Wow ... everything ... a very, very hard truth, huh?

Wow. By the way, what's your definition of "hard" or "truth"?

Quote - And obviously, they're not.

It's not so obvious to a lot of folks that wars are not being waged for and by the oil industry -- at least indirectly. Aside from the historical record of the oil companies pressuring the US government (which has often given in to said pressure) to stop this or that ruler for making this or that country a less profitable place for them, the current war was started by a couple of guys who are life-long representatives of ... gosh, the oil industry. Second, leaving our soldiers out of things for the moment, a lot of the contractors over there are being paid for by, gosh, the taxpayers, to, among other things, gosh, guard the interests of the oil industry ... and there is no doubt whatsoever that the oil industry has spent considerable money funding bogus research for the purpose of battling environmental concerns, or to convince the public of their innocent purity -- at least some of which just has to qualify as propaganda, like for example, when they tell you in their ads how much they are doing for the environment because they care, when in fact they were dragged fighting and screaming to it after years of litigation, and are being forced to do it by law.

Quote - And if we had any sense of moral outrage, we'd haul all of them up for crimes against humanity.

And ... as for the equivalence you draw between overzealous venture capital investment in the internet -- which was lost due to business failures and withdrawn once investors began to realize the potential they'd thought was just around the corner was a little further off than that, and once it was realized that there were an inadequate number of geeks and nerds to bring some of the more ambitious ideas to life in an environment in which everyone was competing for said geeks and nerds, and that not every idea that popped into someone's head was a worthwhile business proposition just because it had some relation to the internet -- and commodities traders, and then the suggestion that we should haul all such "speculators" up for "crimes against humanity," well ... c'mon. What's your deal? Do you just hate all investors or what? And if so, what shall we replace them with?

Capitalism is, by its nature, about investment. Investors are, by their nature, trying to make money. Further, the "they" you are referring to is not just guys in "overpriced suits" by any absurd stretch of the imagination. And while government policy can make certain types of investment more or less appealing, no one really much controls how investors decide to invest. Who would you suggest do that? And anxiety and panic and fear, as well as the lure of easy money, are even harder to control.

So -- as one apparently overly convinced of your own expertise in economics -- how would you fix things?, and how can you, or anyone, suggest people who are only doing what people have always done in uncertain, fearful times, are all guilty of crimes against humanity?, and after you've put away all the retirees and kids' parents along with the "overpriced suit" types, how will that have helped, or prevent investors (i.e., people) from continuing to do what investors (i.e., people) have always done in scary times?