If you want to know why people are protesting on Wall Street, it’s very simple. Author and former IMF official Jon Perkins said it very succinctly: “Elected officials – including the President – no longer write the laws; the corporate lobbyists write and pass them through our elected officials, whose campaigns they finance.”
Any insinuation that says the protester’s demands are not clear, or that they just want to provoke “class warfare” are either foolish or inherently dishonest. Its clear what the protest are about, even if you disagree with some of the signs, there’s a strong sense that what goes on in Washington DC is little more than theater. We have to pass laws so that we can find out later that the “jobs bill” privatizes our infrastructure.
When a company is granted so much political power that they are successfully able to rewrite laws to avoid paying taxes or create other kinds of specifically tailored legislation, you no longer have a representative democracy, but a corporatocracy.
The alliance between business and government is especially strong with the banking sector. Investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase donate to both political parties, even in the same election for the same office to ensure their interests. These and other investment banks donate more to the political process than any other industry.
Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund calls the United States an emerging oligarchy, or a government in which the power structure resides with only a few well connected people. Here, he describes how emerging market economies develop.
“[The corporations] reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise… At the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as… the assumption of private debt obligations by the government.”
This government favoritism in which private debt is put on to the taxpayers should remind you of the TARP bailout, where $700 billion was transferred directly into bank balance sheets. Those bailouts continue by the way in the form of no-interest-loans to US and foreign banks.
Meanwhile, no one has been prosecuted for the illegal activities the banks undertook before and after the crisis in 2008. The list of crimes is numerous including perjury, laundering drug money, forgery, and making “sub-prime” loans to people the banks knew could never pay. That of course doesn’t include the more fundamental crimes of completely buying our government.
One of our primary reasons for fighting the Revolutionary War was to escape unfair loan practices imposed on the people by the British. They would make loans they knew could never be repaid as a precursor to seizing the property at a bargain. They made the farmers pay rent on the land they used to own.
Schemes like this have continued throughout our history, but ever since the Revolution, law has stated that whenever a loan is made with the knowledge that the loan cannot be repaid, it is void. Greece should be free, because it’s government is corrupt. The American homeowner should be freed because he was lied to about the true cost of his home. And the American people should be freed from the banking establishment that seeks to liquidate our assets for their bottom line.
We will become Greece in a few years if we do not take this seriously. Our cause is the spiritual and moral equivalent of the American Revolution and our duty no less great. I strongly urge you to sign the petition to “get money out” (www.getmoneyout.com) and support your local #occupy protests.
