“There may not be a person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit. In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.”

Go read the whole thing; it says what I was going to say — no terrorist has done what our banks have done. Although we were changed by the attacks on 9/11 — we became more vigilant and (unfortunately) more willing to allow the erosion of our civil liberties — we essentially went about our business. Soon after the attacks, President Bush told us to go shopping and we did.

Unfortunately, after the attack by Wall Street terrorists, we can no longer go shopping. The attacks by Wall Street terrorists have left far too many of us unemployed and many more of us poorer than we were a decade ago.

Foreign terrorists could not bring us down. Wall Street has.

What has brought us down is a fragitious banking system fraught with corruption and sick with decades that allowed the top one percent of one percent to draw off capital from the rest of us. Worse still, it was a system that took our hard-earned money and gambled it away. In an instant, millions saw their retirement funds dwindle into nothing — and with no apologies.

Had our economy been the result of a plot by Al Qaeda and we knew who those perpetrators were, we would hunt them down to the ends of the earth and, once caught, either execute them on the spot or toss them into a dark hole for the rest of their lives.

Yet, while we know who is responsible for this current economic crisis, there have been no indictments, no jail sentences, no firing squads. Quite the opposite, we decided that the terrorists who destroyed our economy were the only ones smart enough to get us out of this mess and rewarded them with trillions in tax dollars. So how did they show their gratitude? By returning to the same terrorist activities that led to the meltdown in the first place: Gambling on risky bets while not sharing a single penny of their unearned largesse with the very people who funded their bailout.

Worse, they are now about to reward themselves with bonuses that, by some estimates, will rival those of boom years. And, apparently, there is nothing we can (or will) do about it, mostly because those same banks have taken our tax dollars to fund billions in lobbying congress in an attempt to block regulation and prop up the status quo.

There is a segment (a thankfully shrinking segment) of the population who continue to say that the answer is less regulation, to let the markets correct themselves. The Laffer Curve? The trickle-down theory? Guess what, it hasn’t worked. Our 30-year experiment in market economics has failed and we’re worse for wear, scrabbling back to be the country we once were. Worse than that, the expense of adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have potentially put China and India in the catbird seat for this century.

What has happened to our country, the extent that greed, corruption and sheer incompetence has destroyed so many nest eggs and driven people from their homes — and jobs — has been far more damaging than any terrorist act on our soil. It should be time to make those responsible pay.

I’m not holding my breath.

In the meantime, there is something we as individuals can do to make sure that no bank is “too big to fail” by moving our money from one of the “Big Four” (Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase or Wells Fargo into a smaller, local bank. An online movement has alread started at http://moveyourmoney.info/ — take a look there to see what local banks have a B-plus rating or higher, then make a decision if you want to show Wall Street that you’re saying “No” to terrorism.