We are living in a country that has been stolen. We no longer have a "Free Market" and we no longer have a "Democracy". We live in a nation where the system has been deliberately broken. Wealthy families have managed to purchase our government, and through purchasing them they have managed to enact laws that ensure their own prosperity. Laws that have created the largest wealth gap in the history of any modern, industrial nation since the french revolution. This is the fall of Rome all over again. We are a glowing plutocracy, a nation run by the wealthy, with laws established only for the benefit of the 1%. This 1% is so wealthy they can give away 90% of what they earn, invest 90% of what they keep, and still be unable to spend their wealth faster than they earn it. Even people like myself, at the 99% salary mark, can not imagine this wealth gap between myself and the 1%... The gap is so great, that if we graphed it on a football field, the wealth of the 99% would stand 3 feet off the ground at the 99 yard line, and the goal line representing the 1% wealthy would be in the outer atmosphere of the earth..
We live in a nation of corrupt politicians who have legalized their own bribery and kick-backs. They are placed into office, in order to make it legal for the wealthy, the corporations, the banks, and wall street to STEAL FROM US by passing the deregulation they were bribed and put into office to pass... The wealthy then have tricked people into joining organizations like the "tea Party" started by Koch Industries, and have created FOX News as a 24 hour propaganda machine.
Organizations that funded by these same billionaires, often under shadow companies with catchy "national" sounding names (like Koch Industries' "Americans for Prosperity" which has nothing to do with America or the nation's prosperity) are convincing people to march down the street saying "Please let them steal more from me" under the false, misguided notion that it will "create jobs". These people having no idea that these jobs never actually VANISHED, they were just shipped overseas for profit.
The rhetoric today is "All you people who don't like having people steal from you, are just LAZY, bleeding heart hippies, and you don't want to work! You are jealous of the wealthy, you hate success because you aren't successful". The Occupy Wall Street crowd is doing what needs to be done, doing everything they can do short of bloody revolution (which if things don't change, will eventually come). To me they are heroes. They are the people pushed to the breaking point, who are smart enough to see the reality of our plutocracy (this term coined by Citibank in an internal memo). The reality of our station is that this government no longer "We the People". We no longer have a government "Of the People, by the people, for the people" - we are a plutocracy. We are in a place where the wealthy 1% (who are mostly born that way) don't work. They have their family money handed down on a silver platter the day they were born (like the Koch Brother's who's daddy invented the process of converting oil to gasoline, or Paris Hilton who is only famous because she is rich). We live in a country with the largest wealth gap of any industrial nation (even larger than many countries we consider "3rd world"). We have banks that STOLE MY SAVINGS that I worked 15 years to MAKE. When I watched my personal stock value drop from over a million dollars down to about 100K in value, these thieves on Wall Street and at the banks made RECORD PROFIT off my loss which they caused deliberately. These kids out there protesting (many are students) are paying for college out of pocket on back breaking loans because a lot of them had their college funds pillaged by the government, meanwhile our job competitors in India and Singapore and Holland and China have college and vocational education paid for by their governments.
The Federal Reserve bank (which is not federally owned by the way) has sole control over printing our money, which makes the money YOU HAVE in the BANK worth LESS whenever they do. They print that money and give it to the banks as loans, who then tax YOU AND ME to pay the interest. I pay over 30% in income taxes while billionaires pay 15% because their income comes from Wall Street in the form of capital gains. They are using my money and savings and investments in market gain, losing it's value, in order to make money for themselves. My retirement account is drained by their hedge funds while they control the market fluctuations for profit (the reason hedging was illegal before the mid 90s is because it was always postulated that market gain was driven by business success and could not be easily manipulated, while market decline could easily be caused by manipulation of the media and fear).
The banks invested in bad mortgages they never should have given out, throw them into the stock market removing the risk from them and then BET AGAINST THEM by hedging those securities to make a profit. When those worthless mortgage-backed securities failed, the banks MADE MONEY while you and I lose our 401K... These banks then take OUR TAX DOLLARS (on top of "golden parachutes" being sucked out of our government and the federal reserve for YEARS), saying it will "Save the economy and prevent a credit crisis" and use that money to go on private jets to conferences in tropical island countries and hand out huge million dollar bonuses to the CEO's who crashed our economy.
Today, I can't get a loan to purchase a foreclosure next door to me. A house vacant for the past 2 years, and selling for 1/2 what it will be worth in a few short years. I make over 200K/year and have almost zero debt and a 720 point credit rating, and I can't find a bank willing to loan me the money to purchase this house selling for almost nothing... why? Because banks won't LOAN money for a guy like me to invest in real estate.
Our entire government is owned by these psychopaths. The owners of the billion dollar oil companies like Koch industries, who fund all their campaigns. They deliberately finance the idiotic decision making and deregulation that got us into this mess, along with chasing oil in the middle east causing 2 wars that make them billions by siphoning war profit from wars that cost us trillions in tax payer money. They direct the puppet show that stalls "recovery" (recovery from what? 2011 was a banner year for corporate America's profits).
We don't have a "Representative democracy" anymore, we have a government owned by the aristocratic billionaires who can afford to buy their own politicians. In 2011 the fortune 500 turned RECORD PROFIT... MY COMPANY made record profit, in both revenue and % margin (our best year ever, and we are a publisher of retail entertainment). So where are these jobs? Well I can speak for my company. Deferred tax liability law (thank you W. ) FORCES us (yes me included) to compete by offsetting overseas profit through hiring foreign labor - it's not that we are "evil", or choose this path. It's business, it's the best way to profit, and its exactly what we SHOULD do with the current tax laws. If we didn't do that we would fail and fold, because as a publicly traded company it's either that or watch our stock crash.
India, China, Singapore - that labor isn't better (not by a long shot) or even cheaper in direct cost, it's just practically FREE because of the tax code!!! We can write off overseas profit by hiring overseas labor due to Bush's deferred tax liability on overseas profit... ONE SIMPLE LAW would change all that and not hurt our profits, or our bottom line, or change government revenue one PENNY (well actually revenue would go up, while corporations would increase profit) - The idea is that we keep the loophole exactly as it is, deferred tax on overseas profit, but change the last bit of the bill to "AS LONG AS it returns to US soil" rather than "As long as it NEVER returns to US soil". We actually switch it so that we only defer foreign profit taxation if you are hiring US EMPLOYEES and stimulating OUR economy... It would bring all these high paying jobs back here OVERNIGHT, myself (just me) would immediately in-source the hundreds of production jobs we outsource today, increase my profit while INCREASING government revenue, not with my profit! but with the salary of US employees who would start paying taxes and buying goods and stimulating our economy even farther here in the US... Which would in the end, greatly reduce the cost of safety net spending, and increase revenue reducing our deficit even more.
The argument is this is a "Vast Conspiracy Theory" - I return to the famous line "the greatest trick the devil ever did is convincing the world he didn't exist". This concept of masking reality through calling it "crazy conspiracy theory" has been used before. The holocaust was a "crazy conspiracy theory". Global warming, is a "Crazy conspiracy theory". How long will we continue to pretend that facts can be ignored? It is a fact that the Federal reserve bank is printing money at it's sole discretion. It is a fact that this causes inflation, it is a fact that inflation hurts those who SAVED, and those who cause the inflation profit from it. It is a fact that bribery is LEGAL and that politicians can make millions of dollars in bribes that they can now simply pocket and spend however they see fit (that is what a SUPER-PAC IS!).
The Occupy Wall Street crowd, while often "free spirited" and sometimes appearing to be "Dirty hippies", aren't out there protesting the success of millionaires AT ALL. They aren't out there begging for JOBS, or refusing to TAKE jobs. They are out there protesting the THIEVES that are our entire financial system. The thieves that stole our free market, stole our government, stole our media (and even stole our religion for their own personal gain). The 1% who don't pay taxes and profit off of the destruction of our democracy and our economy, and the destruction of our previously strong entrepreneurial middle class.
So stop bashing the people fighting for YOU. Don't attack the people trying to get BACK your right to save the money YOU EARNED without having it stolen by people so rich they don't even have the ability to spend what they steal from you. Start fighting for your right to have a representative in your government who actually REPRESENTS YOU, and stop fighting against our right to HIRE AMERICANS and make things here. Stop screwing yourself because you have had your brain shut off by puppet masters who scare you into fighting for them. Bring this country back to where it was supposed to be "Of the people, by the people, for the people". YOU start fighting for YOURSELF, the 99, and the country will get better on it's own.
Simon Says
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