What no one likes to admit is that the ones who really took a bath were the ones trying to make the quick bucks, or the ones who didn't know what they were doing and shouldn't have been "playing" the market in the first place. Or both.

You mean the 52% of Americans the Republican platform celebrates as newly-minted capitalists? If the game of capitalism is poisonous to such a large percentage of ordinary people, maybe we should reconsider whether it's the universal boon that you Rightists claim.

Are you familiar with the term "fiduciary responsibility"? All those people you disparage as stupid or greedy had a reasonable expectation of fiduciary responsibility from analysts and brokers to give their best advice, impartially and honestly. Instead they lied for their own profit.

If your banker embezzles your life savings, do you just shrug philosophically and figure you deserved it? Or might you feel you have a genuine grievance against somebody in a position of trust who betrayed that trust?

Don't blame the victim, Tom. There was genuine and widespread wrongdoing by smart people who knew their game better than the neophytes they sucked into it...neophytes whose only failing was to trust people our society holds up as worthy of trust.

You know: capitalists.

--Robert