Posted by PaulK - Sat, Oct 15, 2011, 11:08 P

Occupy the Rabbit Hole

Jeff, Joe... I thought I made myself pretty clear, but here goes again. I'm not complaining about greed and I don't see corporations as a problem. I DO see the way our governance is controlled by business and corporate interests as a huge problem, in that these interests are pursued at the expense of - often - the public good. Clean air and water are in the interests of the public good. Deregulation of air and water quality is in the interests of the energy producers. When these interests bump up against each other, the government of a republic is supposed to represent the interests of the common good, not of big business. But because of the corruption of our system, power and wealth concentrated in such a tight little group of families and stockholders and boards of directors, our elected officials bow to the will of their corporate sponsors all too often.

The reason the protestors are down on Wall St and not in, say, Detroit, or Silicon Valley, is because they see - rightly I think - that the investment banks are bleeding our resources dry, moving trillions of dollars of our economy off-shore, playing poker, virtually, with our economy, producing NOTHING of value, nothing but pieces of paper, and then sometimes even betting that the value of those pieces of paper will decrease. For instance during the housing bubble, they encouraged people to borrow way more than they could afford, took those overly risky mortgage instruments and packaged them up as investment vehicles which they traded on the open market, and then bought futures betting that those investments would decrease in value. So, how, pray tell, did this produce anything of value for America?? Just a bunch of entitled rich folks playing poker with our lives. THIS is what more and more people are fed up with. This, and also that these types of destructive practices are now legal, when they were illegal for 70 years (since the last great depression) until these same rich folks bought the Congress and had the rules changed in their favor.

I am NOT against free enterprise, corporations, hard work, or economic competition. I AM against the spiraling corruption of our free market system and representative government that has become a form of Class Warfare, the extremely wealthy against all the rest of us, the 1% against the 99%. I AM in favor of a fair level playing field and I don't believe we are anywhere close to that anymore. The game is rigged, totally, and not in yours or mine favor. The bank owns the house, the house sets the rules, and the rules are designed so that only the bank wins. It's plain as the nose on your face.