I'm not a religious person, but I think Jesus was on to something when he took on the money changers at the Temple. He accused them of "turning the Temple into a den of thieves through their commercial activities."
That's a good name for the Wall Street global criminal racketeering cartel, "Den of thieves."
I'm going to keep this diary high level, as they say in business meetings. I'll expand on the topic in my next diary...
There seems to be some underlying commonalities regarding the imposition of economic "austerity" in much of Western Europe, and the U.S., and the reaction by an increasingly oppressed and distressed citizenry.
Here's what's happening... As they say, follow the money. All roads lead to Wall Street.
Wall Street (i.e., TBTF banks and the banksters who run them) is a global criminal racketeering cartel. Through cunning, fraud, and bribery they were able to devise a system, a protocol, a modus operindi, that allowed them to essentially take over entire governments, one greedy politician at a time.
Basically, they create highly complex financial instruments based on the output of economies (products, services, productivity, profit). Collaterized mortgage obligations, securities, derivatives, that sort of things. Basically, in the final analysis, it's basically a scam.
So if you manufacture shoes, they create financial instruments betting on the output of your operation, multiple times over. That's why rapid and constant growth is essential and expected in the current system.
So they highly leverage economic output, and through fees generated by trading on the financial instruments, they become enormously wealthy.
Then they turn around and take that wealth to buy off politicians, who then proceed to take down the regulatory infrastructure preventing predation, and criminality.
In this con, then they went around to multiple countries and sold them a vision, a way of doing business... They said, "Hey, look at how strong the U.S. economy is; we offer the best solutions when it comes to socioeconomic system. Sign up to our vision, and you too will be successful."
So they proceeded to securitize, to create "complex financial products," collaterized mortgage obligations, derivatives, etc., using economic output of these countries as a casino... In Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, the U.S., of course, the UK.
But since it all is a mega-pyramid scheme at a global level, for it not to collapse, it requires an accelerated level of economic output, i.e., the expectation that workers (people, citizens) will work harder for less.
In order to keep the fees that feed the scam going, they spread around loans, bonds, and all manner of seemingly easy money to countries, states, municipalities, and people. And to grease the wheel to keep it all going, again, they bought off debased greedy (or easily-manipulate, not-too-smart politicians in the U.S., and Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, et al)
So basically what's happening is that these modern-day money changers have created a seemingly-perfect system to extract wealth and productivity from both, the natural environment, and the citizenry, at a faster and faster rate.
That's the source of modern-day tyranny. And that's why it is unsustainable, and that's why we are starting to see the offshoots of a global revolution.
The issue is not necessarily about whether capitalism, or socialism, or the hybrid welfare state are better than the other. You could probably get any system working properly with the appropriate checks and balances.
The issue is that the system has been taken over by what are in the final analysis criminal thugs, with expensive suits, i.e., Wall Street banksters.
So there you have it... The high-level analysis. In my next diary I'll work on backing it up with sourced material.