Meltdown and Bailout: Why Our Economic System Is on the Verge of Collapse

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on September 22, 2008, Printed on September 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/99703/

The immediate cause of our financial meltdown is unchecked, unbridled greed. Mainstream newspapers and the business press are doing a fairly good job of explaining how the lack of regulatory oversight led us into this nightmare.

But you have to dig down one layer to find the cause of that situation. Under cover of the ideological euphemism known as the "free market" and with enormous cash investments over the past four decades, business elites have captured the regulatory organs of powerful democratic states -- nowhere more so than the United States -- and promoted their own narrow economic agendas for short-term gain.