OK. What In Hell Was THAT All In Aid Of?

Stock market up. Stock market down.  Stock market up. Down. Up. Down.

Not a single shoe did the Stock Market manufacture.  Not a bridge, a road.  It planted no crops, taught no child, ministered to no sick person.  It didn't build a single house, repair a single car, machine a single die, pour so much as one ingot of steel. 

It did absolutely nothing to rebuild America.  It has now even become uncoupled from "real value," "real businesses," "real things," and is simply a big casino for a tiny handful of The International Monied Class. The disconnect is dangerous for America because "real" people have bought into the notion that somehow they are part of the International Monied Class, that the market will affect their real life, that in pandering to Wall Street, Congress (a wholly owned subsidiary of both Wall Street & Multi-national corporations --Which, as Mitt Romney reminded an outraged senior citizen in Iowa, "are people," as in "Corporations are people."), is somehow going to "help" the average working stiff.  It won't. 

So decoupled has Wall Street become from reality, that stocks that used to be valued and traded based on  actual value, have now become disconnected algorithms -- meaningless bits of data moving at the speed of light, split second speculation based on . . .  split second speculation, pure gambling and gaming of the system, totally divorced from the real Wealth of Nations, a con game that enriches a few at the expense of everyone else.

Matt Taibbi is right: America has now become Griftopia, a nation of grifters, addicted to the blinking Big Spin, frantically buying lottery tickets, penny-ante day traders, eyes glued to the streaming stock numbers, dreaming of the big payday that will never come because in Griftopia, the Street is being run by and for the benefit of a handful of major players.  And as for the "real" people?  They're the mooks and marks.

Yowsa, yowsa.  Step right up.