Ponzi schemes and bad apples

True.  It's beginning to look as though our financial services sector has become one huge Ponzi scheme.  Bernard Madoff isn't some rogue trader or just a "bad apple."  Paul Krugman writes today:

"How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole? The financial services industry has claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income over the past generation, making the people who run the industry incredibly rich. Yet, at this point, it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it."

"Bad apples" seem to dominate the Republican party, most of the Bush administration, the top of the Pentagon and an embarrassing number of military, our regulatory agencies, and (yet to come) a big chunk of our economy.  We begin to sort through the elements of our political landscape and wonder who to trust.  Congress will be increasingly under pressure to deliver a stimulus package without pork, infrastructure projects without bridges to nowhere, and a measured response to the law-breaking and lies of the White House over the past eight years. That's when we'll learn whom we can trust in Congress and who has too much to gain from the private sector to do the job.  Krugman doesn't sound optimistic.

".... How much has our nation’s future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?"