Too big to succeed?

A year after the Lehman Brothers failure, and almost a year after the initial TARP program which was rolled out to save our financial industry by saving those businesses which were "too big to fail", one question remains: What was done to prevent this from happening again in the future?

If a company is "too big to fail", logic dictates that it is simply too big, and needs to be broken up, similar to what happened to AT&T several decades ago. Our government has not only failed to do this, but has instead encouraged the failing businesses to be bought out by other larger businesses (one example being the Merrill Lynch purchase by Bank of America). Instead of breaking up "too big to fail" businesses, we have even bigger "too big to fail" businesses.

One could look at this as a failure of leadership or economic stupidity, but the truth is a far worse thing: These companies are major sources of campaign funding. If they die, politicians will have to find other sources of campaign funding, which won't be nearly as generous. So the politicians happily handed out money they didn't have to these companies to keep them afloat. And now we are stuck with the bill for their largess.

The corruption in the U.S. government has reached astounding levels, where bribes fly back and forth between Wall Street and Washington, and all of it perfectly legal, because the lawmakers have made it legal.

If you think either the Republicans or Democrats are somehow immune to this, just look at the bailouts, which were approved by BOTH parties, and you will see just how deep the money runs in Washington.

It is time to throw out the bums, and I do not mean just the incumbents. I mean the two-party system. If you think you are wasting your vote by voting for a third party, I will tell you that your vote on any Republican or Democrat is just as wasted, because you are voting to maintain Wall Street's hold on power.