- IF Money = Speech
- AND Corporations = People
- GOTO Freedom = Slavery
When money equals political speech those who do not have a majority of the money will never have a majority of the political speech.
When the rights of corporations are equal to the rights of people and money equals speech only men who control money will have any rights.
If every special interest is fucking the working classes as hard as they can at the same time AND the working classes are underpaid and underemployed, then the working classes WILL GO BROKE. This is obvious, and it is on purpose. The point is to put you in debt. Your debt is another man's profit. One man's poverty is another man's bonus. Everything has an equal and opposite reaction.
So, with that said, here is the cold reality of the day.
Citizens United has codified the absolute political power of a small, super wealthy Oligarchy
More below the fold
Crossposted at The Progressive Electorate.com
The point is to put working class people in debt. It is not by mistake, it is by design.
Today, we are in the midst of creating a second sharecropper society. I first heard the term "slaves to the bank" from a constituent fighting a fraudulent foreclosure. The details aren't so important -- this couple had been illegally placed in a predatory loan -- but at one point, the wife explained that she and her husband were so scared they would have "given their first born to the bank to keep their home". That was fear speaking, total unadulterated panic. And as we watch debt-holders use the ornaments of fear, such a loan sharking company that set up fake courts to convince debtors they were losing cases, we should recognize that what the creditor class wants is what they've always wanted: total dominance of our culture.
Today, the debts do not involve liens against crops. People in modern America carry student loans, credit card debt, and mortgages. All of these are hard to pay back, often bringing with them impenetrable contracts and illegal fees. Credit card debt is difficult to discharge in bankruptcy and a default on a home loan can leave you homeless. A student loan debt is literally a claim against a life -- you cannot discharge it in bankruptcy, and if you die, your parents are obligated to pay it. If the banks have their way, mortgages and deficiency judgments will follow you around forever, as they do in Spain.
Young people and what only cynics might call `homeowners' have no choice but to jump on the treadmill of debt, as debtcroppers. The goal is not to have them pay off their debts, but to owe forever. Whatever a debtcropper owes, a wealthy creditor owns. And as a bonus, the heavier the debt burden of American citizenry, the less able we are able to organize and claim our democratic rights as citizens.
Debtcroppers don't start companies and innovate, they don't take chances, and they don't claim their political rights.
Think about this when you hear the calls from ex-Morgan Stanley banker and current World Bank President Robert Zoellick and his nebulous mutterings pining for the gold standard. Or when you hear Warren Buffett partner Charlie Munger talk about how the bailouts of the wealthy were patriotic, but we mustn't bail out homeowners for fear of `moral hazard'. Or when you hear Pete Peterson Foundation President and former Comptroller General David Walker yearn nostalgically for debtor's prisons.
Matt Stoller via nakedcapitalism.com
Bold text added by the diarist
The above quote was written by Matt Stoller, who was a policy advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson on financial policy issues. I found this quote in a diary by DailyKos user bobswern and it has stuck with me since I first read it. Debtcropping. The term sums up perfectly what the American economy is based on in 2010. Our economy puts you in debt ON PUROPOSE, and when the valueless debt that can NEVER be repaid eventually blows up in the hands of the financial institutions that hold them we bailout those institution but not the people on the bottom who were robbed because The goal is not to have them pay off their debts, but to owe forever.
Whoever has the most money has the most rights.
This is the heart of what the John Roberts SCOTUS decided in the Citizens United case.
Money equals speech and speech is a right. Therefore, money equals rights.
If you do not have money, then you will have no rights.
The goal of our economy is NOT to have Americans get out of debt, but to make it so they owe forever. It's like the Matrix, but instead of turning you into a battery the goal is to turn the average person into a bank account that is always overdrawn.
You see, thereisnomiddleclassspoon.
There are only two sides now. One is an all powerful Oligarchy of the super duper uber rich. The other side is the new Debtcropper society, people who have all the chips stacked against them who are being screwed by every special interest at once, people who are under paid and under employed, people who are in debt and suffering needlessly in our land of plenty, all so a very small group of really rich people can have guaranteed million dollar bonuses every year.
The Citizens United decision by the John Roberts Supreme Court codifies the total advantage that the rich have over everyone else in pushing their self serving agenda politically. NOWHERE in the Constitution does it say that Corporation equal people. NOWHERE in the Constitution does it say that money equals speech. They lied. They made it up. The game is now officially rigged to guarantee that not only are the Banks Too Big To Fail, so are the political views of millionaires who can afford the more rights to free speech than the rest of us combined can.
The only question now is, how do we fight back?