“Why every president from Reagan through Obama has put Wall Street before Main Street“, by Michael Hirsch.
For the last thirty years, it has been the mantra of Washington, Wall Street, and economic academia: The fastest way to economic growth is to make financial markets happy. The few economists and government watchdogs who took exception to this theory or pointed out some of the dangerous trends that accompanied it were either castigated, dismissed as cranks, or ignored. How could this happen? How could five successive presidents from both parties pursue and expand an economic policy that hollowed out the American economy and produced the worst economic catastrophe since 1929?
It was at least partly control fraud, the deliberate looting of a nation or company by a few at the top. Former regulator William Black developed the concept of control fraud, and in a crucial phrase said, the failure of the entity is not a failure of the control fraud.
Bill Clinton once said “You mean to tell me that the success of my [economic] program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?”
But bow to them he did, and and was then instrumental in the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which directly greased the way for the rise of the banksters and our current financial collapse.
So, how do we take back our country?
We don’t. It’s over.
The answer is simple but not easy: stop patronizing Wall Street. Make the federal government irrelevant by providing for our own needs. But we’re too busy buying cheap goods from China, sold by a Wall Street favorite and financed by an investment bank, delivered by ship and truck burning lots of oil per mile, and shipping the profits to a town far away, paid for by punching the clock at another Wall Street firm, and desired because we see them on our (made in Korea) TV.
Screw them. Reuse what we’ve got. Build our own. Grow our own. Employ ourselves. Buy local. Or skip it completely. And above all, pay cash, not credit card.
The success of the corporate plutocracy depends on our culture of consumption, which not only enslaves us, it’s making the planet uninhabitable. Stop consuming, and they hurt.
DJ’s dead on. Sort of like Bill Hicks said, let’s all own three shirts and one pair of jeans and bankrupt the f***ers.