Overthrow the Speculators by Chris Hedges

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/12/30-3


Traders work at the Goldman Sachs posts on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in this file photo taken on March 15, 2012. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Money, as Karl Marx lamented, plays the largest part in determining the course of history. Once speculators are able to concentrate wealth into their hands they have, throughout history, emasculated government, turned the press into lap dogs and courtiers, corrupted the courts and hollowed out public institutions, including universities, to justify their looting and greed. Today’s speculators have created grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge the masses into crippling forms of debt peonage. They steal staggering sums of public funds, such as the $85 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that they unload each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash. And when the public attempts to finance public-works projects they extract billions of dollars through wildly inflated interest rates.

Speculators at megabanks or investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the vulnerable from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their shareholders. They are parasites. They feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They just manipulate money. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged.

We can wrest back control of our economy, and finally our political system, from corporate speculators only by building local movements that decentralize economic power through the creation of hundreds of publicly owned state, county and city banks.

The establishment of city, regional and state banks, such as the state public bank in North Dakota, permits localities to invest money in community projects rather than hand it to speculators. It keeps property and sales taxes, along with payrolls for public employees and pension funds, from lining the pockets of speculators such as Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein. Money, instead of engorging the bank accounts of the few, is leveraged to fund schools, restore infrastructure, sustain systems of mass transit and develop energy self-reliance.

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[on point]

2. They are an unproductive 'tax' on our economy

[TBF]

3. It's a pyramid scheme ... K&R for exposure. nt

[Egalitarian Thug]

4. K&R Shining the light on these parasites. n/t

[postulater]

5. Community banks would be a great idea

for the small government people.

Perhaps Scott Walker will see the light.

[adirondacker]

6. K&R for Chris! nt

[msongs]

7. our elected officials are fine with being corporate toadies. follow the yellow brick road nt

[JDPriestly]

8. We need to establish public banks. I'm all for it.

This is a tough concept, but when the government borrows money from a private bank, it agrees to pay interest. In a sense, by borrowing money from a bank and then paying interest as well as repaying its debt, the government is thus subsidizing the bank. That is counter-intuitive and thus may strike some as incorrect. But if you think about it, let's say California borrows money from a group of private investors and a couple of banks are among them, since the private investors and banks would not loan the money unless they could make a profit, it has to be understood that when California pays the interest from which the bank benefits, California is subsidizing the bank to some extent. We don't think of California as doing the bank a favor when California borrows money from a bank. That is because part of the interest repays the bank for taking a risk in lending the money. But the fact is that California is highly unlikely to default. So it's pretty sure thing for the bank.

If California had its own bank, many citizens would deposit their money in that state bank and it would mean that those citizens were loaning the money to California and benefiting from the interest on that loan. I really like the idea.

[snot]

9. K&R'd!

[rhett o rick]

10. k&r thanks for posting. nm