When Wall Street Rules, We Get Wall Street Rules

[Hannah Bell]

The middle class is getting whacked by the Great Recession. Fifteen million people are out of work...This pain is infuriating for two reasons. First, this was an entirely preventable disaster. The housing bubble was easy to see. Competent economists had long warned of its dangers...If this disaster were preventable and we knew how to get out of it, why didn't our leaders try to stop it before it happened? The answer to both these questions is simple: The politicians work for someone else.

The reason that there was little interest in cracking down on the housing bubble is that Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and the rest were making a fortune from the financial shenanigans that fueled the bubble. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin personally pocketed over $100 million from this fun. Why would they want the government to rein it in?

For example, they wrote trade rules that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of the bulk of the U.S. workforce by placing manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in China and other developing countries... They did not try to subject lawyers, doctors or other highly paid workers to the same sort of international competition. They only wanted international competition to put downward pressure on the wages of workers in the middle and bottom, not those at the top. This elite has instituted a system of corporate governance that allows top executives to pilfer companies at the expense of their shareholders and its workers... to gamble with the implicit promise that government picks up their tab when they lose.

No progressive movement will make any progress until we understand the battle we are fighting. Our income is a cost to the rich. They will look to cut it wherever they can, whether this is wages for private sector workers, pensions for public employees, or Social Security for retirees. That is their target. We have to fight back using the same logic. Their income is our cost -- We have to put the focus on the ways the rich have rigged the rules and place this at the center of political debate.

http://www.counterpunch.org/baker08192010.html

[mike_c]

1. "Our income is a cost to the rich."

That is just about as succinct a statement of how capitalism works, and why it will ultimately fail, as any I've seen.

[RandomThoughts]

2. The rich all work for the same thing also.

Not one of them has corrected my issue, so they must be working together or censorship.

They correlate, yet do not correct. So it is proven they are working as one entity, for money is my best guess.

My best guess is they need permission from their boss in the hierarchy they follow, hence why none with far more then they need have corrected issues.

Either there are blockers keeping them all from hearing, or they are responding to the same thoughts, since they all have acted on that issue the same.

[midnight]

3. K&R.