Pay Your Money, Take Your Chances

--Lalo Alcarez

Ranger Question of the Day:
USAToday headline --
"Deportation Tears Families Apart";
Don't endless wars tear families apart, too?
How about relentless financial insecurity?

This sector of the world about which
science could not utter a single word
was nothing less than this:
what it is like to be an individual living
in the United States in the twentieth century
--Diagnosing The Modern Malaise,
Walker Percy
__________________

Take your pick: What is the greater threat to welfare of the average taxpaying U.S. citizen -- Terrorism, or Wall Street?

Hundreds of billions of dollars were lost or stolen by the denizens of the large corporate banks. To date there have been no criminal prosecutions of these thieves.

Contrast this white collar crime with that of a piddling player like Jose Pimenthal, recently arrested on terrorism charges in the town that brought us the sub-prime debacle. Pimenthal is a pathetic wannabe devoid of any operational terrorist skills and who -- like all the other poor zhlubs -- will be convicted of terrorist activity and will spend the rest of his sorry life in a maximum security prison.

Pimenthal's poverty of thought should have been evident in his misplaced decision to go from being Hispanic to Hispanic-Muslim, and plotting bomb attacks against the United States Postal Service, and entity imploding nicely without any two-bit help from another bomber manque with a WMD (weapon of minor destruction).

Weigh the harm caused by a Pimenthal against that perpetrated by the respected investment bankers on Wall Street. The ineffective pipe bomb that Pimenthal was allegedly trying to build would have been as effective as flatus in a windstorm; the fallout from the financial meltdown is still cycling the globe.

We need some perspective on the reality of our lives.

Like the news show host says, The Answer: Bankers are more dangerous than domestic terrorists.