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Wall
Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping
scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat
from the carcass of the middle class.
What
we Americans go through to pick a president is not only
crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of
millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort
to stir up hatred and anger on both sides.
An
unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street
a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.
This
is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national
pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company
to get away with doing it.
'Nobody
goes to jail.' This is the mantra of the financial-crisis
era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial
company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals
that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds
of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's
wealth - and nobody went to jail.
What
makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is
the way the media encourage us to believe that our fate
hangs on the every move of the promise-breaking, terminally
disappointing Teflon liars in Washington.
What
we have now is a situation where politicians get a whole
bunch of money from mainly business interests. Then once
they hold that office, they spend all their time in office
paying back over and over again those campaign contributions
through various favors and contracts and that sort of thing.
You
know what an effective deterrent to crime is? Jail! And
do you know what kind of criminal penalty actually makes
people think twice about committing crimes the next time?
The kind that actually comes out of some individual's pocket,
not fines that come out of the corporate kitty.
If
anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks
became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two
guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go
out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order
to eat.
It's
increasingly clear that governments, major corporations,
banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense
of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional
survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary
lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so
much as tiptoes across the informational line.
The
joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought,
responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to
do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach.
And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.
I think
that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying
to learn something new.
If
the law doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't
really have a system of law.
The
new America,instead, is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which
all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled
dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial
criminals and tehir castrato henchmen in government, whose
job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show.
In
a society governed passively by free markets and free elections,
organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
Matt
Taibbi on TPP:
Instead of standing in true partnership with unions and
working people and employing a strategy of forcing the rest
of the world to democratize and grant workers real rights
in exchange for access to American consumers, they've done
the opposite- beating up on the captured labor demographic
as a way to reassure big business.
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