When you've lost the Wall Street Journal ...

Matt Taibbi once described a major Wall Street financial firm as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” If anything this description falls short of capturing the putrid essence of the finance industry. Manufacturing and R&D are the lifeblood of great nations. Wall Street is steadily killing them off. The day approaches when we will be left with only lawyers and financiers, the parasites without the host. We will have become a larger version of Britain, an empty shell of a once great state.

There has been almost no effective push-back against these bloodsuckers. Politicians from both parties are primarily lawyers, who wouldn't know the meaning of productive work if it bit them in the ass, and, with few exceptions, are in debt to the financiers for their electoral campaign spending. Surprisingly, a small push back has come from the Wall Street Journal, belatedly recognizing that the death of the host is not good for the business of the parasites. One article is from Michael Dell, of Dell computers, describing the baleful effect on his company of short term investor interests.

The second article is by William Galston, and is subtitled, 'Financiers fixated on the short-term are forcing CEOs into decisions that are bad for the country'. An unbiased look at the country's arc over the last thirty years is all that is required to see the truth of this statement. The maximization of shareholder value by activist investors comes at the cost of long-term prosperity for the company and ultimately for the country. At present we are on a path to irrelevancy. Once our technical edge is completely eroded we will no longer be a great nation, irrespective of how many nukes we possess. Just look at Russia.

N.B. Both articles can be accessed by pasting their titles into Google.