A Most Righteous Rant: 'We Can’t Afford This Oligarchy' - FDL

[WillyT]

We Can’t Afford This Oligarchy
By: masaccio - FDL
Sunday November 27, 2011 11:00 am

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The American Oligarchy has done enormous damage to the rest of the country. A brief history of the economic damage would include the depressions of the 1800s, the Great Depression and today’s Lesser Depression; and the Fed’s constant war on inflation which results in one recession after another to the benefit of the Oligarchy and to the misery of those laid off. The human violence is equally fierce, a steady stream of people killed for striking, killed in unnecessary industrial accidents, killed by unsafe products and killed by infected food.

The indirect damage is equally horrifying. Where once US Oligarchs were partially under control, beginning about 1980, they began to dismantle the regulatory and institutional control system. Up to the 70s, the SEC was a scary bunch of regulators. That change began with Reagan’s appointment of John Shad as Chair of the SEC. I was Securities Commissioner in Tennessee, and we were working on fraud cases with experienced SEC and CFTC people. They were pulled off those cases and put on insider trading cases and broker dealer examination. Lots of people quit rather than do such pointless cases.

A succession of billionaires began to use their money to fund think tanks that produced apparently scholarly papers to support the interests of the Oligarchs. They sought out business and economics schools to fund, insuring that the wide-ranging intellectual John Maynard Keynes would be forgotten, replaced by sterile mathematical models and outright lies from people who manipulated data to serve their paymasters. They bought up and consolidated the public media, insuring that a huge number of people would be ignorant as toast.

They export jobs. They speculate in markets for food. They demand the right to privatize roads, water, parking, prisons, education, and parks. It’s all part of a grubby search for safe high returns on their money, selling us things we must have, and can easily and efficiently provide through government. The Oligarchy refuses to pay taxes. A recent report by the Tax Justice Network says that the total US tax evaded through the shadow economy is $337 billion. The rest of us have to make that up, or do without.

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More: http://firedoglake.com/2011/11/27/we-can%E2%80%99t-afford-this-oligarchy/

:kick:

[Fire Walk With Me]

1. K&R

[phasma ex machina]

2. War pig central banksters use inflation to pay for their eternal war. nt

[woo me with science]

3. K&R