"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks,” Congressman Spencer Bachus, Republican Alabama.
What are you doing Alabama?At a time of 10% unemployment, pay freezes for middle class federal workers, the planned for destruction of social security and unemployment coverage, every breaking news story is of unprecedented record profits for Wall Street; Wall Street Sees Record Revenue in Recovery From Bailout.
You got the rest of the union
to help you along
What's going wrong?~ Neil Young, Alabama
What benefit does Wall Street provide to the American people? They no longer loan money to emerging small businesses, they do not seek to find rivals to established corporate behemoths, they no longer regulate themselves, they increasing create more and more byzantine "products" which are divorced from an actual commodity or crafted item. Or as the NewYorker asked; What Good is Wall Street?
Since 1980, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in finance, broadly defined, has shot up from roughly five million to more than seven and a half million. During the same period, the profitability of the financial sector has increased greatly relative to other industries. Think of all the profits produced by businesses operating in the U.S. as a cake. Twenty-five years ago, the slice taken by financial firms was about a seventh of the whole. Last year, it was more than a quarter. (In 2006, at the peak of the boom, it was about a third.) In other words, during a period in which American companies have created iPhones, Home Depot, and Lipitor, the best place to work has been in an industry that doesn’t design, build, or sell a single tangible thing.And when trouble came and the economy was faced with a meltdown caused by the rampant malfeasance of Wall Street? Those selfsame people who create nothing, those who do nothing but play fancy computer games of transferring little 1s and 0s from one ledger to another, were saved on the backs of the workers. And since then? Why they've created no new jobs, they've tightened loans, they've foreclosed homes, they've sought to destroy healthcare, GM and the UAW and anything which represents a protection to the Middle Class and Poor in America.
And why do they get away with it? Apparently because of the Grand Scale of their Theft. I've tracked down and caught any number of thieves in my capacity as a police officer. The latest was a man who attempted to pass off false coupons he created himself for a pack of Marlboro's. It's a Deceptive Practice. He's poor and will undoubtedly get a conviction for a Class A Misdemeanor for trying to pass off the worthless paper.
But, what does Wall Street get for passing off Trillions in worthless paper again and again and again? They get the full faith and force of the Federal Government every time. Welcome to Serfdom.
Related:
A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Trading in Derivatives [The New York Times]
How Wall Street Creates Socialists - E.J. Dionne And from the article, The *Money* Shot:
“Well,” Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre sent to his girlfriend, “what if we created a ‘thing’, which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?”
Perhaps Fab once read the Karl Marx who wrote: “The more abstract money is, the less natural its relationship to other commodities.”
That Bachus quote will be added to my list of quotations, right below Mitch McConnel's, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
ReplyDeleteWe are becoming the serfs to the Lords of the Fourth Reich.