away, and nobody goes to jail, and nobody ever hears about it.

"IF YOU OWE THE BANK $100 THAT'S YOUR PROBLEM. IF YOU OWE THE BANK $100 MILLION, THAT'S THE BANK'S PROBLEM." — JP GETTY

Lying is institutionalized. You can blame insititutions, you can blame the President.  If the President can lie, why shouldn't everyone? It's an epidemic.  From Wall Street down to Main Street.  The truth is for losers, and the connected [ Wall Street, University, Government ] conspire to get away with it, and do.

Center For Responsible Spending mortgage lending policy legislation regulators regulators failure to enforce consumer protections.