They are already videoing your moving car as “practice” for bomb and rocket strikes.
France just announced a proposal as shockingly civilized as their superbly implemented Free National Health care for every French citizen in the NUMBER ONE rated health care system in the world – that costs half as much per person as Americans pay for health care. Public Banks. Banks that actually ARE banks. Banks that actually make loans to businesses…not trading companies who call themselves banks and speculate on corn and oil and derivatives and don’t lend money to anybody, except maybe other banks. Public Banks, chartered by the government to BE banks – and nothing else. A place where grandmas and cash-rich corporations can deposit their money in a safe government-guaranteed interest-paying banking institution, assured that their money will be used to develop the national economy. Not drive up the prices of housing and wheat and oil. Development Banks. Development Banks not for the Third World, but for France! And why not America too? The private banking system has completely failed us. We need public banks. Let ‘em call it Socialism. That’s what it is. Putting people’s jobs before corporate profits. Socialism. And we wouldn’t even be talking about this if France hadn’t just elected a Socialist president. Public Banks. How civilized.
In Spain the activists raised $15,000 for court costs, and pro bono lawyers sued the former IMF chief, who ran the largest Spanish Bank, for fraud. Occupy Wall Street took half a million dollars and did what? Got sidetracked into stop and frisk laws and foreclosures in Brooklyn. Stupid stupid stupid. They need to take whatever money they have left and launch the criminal lawsuits against Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein that Obama and Eric Holder refuse to launch. Sue the bastards now! Criminal fraud charges now! When we let the government prosecutors handle this they plea bargain away the criminal charges and accept some trifling fine. No more fines. We want criminal prosecutions. Now!
For our economy to recover we need higher interest rates. Low interest rates hurt savers and help bank speculators. Here’s how that happens.
In an economy where real inflation is 5%, grandma and grandpa are forced to put their savings in banks that are only paying them 1% interest. That means these old folks on a fixed income are losing 4% per year of the money that would normally be paid to them in a free market economy – one where interest rates keep pace with inflation. This amount has run into hundreds of billions of dollars, stolen from retirees and the the poor, to benefit whom?
Big Banks.
By keeping interest rates low Ben Bernake and the Fed are making huge amounts of money available for big banks to use in their speculations, betting on fluctuations in the British pound, or the price of oil, or utterly opaque derivatives like bets on fluctuations in some index like the Dow Jones.
So grandma and grandpa are being penalized so that big banks can speculate in oil, and drive gas prices up, burning us – the ones who bailed them out – all over again.
But what happens if we raise interest rates to say 5%. Continue reading
A neighbor of mine asked me what to tell his right wing friends who say socialists just want free handouts from the government.
I said: tell them the Big Banks just got over $7 trillion in handouts from the government and the Federal Reserve. At the current rate that equals about 100 years of handouts to the poor. Right now we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. When the poor make a mistake they suffer. When the rich make a mistake they get a government bailout.
But there’s more, I said.
You are a musician. I’m a writer and painter. We both have disabilities. You are blind. I have a lot of broken bones, chronic fatigue, and BiPolar II. You give away your music for free in churches and old people’s homes. I give away my writings for free in blogs and podcasts and letters to the editor and ebooks. And I give free access to my paintings online. We both make people happy with our art. We both work, but we don’t get paid. We don’t sit around on our asses smoking dope. We both work hard at what we do. And we both get food stamps and Supplemental Security Income, S.S.I. And that is what your uniformed right wing friends would like to stop.
Speaking for myself, both as a writer and as an artist, I would love to have a fully functioning publishing company, so I could publish my books and prints of my paintings. I started a publishing company nearly 20 years ago, but in that time I have never been able to find any investors for my business. Why?
I’ll tell you why.
Something happened to Capitalism. Continue reading
