U.S. Economic System: Vote Progressive or Vote Elitist

Our government is indeed, as alleged, bad; all Americans, elitist or progressive, can agree on that, and it is bad because we keep electing officials who follow the money. If we the voters do not punish them for favoring the rich, why wouldn’t they?

If you wonder what is wrong with Washington, filled as it is with an insidious gang of outright paid agents of the billionaires and spineless “moderates” who want to fit in, here is what an honest spokesperson for democracy sounds like:

Since the great financial crisis of 2008, big bank CEOs and their lobbyists have led the charge to block efforts to regulate Wall Street. Their message has been clear: leave it to us — the big Wall Street banks — to regulate ourselves because we’re the only ones who understand how the world really works….Even after Dodd-Frank became law, the fight wasn’t over. Open public debate turned into guerrilla warfare over rules to put the law to work. For two years now, Wall Street bankers and their lobbyists have pushed regulators to water down those rules and have pushed for loopholes for their lawyers to wiggle through….in 2011 alone, the financial industry spent more than $161 million on lobbying efforts….
reckless gambling by the big banks can affect the jobs, the pensions and the tax bills of every American — and that means that those company’s actions should be subject to careful oversight.That’s what government does: it passes laws to keep markets honest, and it puts a smart cop on the beat to enforce those laws. It is hard, but it isn’t brain surgery. And it starts only if we have a Congress that has the guts to stand up to the big banks and their armies of lobbyists. [Boston Globe 5/15/12.]

Every voter with an ounce of patriotism and every voter who will earn less than $10M this year needs to read the full text of Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s Boston Globe review of how the billionaires are buying Washington.

It is not over; the U.S. did not recover. The billionaire fraud against the American people was not a “mistake.” It was planned by the billionaires, protected by new laws passed under both Clinton and Bush, and facilitated by the $3T neo-con adventure in Iraq. When the feeding frenzy of the billionaires got out-of-control, their paid agents took care of them (using your money), and now they are fully confident that the American people in their wisdom will vote the guilty right back into office.


You can't win a class war if you don't even know one is being forced upon you.

_______________

Technical Note:

Since my references to bad billionaires admittedly may sound, to the uninformed, like a conspiracy theory, consider:

·          The share of income earned by the top 1% of Americans is now higher than it has been since 1928, just before the Great Depression. [Hacker and Pearson, Winner-Take-All Politics, pp. 15-16.];

·          The bottom 90% (yeah, ninety) of the population has been below average household income between 1979 and 2006; [p. 25] (think it’s gotten better since?)

·          It is now easier for a poor person (like Lincoln, for example) to rise up in Australia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Spain, France, or Canada than in the U.S. [p. 29] (What do you mean, “American” dream?)

·          Among rich nations, the U.S. level of doctors, hospital beds, and nurses is below average but the U.S. has “the highest rate of preventable death before age seventy-five”; [p. 31]

·          The U.S. has the richest elite (top 1%); [p. 38]

·          “In 2006, the top twenty-five hedge fund managers earned nearly $600 M on average.”  The top hedge fund earner raked in $1.7B;[p. 51]

·          Billionaires, when they pay taxes at all, pay at the lowered, new, privileged legal rate of 15% set in 2003, not coincidentally the same year the U.S. invaded Iraq (when you “earn” money by manipulating other people’s money, your tax rate is about half the rate paid by someone who works a regular job).