As a nation, the political maturity of this country is, as a whole, pure naivete. The illogical becomes the norm.The lies and harkened deceits are as new and improved by right wing "entertainers" who serve as the quasi leadership for racism, hatred and more importantly, fear.
As a consumer, the United States is among the most populous gluttonous of natural resources, and seemingly the least able to change when the environment and reality demand that change be effected. Too often the political leaders of our country fail to put the nation ahead of their personal careers. The ideologues rule the day and quash any attempt at rational discourse. And they are able to do so because of very 'undemocratic ' rules in the U.S. Senate. They are bought and paid for by the special interests whose companies have nothing to do with the long-term survival of this great country, but everything to do with the bottom line of their balance sheets.And these same politicians typically have no fear of election defeat because the thirty second sound bite clouds the eyes of voters who fail to comprehend the true gravity of the wallowing morass we find ourselves in today. And the talking points issued by faux news organizations and talking heads provide the only rational many people find for believing as they do that they are special, or better than, and deserve to lead even if it is into the abyss.
It does not matter if it is climate change, the banking system and Wall street or torture being passed off as an ' enhanced interrogation technique.Most of us are so caught up in the day to day struggle to pay for this life of the "American Dream"-built on credit, that where a feeling of impotence effecting meaningful change through our legislators and Congress takes a back seat to putting dinner on the table and paying our mortgage. Individually we have only one small voice in the land of the ' special interest ' democracy. Organized interests have input, and they also have coffers to draw upon that allow them to pay for the legislation they are pushing and that will benefit their particular designs.
In truth, our great nation has never really been a "free and participatory democracy". I say this simply because even the United States Constitution, the founding document from which all else is supposed to flow, when originally written in 1787 did not count slaves as complete persons.The slaves of that day were counted only as 3/5 's of a person per slave where representation in the U.S. House of Representatives was concerned and where the apportionment or direct taxes was applied. Further, slaves were not allowed to vote, but neither were women, regardless of their color. As a point of fact, the fifteenth amendment, adopted in 1870 prohibited any state from denying a person the right to vote because of race, color or previous condition of servitude.The Nineteenth Amendment, adopted in 1920, prohibited any state from denying the right to vote to any citizen because of sex.
Business in the United States is, at best, amoral. Our nation was brought to its knees economically, as was much of the world economy at the end of the 20th century. The seeds for this collapse were sown with the removal of banking regulation beginning in 1980 with the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of that year, and culminated with the repeal of Glass-Steagall by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.
From the end of the Great Depression and the advent of the Banking Act of 1933 (one facet of the Glass-Steagall Act,) this law was designed to limit financial risk and investment banks to keep separate and distinct from commercial banks. The subsequent economic growth of this nation is unparalleled in human history.
With the end of regulation and the greed that drove it, the investment bankers and commercial bankers riverboat gamblers who simply became not only put together bundles or poor investments and sold them as winners to investors throughout the world, they also developed programs that allowed them to bet against the success of those bundled, poor investments.So, they were able to play both sides of the equation against the middle. In so doing, they built in guarantees of financial reward for themselves and their companies while the economies of the world faltered.
Remember, the primary legal requirement for any corporation to exist is that it make a profit. As big a profit as can possibly be made. How it is made seems to be pretty much irrelevant. The mere fact that profits pile on top of profits and enrich the few with secretive financial instruments meets virtually all the legal requirements for a corporation. The moral bankruptcy that ensues by deceiving the investors and destroying the retirements or countless citizens whose fund managers were among those who invested in these "bundled" entanglements, it was pretty much irrelevant to any but those whose lives were decimated.
Wall Street and the bankers of those organizations deemed to be "too big to fail" are holding the U.S. economy and the stability of the world economy hostage as they design and implement derivatives and gambling tools that are outside the purview of current state or federal law, and they do it for one reason-GREED driven by profits ... Greed that is rationalized as maximizing profit regardless of the impact it has on the public or the economy, as a whole.
After all, what do add to the derivatives market? Not a thing.They do not produce a product for use in homes or in businesses. They do not produce anything that can be consumed. They only produce profits or losses. But when you build the financial instrument and you control the rules of the game, you cannot lose. Money making money, but it provides no strength to the long-term fabric of our economy or our society. It certainly does not create jobs, but it does enrich the few.And anything designed and developed strictly for the purpose of making a profit with no return being added to the economy is pure, unadulterated GREED. This is where deregulation has led us.Does anyone truly believe there is a positive to be had from this type of unlimited patentability and unfettered economic activity?If so, I would welcome your input.
One further note-Please do not use the tried and true, those false and proven so, "trickle down economic theory".It didn't work.It never has, and it never will.Why?Because people are greedy and when they have more than they can consume they become delusional about their relative importance in this world especially when compared to everyone or anyone else.Without a firm hold on what is morally correct and demanded of any who follow a thought process involving goodness and a strength of character that exists without a legal requirement for being so, there can be no healthy philosophy for building a sound structure and being concerned for anyone but their own.
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