So Congress enacted some  financial reforms. Big deal. Mere window dressing. Wall Street must be drunk on Dom Perignon, celebrating the huge paid-offs from their successful $400 million investment by lobbyists to “kill reforms” And that GOP concession? Phony. Wall Street will reward them for the loopholes denuding Dodd’s financial reforms. And even with all his rants about fat-cats, Obama wins. Eventually Wall Street will spend another $400 million to keep Obama in office for a second term.

“Change? Yes we can?” That’s funny today. Obama is now Wall Street’s best asset, their new Trojan Horse replacing Hank Paulson, a troika with Bernanke, Geithner. Wall Street always gets what they want. And you can bet they’ll cough up yet another $400 million keeping lawyers and lobbyists busy fighting SEC regulations, to make sure its back to business-as-usual with free-market Reaganomics capitalism. Spending $400 million is chump change compared to the hundreds of billions Wall Street gets cheap from the Treasury and Fed, by playing us taxpayers for suckers after screwing up the economy and triggering the 2008 meltdown. Yes, we’re suckers, and Wall Street will take advantage of us the next time they meltdown, coming soon.

What can you do? Shift focus from “them” to you. You need a whole new strategy. Are you ready? Okay. First, let’s assume you really are tired of the pain of fighting Wall Street. You are? Good. Then you’ve had an epiphany … an “awakening” … you’ve had one of those rare “ah-ha!” moments … what Zen masters call “enlightenment” … you finally see “the light” … the futility of denying reality … and as you see into this new reality, you surrender the fight, you accept these six secret “wisdoms” underlying your new investment strategy:

First. Accept that Wall Street money calls the shots in Washington. Period!
Seriously, stop fighting Wall Street. They won. Admit it. You join with Wall Street in spirit. You flow with this new reality, without being tortured by inner anger because it’s eating you up, worse than marching with the Tea Party. Acceptance works for the president, he’s obviously “at one” with Wall Street. Peace of mind is more important. Stop fighting. Do it willing, not begrudgingly, not as an indentured servant but as a true partner capitalizing on the simple reality that Wall Street is, in fact, running America. (More)

Allan Meltzer’s Op-Ed in The Journal. “Market Failure or Government Failure?” is a must-read. While CMU Professor Meltzer, author of the definitive History of The Federal Reserve, sticks to his conservative free-market ideology, it’s obvious some ambivalence exists, as his headline reveals: Is it market failure? Is it government failure? The truth is, of course, it’s both, so he hedges his bet: “Regulation often fails either because regulators are better at announcing rules than at enforcing them, or because the regulated circumvent the regulations.”

But step outside partisan ideology and you see a third alternative: In the last generation free-market Reaganomics has virtually replaced the original Adam Smith’s 1776 model of capitalism, and is now America’s leading economic ideology. That’s true for both political parties as well as fringe political groups, for Wall Street and Main Street, for consumers and investors as well as American voters. Moreover, today’s government is little more an extension of the new capitalism that’s controlled by Wall Street.

What most distinguishes the “New American Capitalism” from Smith’s original brand of capitalism? We’ve lost our ”soul.” In the New Capitalism there is no soul, it is dead. Wall Street, the original spirit-guide of capitalism is now soulless, lacking a moral compass. That was not the goal of Smith’s model: In his Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith clearly saw capitalism driven by a moral code. The “invisible hand” guiding capitalism and government was not a soulless network of materialistic algorithms designed simply to maximize wealth and concentrate power in the hands of the few. But it is today. We wrote about this historic turning point at length for MarketWatch in “The Death of the ‘Soul of Capitalism:’ 25 reasons why America has ‘lost its soul’ and collapse is inevitable.” (More)