Do you remember the first time you saw a rain drenched Peter Finch scream, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”? We do. We were too young to see Network in the cinema (the movie came out the year we were born: 1976). Instead, we watched it late one night on TV. And we’ll never forget the moment when Finch’s character, news anchor Howard Beale, arrives in the television studio in his tan raincoat with a deranged look on his face and begins to speak to camera.

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be!

We all know things are bad – worse than bad – they’re crazy.

It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”

Well, I’m not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad.

You’ve gotta say, “I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!”

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!!”

Network was released just two years after the 1973-74 stock market crash. And Beale’s mad rant to camera was very much a product of its time, capturing brilliantly the out-of-control inflation, the recession, the Cold War.

But we bring it to your attention today because Beale could just as well be talking about our “Great Recession,” the one brought on by easy credit, corrupt government, shoddy regulation, bungling corporate management and the credulity of the herd. And because Beale’s speech has one vital ingredient, something that’s sorely missing from our current predicament: anger.

So today, dear reader, we’re going to get mad, Howard Beale-style. We’re going to stick our head out the window and yell. And if you’re reading this, wherever you are, we ask you to do the same. Get mad… Remember who’s responsible… And most important, start putting in place your plan to survive this whole stinking mess.

As the author of Bailout Nation, Barry Ritholz, wrote last week at The Daily Reckoning, the recklessness and incompetence that led to the economic meltdown seemed to be a team effort, “but that does not mean we cannot attempt to highlight those whose contributions have disproportionately led to the final catastrophe.”

First on Ritholz’s list of culprits, and on ours, is the man they once called “the Maestro,” former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. According to Ritholz,

Several of Greenspan’s policies proved to be wildly misguided: the regular interventions to protect asset prices and bail out investors, the irresponsibly low rates after the post-2000 crash, and his nonfeasance in supervising lending. Most of all, it was his deeply held philosophical conviction that all regulations are bad, and are to be avoided at all cost. We now know what that cost is, and it’s astronomical.

Here we part company with Ritholz. The lack of regulation did not cause the collapse. It was bad regulation combined with the implicit promise of government bailouts led to the extravagant and poorly calibrated lending and financial risk taking that finally blew up the financial markets last year.

But whatever your view on Greenspan’s regulatory errors, his decision to keep interest rates artificially following the 2000 stock market crash was incredibly dimwitted. First, it facilitated the re-election of one of the nation’s most blundering presidents George W Bush in 2004. Second, it fueled mass speculation. This led to an inflationary spiral that pushed commodities prices and real estate valuations into the stratosphere.

Of course, the Maestro was just doing his bidding. And who knows, maybe the old fool really did believe that all that funny money would one day find a good home.

Congress, on the other hand, was supposed to look out for the interests of the American people and uphold the Constitution. Yet over the years it has eroded so much of what once made America great.

Instead of a free market, it has given us central planning, fiat money, the biggest deficit of any serious country in the world. It has destroyed the value of the dollar. It has given us a national debt, the interest on which cost the American taxpayer $260 billion last year alone. It has given us Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and laws criminalizing banks’ failure to lend to subprime borrowers. It has given us an unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare that now measures just under $100 trillion or 700% of annual GDP.

On Congress’s watch, the America that routed Hitler’s armies, rebuilt Europe and defeated the Soviet Union has been brought to its knees.

Maybe we’re just tired and grumpy. We’re on our way to Berlin to see how the German economy is holding up, and we’ve been traveling all day. But we see this as reason to get mad.

As the ancient Greeks knew well every crisis is an opportunity. (It’s engrained into their language: the original Greek word “crisis” translates into opportunity.) The Great Depression led to the creation of the Securities Exchange Commission, deposit insurance and the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment and retail banking.

To what end will the current crop of American politicians use this “Great Recession” (as James Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer calls it) or “Greater Depression” (as Casey Research’s Doug Casey terms it)?

To begin, we might reasonably expect our dear leaders to allow the crisis do its work. As Joseph Schumpeter taught us, and important function of economic crises such as the one we’re now experiencing is they help rebalance an economy and make it more efficient.

According to Schumpeter’s core idea of “creative destruction,” downturns, if left to their own devices, have the positive effect of weeding out inefficient and failed companies and allowing more capable businesses take their place. They also encourage investors to reallocate their capital sectors and businesses with more chance of success.

On a wider scale, our current crisis is perhaps a once off chance to rebalance global trade – something that has been dangerously out of whack for some time now. We know that leading up to the collapse Americans lived beyond their means: they spent too much money they didn’t have. Meanwhile, the Chinese saved too much and spent too little. As a result, America imported (and consumed) too much and exported (and produced) too little.

This is now naturally being rebalanced: personal savings rates in the US are now rising back toward their historical average. The Bureau of Economic Analysis revealed that Americans in May on average saved 6.9% of their after-tax income – the highest level in 15 years.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and those that surround him in the Obama administration appear to have a different view of the opportunity that’s been created by the current crisis. (Readers will recall that Emanuel famously urged his fellow Democrats to remember never to let “a serious crisis go to waste … it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”)

Unfortunately, Team Obama isn’t much interested in Schumpeter’s creative destruction or the allowing debt-crippled Americans save and pay down their debts. Instead, it’s bent on the twin political wonders of bailouts and ‘stimulus’ packages.

The government has so far spent $439 billion of the $700 billion TARP slush fund on bailing out failed banks, insurers and auto makers. (So much for creative destruction.)

The Congressional Budget Office now admits that most of the money it shelled out to GM, Chrysler and their financial arms and suppliers ($55 billion) and to AIG ($70 billion) will be lost. And losses for the bailouts of Citigroup and Bank of America are now expected to come in at $9 billion and $10 billion respectively. (Yes, dear reader, we’re angry…)

President Obama billed the first ‘stimulus’ package as “making dramatic investments that would revive our flagging economy.” But as we know now, the truth lies elsewhere. The Wall Street Journal estimates only “about 12 cents of every $1” of that particular spending bill is “for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus.”

The 647-page bill rushed through Congress was impenetrable enough to keep all but the most determined snoops away. But we know now it contains $1 billion for Amtrak, a railroad that hasn’t turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 billion for the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research; $650 for to pay for digital TV conversion coupons; and $150 for the Smithsonian (among other boondoggles).

We also know that the unemployment rate today is 9.5% – nearly 20% higher than the Obama White House said it would be with its much-hyped $787 billion ‘stimulus’ package in place.  And that it in May it took $6.52 stimulus dollars to increase consumer spending by $1. As David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff puts it, the money from Uncle Sam is going into the coffee can instead of being used to buy more coffee: Americans are saving, rather than spending, their stimulus.

In addition to the Obama’s first failed ‘stimulus,’ a second spending bonanza is now being proposed. This is a grave mistake. Americans are finally saving more and consuming less. They are even taking tentative steps to paying down their all too onerous debt burdens.

What does the government do confronted with this prudent behavior? It panics. And it immediately tries to reverse the trend. It borrows money out of pocket from foreigners and prints dollars to try to jumpstart the very trend – debt-driven spending – that led us to the current collapse.

The truth is no amount of Keynesian stimulus will replace the roughly $12 trillion lost in household wealth. Former political lights tried this throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The result? Poor growth and high inflation.

We can’t escape the fact that overspending, overborrowing and undersaving caused this crisis. It’s wrong to believe that it’s also the cure.