Does anyone know how to build a barricade? No, seriously. Anyone? Anyone?
Bernie has some things to say about the Occupy protests and he frames the problem quite nicely.
The demonstrators and millions of sympathetic Americans understand that odds are stacked in Wall Street’s favor because of the extraordinary economic and political clout of the big banks. Believe it or not, the country’s six largest financial institutions (Bank of America, CitiGroup, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs) now have amassed assets equal to more than 60 percent of our gross domestic product. The four largest banks issue two-thirds of all credit cards, half of all mortgages, and hold nearly 40 percent of all bank deposits. Incredibly, after we bailed out the behemoth banks that were “too big to fail,” three out of the four are now even bigger than before the financial crisis.
Not only do these financial institutions have enormous economic clout, their wealth makes them an extremely potent political force. From 1998 through 2008, in order to achieve their goal of repealing Glass-Steagall and other financial regulations, they spent more than $5 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions. They also spent hundreds of millions to water down last year’s Dodd-Frank reform bill. After the law was passed, hundreds of millions more were spent to repeal provisions and weaken regulations. They never give up.
They never give up. Think about that for a second. These banks, and the pirates who run them, will never stop gaming the system. They will never stop screwing Americans. They will never stop corrupting our Republic. And as there are fewer and fewer to chose from, as regulations favor greater and greater consolidation, where is our choice? How is that “freedom?” When will our drift towards oligarchy be halted? Must we now man (and woman!) the barricades in a very literal sense and burn these banks to the ground before they’ll listen? Has it, after 30 years of supply-side trickle-up economics, finally come to this?
I’m beginning to wonder. I really am.
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