It enables the Robber Class to keep what they've stolen without fear of appropriate taxation and it slows the economy down so that any increase in their wealth has to come from either accounting tricks or risky investment in hedge funds playing the derivatives casino.

When the whole derivative structure finally collapses, it will take everything else with it.

like cockroaches on a red-hot griddle, trying to keep the whole house of cards standing. It's pathetic! I wonder how many US citizens are ready for what's coming ...

marketable skills that one can trade for food if one isn't a farmer who's got adequate rainfall.

That's how the poor survive, anyway, and we're all going to be poor if that house of cards topples.

I won't care what happens.

It's as if they have come to the river but don't see the water. Of course austerity is counterproductive to getting out of the Great Recession, but why is it being implemented in the 1st place? Why did the economy crash, and why are only the uber rich recovering, when no one else is?

The answer to all those questions is that this is how capitalism works, or doesn't work. Capitalism always causes crashes, always benefit the uber rich, the 1% over, the 99% or majority of people. Capitalism is a broken and corrupt system and needs to be replaced.

I still have hope that a highly regulated form of capitalism can work, along with removing private industry from some industries (such as health-care) where you don't want decisions to be based on profits. I guess that's European social democratic capitalism.

The obvious problem is that with unlimited corporate campaign money, unlimited rich person campaign money, lobbyist perks, payoffs, and lucrative future employment with private corporation for politicians that play according to the corporations' rules, regulation of capitalism is a joke.