Michael Thomas writes for Newsweek: "But it won't just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street's tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced."
Chief executive officers from eight of the largest US banks receiving government aid testify at a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, DC, 02/11/09 (photo: Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg)
"There Will Be Violence, Mark My Words"
28 December 11
magine a vast field on which a terrible battle has recently been fought, the bare ground cratered by fusillade after fusillade of heavy artillery, trees reduced to blackened stumps, wisps of toxic gas hanging in the gray, and corpses everywhere.
A terrible scene, made worse by the sound of distant laughter, because somehow, on the heights commanding the dead zone, the officers' club has made it through intact. From its balconies flutter bunting, and across the blasted landscape there comes a chorus of hearty male voices in counterpoint to the wheedling of cadres of wheel-greasers, the click of betting chips, the orotund declamations of a visiting congressional delegation: in sum, the celebratory hullabaloo of a class of people that has sent entire nations off to perish but whose only concern right now is whether the '11 is ready to drink and who'll see to tipping the servants. The notion that there might be someone or some force out there getting ready to slouch toward the buttonwood tree to exact retribution scarcely ruffles the celebrants' joy.
Ah, Wall Street. As it was in the beginning, is now, and hopes to God it ever will be, world without end. Amen.
Or so it seems to me. It was in May 1961 that a series of circumstances took me from the hushed precincts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I was working as a curatorial assistant in the European Paintings Department, to Lehman Brothers, to begin what for the next 30 years would be an involvement - I hesitate to call it "a career" - in investment banking. I would promote and execute deals, sit on boards, kiss ass, and lie through my teeth: the whole megillah. In consequence of which, I would wear Savile Row and carry a Hermès briefcase. I had Mme. Claude's home number in Paris and I frequented the best clubs in a half-dozen cities. But I had a problem: I was unable to develop the anticommunitarian moral opacity that is the key to real success on Wall Street.
I had my doubts from the beginning. A few months after I started to work downtown, I ran into an old friend from college and before, a man later to become one of New York's most esteemed writers and editors.
"So," he asked, "how do you like what you're doing now?"
"I like it quite a lot," I said. And this was true: these were new frontiers for me, the pace was lively, the money was good enough ($6,500 a year), and there was so much to learn. But there was one aspect of Wall Street that I found morally confusing if not distasteful: "There's one thing that bothers me, though. It's this: on the one hand the New York Stock Exchange has sent its president, the estimable G. Keith Funston, out into the countryside, supported by an expensive, extensive advertising campaign, to exhort the proletariat to Own your share of America! As if buying 50 shares of IBM or GM in 1961 is as much of a civic duty as buying a $100 war bond in 1943."
I then added, "But here's the thing. At the same time as Funston's out there doing his thing, if you ask any veteran Wall Street pro how the Street works, the first thing he'll tell you is: The public is always wrong. Always." I paused to let that sink in, then confessed, "I have to tell you, I have trouble squaring that circle."
And that was back when Wall Street was basically honest, brought into line thanks in part to Ferdinand Pecora's 1933 humiliation of the great bankers of the Jazz Age and even more so because of the communitarian exigencies forced on the nation by war. From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, greed was definitely not good, and that proscriptive spirit lingered on right up to 1970, when everything started to change, and the traders began their long march through our great houses of finance, with the inevitable consequence that the Street's moral bookkeeping grew more and more contorted, its corruptions more elaborate, its self-interest less and less governable. What someone has called the "Greed Wars" began.
But now, I think, the game is at long last over.
As 2011 slithers to its end, none of the major problems that led to the crisis point three years ago have really been solved. Bank balance sheets still reek. Europe day by day becomes a financial black hole, with matter from the periphery being sucked toward the center until the vortex itself collapses. The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government's fault. This time, however, I don't think the argument that "Washington ate my homework" is going to work. This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street's head - and about time, too.
It's funny; the Big Lie has a long pedigree. A year or so ago, I was leafing through Ron Chernow's indispensable history of the Morgan financial interests, and found this interesting exchange between FDR and Russell Leffingwell, a Morgan partner and Washington fixer, a sort of Robert Strauss of his day. It dates from the summer of 1932, with FDR not yet in office:
"You and I know," wrote Leffingwell, "that we cannot cure the present deflation and depression by punishing the villains, real or imaginary, of the first post war decade, and that when it comes down to the day of reckoning nobody gets very far with all this prohibition and regulation stuff." To which FDR replied: "I wish we could get from the bankers themselves an admission that in the 1927 to 1929 period there were grave abuses and that the bankers themselves now support wholeheartedly methods to prevent recurrence thereof. Can't bankers see their own advantage in such a course?" And then Leffingwell again: "The bankers were not in fact responsible for 1927–29 and the politicians were. Why then should the bankers make a false confession?"
This time, I fear, the public anger will not be deflected. Confessions, not false, will be exacted. Occupy Wall Street has set the snowball rolling; you may not think much of OWS - I have my own reservations, although none are philosophical or moral - but it has made America aware of a sinister, usurious process by which wealth has systematically been funneled into fewer and fewer hands. A process in which Washington played a useful supporting role, but no more than that.
Over the next year, I expect the "what" will give way to the "how" in the broad electorate's comprehension of the financial situation. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of "Tobin tax" on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over.
But it won't just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street's tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell's head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren't met, and I say let 'em go!
At the end of the day, the convulsion to come won't really be about Wall Street's derivatives malefactions, or its subprime fun and games, or rogue trading, or the folly of banks. It will be about this society's final opportunity to rip away the paralyzing shackles of corruption or else dwell forever in a neofeudal social order. You might say that 1384 has replaced 1984 as our worst-case scenario. I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood.
There should be more to America, Gore Vidal has written, than who pays tax to whom. It has been in Wall Street's interest to shrivel our sensibilities as a nation, to shove aside the verities of which General MacArthur spoke at West Point - duty, honor, country - in favor of grubby schemes and scams and "carried interest" calculations. Time, I think, to take the country back.
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their ultimate wicked cowardice! (Fox News would never show it.) Truly, no kidding, who will lead us? Just don't forget the porta-potties....
Walden and Thomas, I suspect both Silver Spooners or Trust Babies have ruined us. Our leaders are such. Never worked front line jobs, just got put into positions of power and told to control.
I agree that we elders throw ourselves on the tracks. We would die quickly because no jail wants to pay for our medicine!!! Yet Silver Spooners gave the masses the medicine of poison. Those of us who worked hard without power feel the outrage. Filthy bastard banksters, medical crooks, pharmaceutical drug pushers, taxation without representation, lazy ass congress/senate (insider trading) and on and on. We all can bend over and kiss our lily white asses goodbye. Go to YouTube and pull up the free video, Shock Doctrine. Watch it. Maybe we really ought to start bending.. or start raising hell. Viral messages, videos, ideas...and nasty letters to the asshole congress/senate pieces of excrement. Who really is in control? Why hasnt Eric Holderman charged any banksters? Why havent we set up banks independent of the Fed Reserve? Holderman deserves to be charged as a white collar criminal for neglecting and being complicit in miscarriage of justice. Is he drugged up or just got his short hairs in the wringer? And then those we have called Pres from Reagan til now...all guilty of high crimes.. and no one does anything. Constitution is gone. How can we best respond?
There are many elders who should be ashamed and for them to finally see the light and hold themselves accountable now and throw themselves into the repair (if repair is even possible at this late date) is great. I am old and I have been fighting all my life. I will not let the young blame all of us as if we all lived the same life. IT is too easy to do this and it will happen again if we do not identify the greedy and selfish among us as the villains.
Twenty of those years were Republican years. Carter could not clean up the mess in four years, Bill did it, but it took eight years .
Then came the other Bush who went immediately about dismantling Bill's programs.
Then here is Obama who had a bigger mess than FDR, (who took 12 years to clean up the mess)and we only wanted to give Obama 2 years.
Nevertheless,Ob ama and the DEMOCRATIC House, under Speaker Pelosi, accomplished more in two years, with obstacles no other president has faced, verified by objective documentation,t han at any time in our history.
An ungrateful and misinformed people cannot be allowed to give opportunity to Republicans who not only promise to repeat their atrocities, but, to inflict more pain on the Middle Class if they can.
Bill Clinton, you mean? The great triangulater? He who appointed Big Bob Rubin and the rest of the Wall Street crowd to his economic team so they could rob us "liberally", whose signing off on the repeal of Glass-Steagel made the most recent depredations of Wall St. and the banksters possible? And you expect better of Obama with Geithner and Bernanke et al? Why, because they're ostensibly Democrats?
Grow up. Yeah, the Republicans are awful, but the Democrats are only marginally less evil, and some not at all. .
Look who Obama has around him - crooks like Geithner, Summers and he just appointed a guy to the Federal Reserve who worked with Bush and the Carlyle Group.
Look how Democrats whine and cry all over themselves and then go along with whatever is not in the best interest of we the people.
What part of this game evades you?
Obama is continuing where Bush left off. That was the plan when he was put up to run in 2008 b/c he could pretend that he supported the poor and working class while he did just the opposite.
If you don't get this, you are one of the misinformed people you mention in your post.
Obama is not your friend. (And neither are Republicans I will add b/c next thing, you'll be calling me a right-wind plant.
Like I said. Take off you blinders and wake up!
You say Obama and the democratic house under Pelosi accomplished more in two years with obstacles . . .
Could you be so kind as to list those accomoplishment s?
I'm sure others on this blog would also like to know what these are.
Thank you in advance and looking forward to reading your list.
Mr. Thomas is right. It is going to be awful. Only the status quo is worse.
Presently, the bankers, politicians, and economicists are treating the populations like children telling them they have to take their austerity medicine while they live in the lap of luxury.
There's just too much pent up hostility towards the politicians and bankers, and when people have finally had enough, no amount of BS propaganda is going to placate them.
I foresee the London Olympics being crashed in spite of the £1 billion+ the UK government is paying for security.
2012 is going to be a insane year and a rough ride for the politicians and bankers - that is if they survive it.
Out of this amoral culture, self-serving culture, a new culture will arise. It is already seeded -- the transformation of consciousness to the level of compassion, the long lost consciousness of "we"
Speaking metaphorically: this culture is the manure on the field.
Whereas Mr. Thomas toiled at the front, blowing smoke up the collective ass of suckers and greedy marks around the world, pulling the same basic scams and rip-offs that have persisted to the present day, dissected by Matt Taibbi and others. None of this is new; only now it's obscured by the byzantine complexities of technology and abstruse, impenetrable jargon, which serves as crypto code the suckers will never understand, including 99% of the drones bloviating up on Capitol Hill.
"Excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes"; a sublime metaphor for Wall Street and Congress both. Beautiful.
I loved that line as well.
Stonecutter, your prose is pretty good as well.
Check out what passes for comments on the Right Wing sites some day. Their connection to literate writing stops at the 2nd grade. No exaggeration!
It has been over three years since the worst of the debacle began, and nothing has been done to the perpetrators.
Even the Milquetoast Dodd-Frank bill has been watered down beyond recognition, and attacked viciously by so-called Conservatives.
Afraid that, as far as consequences go, I'll just believe it when I see it.
Thomas believes, as do many others, that circumstances are eliminating the middle ground. Which way it will go is questionable.
I hope to avoid the violence that he speaks of, but it may take widespread adoption of the policies of the most radical members of the Left-wing political establishment-- think Kucinich and Sanders-- to bypass this event. Dodd-Frank isn't really for public benefit.
Without a war-- an external enemy to blame-- the only hope of the oligarchy to avoid class warfare is to convince (enough) people that they are well off. This means lots of junk food, drugs, and mindless entertainment. Hmmm… it seems familiar.
The alternative is the extreme-- though possibly gradual-- clampdown on civil liberties so many have predicted-- our current path.
One optimistic note: OWS has eliminated the public taboo against considering-- even discussing-- the inequality of wealth as the cause of our problems. It took the oligarchy decades to create this rule of etiquette, and OWS tore it down in a few weeks by rubbing our noses in the issue. Kudos to the 99%!
http://www.tomdegan.blogspot.com
Tom Degan
You're missing the point here, I believe. WE are the government. If the mechanism of our own homeostasis is out of our control, such as, for example, when one is carrying a heavy infestation of rapacious parasites, we first must remove the parasite. Then we can tend to restoring our national balance. But, the job is up to us as Americans to oust the infection. We are our own immune system and I, for one, am a macrophage, and I am hungry. But the immune system must be coordinated or we just have autoimmune disease as we saw with OWS where our worst physically attack our best who seek only healing. Gandhi had generations of murder and abuse and a 'foreign' target. Unification needed only a catalyst. Our parasite looks like us and uses our chief value, Freedom, against us. It is more difficult but not undoable to free ourselves of this disease. But we can not do it each of us alone. Michael Thomas for President!
And, Ash, WTF?
I will be watching the "news" for more on this and expect Mitt Romney to come out either in favor of or against such an outcome. As an "intellectual, I expect that Newt will support both sides.
From your lips to "God's" ear!
Occupy! Occupy!! OCCUPY!!!
You've made an extremely important point. Violent retribution would be gratifying, yes, but it would invite a severe backlash – one that would be supported by the "zombie mainstream public" and backed by the most powerful military the world has ever known.
Harnessing public anger and converting it into positive change will be very tricky and an enormous challenge, requiring great leadership and united political will – neither of which is anywhere in sight at the moment.
Meanwhile, OWS is drowning in its own naval gazing and anarchist dogma.
Where are the leaders?!
When the Tea Potters starting using that tag line, I never heard an answer for who they wanted to take it back from. Since the Tea Potters started boiling after the African American guy became President, most of us assumed that was who they wanted to get it back from (The African American guy).
Now we have the Occupy movement and its sympathizers, such as Mr. Thomas using the same wording. But, their very name of the US Occupy movement, Occupy Wall Street, implies who has taken our country from us.
I too fear the potential of violence, and it appears that the Tea Potters are being incubated into thinking in violent terms. But while the OWS searches for common ground, the Tea Potters see OWS as the enemy. This is a very scary tactic by the PWS (Protectors of Wall Street)who are manipulating the Tea Potters.
The PWS may very well end up with a Civil War, possibly on a world wide scale. They have no idea how disenfranchised the vast majority feels. They have no idea how connected all the people of this planet now are.
thank you.
Wall Street families can choose to hide until they are caught, or brazen this out with a very robust participation in Nation-Building. Namely, THIS Nation, the USA. The country's infrastructure needs upgrading. Electric generation and water supply. See NAWAPA.
The oil emergency (annual oilfield depletion, Peak Oil and resource nationalism restraint on export) will hit sooner with Middle East meltdown and a bit later, with supply/demand crunch. Protecting agriculture and essential aviation, we must cover trucking fuel shortage, and gasoline rationing.
Hoarded wealth must rebuild US railroad network, passenger and freight rail lines must again connect the smaller dots as seen in America circa pre-WWII era. When the USA was a lending not a borrowing Nation, AND ENERGY INDEPENDENT.
Office managers, help your bosses: get US Rail Map Atlas Map volumes from spv.co.uk, see heritage rail footprint needing rebuild in post-carbon era. Show your bosses and boards of directors the scripture lesson of the day: James 5 in the New Testament- It starts out with a warning to rich oppressors....
Great points about rail lines. But instead of rebuilding the old lines, we need to build the future. Our new rail lines need to integrate heavy rail for long hauls, with light rail for short hauls. Movement of people and goods over multiple modes of transportation need to be synchronized and adaptable.
Many of the old rail lines have been converted to "rail trails" and used by commuters as well as for recreation. We cannot give that up. Biking and walking should be encouraged through design not by fiat.
Railroads are an important feature of a 21st Century transportation architecture, but just that, a feature.
In 1961 President Kennedy challenged America to go to the moon. This adventure inspired not just Americans, but the entire world, to stretch our technological limits. A new challenge to completely reinvent the American infrastructure could be the challenge and the push we need.
And "Capitalism causes heart palpitations to the rich, and squeezes the life out of the poor". And "Divine Monarchy is the ideal form of government".
you can hear them coming
down past gucci gulch
where the swine are drumming
Bravo, Newsweek.
Perhaps this clarion call to action will wake up the mass media once and for all.
Look at PBS "Frontline-The Warning" about Brooksly Borne and her testimony to Congress. She was an expert in derivatives and was FIRED from SEC in 2005 when she warned about what was going to happen..
Counterfeiting: Through financial bubbles and loan pyramids, it creates facsimiles of official money for private gain unrelated to anything of real value.
Securities fraud: Selling shares in asset bubbles that are maintained solely by the constant inflow of new money is, in effect, a Ponzi scheme.
Reverse insurance fraud: Insurance fraud, by common definition, occurs when the insured deceives the insurer. In reverse insurance fraud, the insurer deceives the insured. In Wall Street practice this involves collecting premiums to cover risks the insurer lacks adequate reserves to cover and then refusing to pay legitimate claims.
Predatory lending: Using a combination of extortion, fraud, deceptive promises, and usury, predatory lenders lure the desperate into perpetual debt at exorbitant interest rates."
http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/7-ways-to-stop-wall-streets-con-game
While the roots go back for millenia, the American mechanism goes back only a hundred or so years. That mechanism is the modern corporation and its board of directors, tied to the officers.
Greed is as old as mankind. Trying to eliminate it as useless as screaming at the rain. Eliminating the conditions that promote and reward greed is something else, again. This we can do but only if we change the size, longevity, purpose and governance of this paper monster we call the public (and aften the private) corporation.
The endgame is to create economic rules of the road that are far more fair, equitable and enforceable. Rewards must be more equitably distributed, if only out of self preservation. An economy that creates no superrich and no really poor is more vibrant and better for everyone. In the words of Benjamin Franklin in response to Europeans' marveling at the lack of pretensions among the relatively wealthy in America, " It is our great mediocrity." He was referring to the lack of a deep chasm between rich and poor.
The Occupy movement may or may not be the spark that starts the conflagration. Until Occupy moves beyond its anarchist roots and accepts responsibilitie s, it will just exist as a bunch of really pi$$ed off dudes, pointing to problems, but not doing anything to solve them. Unless it takes upon itself the task of becoming the solution, it will wither and wimper into irrelevance.
Fortunately, many working groups have sprung up within Occupy to tackle some of the central problems Mr. Thomas alludes to. But there is far too little coordination among them across the country and far too little real listening to non-occupiers.
It is one thing to be OF the 99%; it is quite something else to arrogantly assume that a handful of folks are or represent the 99%.
Hopefully, this will change as the movement matures.
Thanks for the compliment. You're not my son, are you? Probably not, but here you never know.
Anyone who was a critically thinking adult in the '60's and '70's--it seems there were more of us then--remembers the chaos, the assassination horrors, the violence, the raging war and anti-war backdrop, the violation of public trust and deep-tissue disillusionment that was Watergate, the hard-wired cynicism of Nixon and his crew of miscreants, in which I include the teflon Henry Kissinger. Yet, compared to what came after in the GOP, Nixon's mix of genuine statecraft and political cesspool-cleaning would almost be a welcome relief...almost. At the end of Oliver Stone's biopic about him, Nixon stares at a portrait of JFK in the White House and intones, "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are." Gustave Le Bon said, "The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim".
We get the leadership we deserve. We the People allowed this rot to gather momentum and legitimacy for decades, automatically re-electing the same band of brothers in greed and corruption, buying their act, their lies, their empty promises, their collective mythology, because we secretly admired them, wanted to emulate them, BE them.
Are we awake yet? Is it finally ENOUGH?
Expect, watch for blood in the streets.
"The salvation of the people depends upon themselves, upon their capacity for suffering and sacrifice." Gandhi
I don't think you folks understand the change that has already taken place in the public dialog, because of all of the Occupiers: they are talking about a new system that is nonviolent. They are showing and honoring compassion, community, they are speaking of love. There are too few of the 99%ers to stand up to the guns and tanks -- the killing machines of the 1%. I think we must and will become students of Gene Sharp and his tools of nonviolent revolution. And in the process, hopefully we will work on reversing climate change so the planet and our progeny will survive. A long shot? Yes, but our only hope.
The parents will not shoot their children - and the children all over the World start to understand that we do need systemic change - not another party victory.
Look at the blue-red electoral map - we are still fighting civil war from the two centuries ago - this is legacy of violence.
We need to make MONEY CULTURE immoral. On the Christmas Eve to take our children to see bird migration, stars, trees - not buy more crap in Wall Mart.
See $30 billion of arms sale to Saudi Arabia as obscene/criminal, NOT job creation.
The peaceful change is ESSENTIAL - otherwise we will become failed state like Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan - fight class and regional warfare - another civil war.
Where have you been hiding these past score of years? What was it that made you wait 20 years after leaving Wall Street to make your true feelings felt? Whatever the reason, I thank you; we thank you. You wrote a very good piece of passionate retrospection. Please do not stop with this one entry. Here come the cliches: 'the cat is out of the bag;' 'the dew is off the lily;' 'the truth well set you free;' 'there's no turning back now;' 'in for a penny, in for a pound;' 'you have your foot in the door;' 'no holds barred;' et al, et al.
Please, please, now is the time to name, names, and 'let the chips fall where they may!'
OFF WITH THEIR HEADS...OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!!!! EVERYONE NOW---OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!!!!!!
http://mycountrymyass.com
That said, the focus here is too much on Wall Street, and not enough from where this crap emanates from - nay, it's Genesis...
Government.
In fact, one could argue that this piece is a clever distraction (Away) from where the Real culprits lie - in seats of elected Power.
'Off with the heads of these 'Evil' and 'Greedy' bastards, the serfs cry!
But no mention of the poison roots from where this Greed gains its momentum.
Talk about a return to Real Representative governance and an End to Full-Time legislatorship - then we can sit down and have an intelligent discussion about cleaning up Wall Street. Until then, these are but the chest-poundings of a frustrated dock worker who's gonna exact righteous revenge - you betcha, someday...
That said, the focus here is too much on Wall Street, and not enough from where this crap emanates from - nay, it's Genesis...
Government.
In fact, one could argue that this piece is a clever distraction (Away) from where the Real culprits lie - in seats of elected Power.
-And who owns that institution?
And what keeps the status-quo?
Money in and out of that great revolving door which funds the, Military/police, planet-destroying, status-quo maintaining, lobbyist-bag-carrying, influence-peddling, power-recycling bought and paid for non-representation.
Ah, THERE'S the rub and the basis for retribution: you go after one, the other is welded to and part of it -so let them all fall!
Good 'fess-up article from a former digested and spat out morsel formerly lodged in the belly of the beast.
Some have mentioned very scary scenarios if OWS continues. The way I see it, if we don't support it and help, we are doomed anyway, especially if we consider the GOP controlling all three branches of the government after 2012, SO, we might as well go down fighting to put a stop to the corruption with one powerful and massive thrust from all of us.
The OWS protesters have already shown much courage, any help that the rest of us can be, we need to give it. I especially like the idea of the elderly showing up en-mass in their walkers and wheelchairs and canes and give Wall Street a piece of their minds.
Happy, and Peaceful New Year All!
Almost there. You just need to take that thing of the president's out of your throat and you will be able to see 100% clearly.
Until we think and act like sovereign beings, and stop externalizing our problems and the solutions, expecting someone else to fix them, we will continue to suffer in a system we deserve.
Some very specific actions which I keep wondering why the OWS crowd isn't more demanding of, would include:
Monetary reform:
- Abolishing income taxes by repealing the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution
- Repealing the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, ending debt-based money
- Making fractional reserve banking illegal
- Instituting credit-based money (issued via Treasury), backed by gold or silver
Property reform:
- Restoring true private property: allodial title, not a variant of feudal land ownership
Legal reform:
- Ending corporate personhood
- Repealing almost anything done by the Federal government after 1913, including the "Patriot Act", recent NDAA, and a long list of presidential signing statements
Education reform:
- Start teaching critical thinking in schools (instead of the current Nazi- and Soviet-based 'outcome-based education system').
- Better yet, start homeschooling, and stop sending your children to an external authority for 'education'
We need to get organized, and take corrective action. Soon.
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