From Washington Times comments

DE BORCHGRAVE: Capitalist Abyss

I agree with Mr. de Borchgrave's commentary above, and with the comments of soxconn and Jaeger, below. But there is another critically-important factor in this national tragedy: the education-level of the public. The general public is now so undereducated that at least a third of the high-school graduates can't do enough simple math to hold down a job on a production line or make change while running a cash register. Thus, when someone comes along and offers them a mortgage that their income can't possibly sustain, or an adjustable-rate mortgage with sky-high premiums down the road, or a car lease with a balloon payment, they simply have no idea what they're dealing with.

Until about 45 years ago, our public-school system was run under the tenets of conservatism: its goal was to educate the educable children; and it understood clearly that the perfect is the enemy of the good. 85% - 87% of the children are educable; the rest are dysfunctional, meaning that many are disruptive, and some are actually dangerous; so the schools moved them out of the mainstream. You can't teach if you don't have discipline; so the schools were expected to discipline the children. The system was not perfect, but it created an American public with enough smarts to deal effectively with the world around them.

Then the liberals took over. The Earl Warren Supreme Court undercut fatally the authority of the schools to maintain discipline, and converted the schools from education centers for the educable into holding pens for all of the children (ironically, President George W. Bush's recent slogan, "No Child Left Behind," expresses perfectly that mentality). Then the schools were integrated racially in such a way as to emphasize the speed and smoothness of the integration, for political purposes; in order to attain those ends, the schools had to drop their education standards, and invent fluff courses and social promotions to play the necessary looking-good games; and those horrible expediencies persist today. The liberals junked the traditional courses and teaching methods, and substituted Rousseau's and John Dewey's proven-unworkable programs and techniques. The liberal trade-unions for teachers then gained so much political clout that they could successfully stonewall any real attempts to reform the system. This combination of educational catastrophes constitutes the perfect storm.
The result is that today, much of the American public is barely functional. Therefore, it provides endless numbers of suckers who can be scammed with pathetic ease by the greedheads who run so many of our financial institutions these days. And that is one of the key reasons why the greedheads in business and the liberals in Congress have been able to wreak such destruction upon our economy.