What America do you live in?

So I'm sitting here at work, and someone left a newspaper out. One of the front page stories is apparently about how police forces around the country are cutting back response to "lesser" crimes like burglary. I can't get much further than that without messing with someone else's newspaper and, honestly, I'm feeling sort of ill and don't want to search for the news story online. (I ought to be home but need the money - ok, this is too much of a tangent now.)

You gotta wonder if the bastards at places like Goldman Sachs (or the aptly named Magnetar Capital) ever read the local newspaper. Or watch TV. Or have kids in public schools. Do they feel remorse for the domino effect their ideas and actions had on the rest of society? Working people have lost their homes, their jobs - all of the security that prosperous America once bestowed its middle class. Never again, reports the NYT, will real estate multiply the wealth invested in it. (Perhaps because the capitalist magic known as "bubbles" relies on speculation and market tricks.)

It may very well be that the era in which ordinary Americans participated in economic mobility is over.

So how do they sleep at night? I wonder if it isn't that they occupy a different social class than we do, and that the accompanying psychology inside that class creates a sort of co-occupant America, a country not of use and practicality but of trade-for-profit's-sake. Wherein everything has a price tag, nothing an end use.... Wherein we, the end users, the consumers and the workers, are, effectively, invisible.

Goldman [Nut]Sachs

Bullshit.

More bullshit.

A bullshit triumvirate, even.

What Goldman Sachs does is usury. Merriam-Websters defines usury as "the lending of money with an interest charge for its use." There is a reason most religions outlaw usury.

"But Dresden," the political economists howl, "without interest rates, we would have no banks!"

Think about that for a minute. Why do we have banks? Ostensibly, we are told from a young age, to house our money. To keep it safe.

Now if that ain't the fox guarding the henhouse!

You know why they have a big fancy safe and an armed guard? Cuz they're bastards, and if people caught on to their game, there'd be riots in the streets, and the people would march into the lobby and redistribute the wealth. Along the bottom. Among the people who created it.

Why do the banks, in our society, safeguard the housing deeds? Why do they stand between us and our ability to have a good life? Why are we only allowed a home when it brings them a profit?

Goldman Sachs contributed to the financial meltdown of the global economy! Not just a local economy, not just one country. THE WHOLE. FUCKING. PLANET. The whole thing. From pole to pole, from midnight to afternoon. Iceland collapsed because of the fallout of the decisions made behind these doors:



Countries. Livelihoods. Lost. Right there under those flags.

All the government money? To the banks. To Sachs.

Fraud is the least word for what has gone on here. It's outright banditry on the one hand, and one giant systemic old boy's club on the other. Their thirst for profit, their industry's outright ownership of the US government, is swiftly driving the world economy into convulsions.

And yet they scream bloody murder when they're held to standards of accountability. And their welfare, of course, is intrinsically tied to the stock market - that so-called indicator of economic prosperity. There is no daily measure of how the working class fares. If we had a play-by-play of job turnover, petty layoffs, workplace safety violations, etc. etc. etc., we would be consumed by a collective dread at the drudgery we share under a common yoke. But so long as the focus is on high rolling pricks like the fine business majors at Goldman Loot-and-sacks, we'll go on believing that teachers at failing schools ought to be fired and business execs who crash a planet's economy can be given a second chance.

"The heathen were able, by the light of reason, to conclude that the usurer is a double-dyed thief and murderer. We Christians, however, hold them in such honour, that we fairly worship them for the sake of their money.... Whoever eats up, robs, and steals the nourishment of another, that man commits as great a murder ... as he who starves a man or utterly undoes him. Such does a usurer, and sits the while safe on his stool [or in his corner office], when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows, and eaten by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders, if only there were so much flesh on him, that so many ravens could stick their beaks in and share it. Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves ... Little thieves are put in the stocks, great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk."
- Martin Luther, as quoted by KARL MARX in Capital, volume 1

It's time we gathered up the money-lenders and imprisoned them for life, and never let interest and credit rule our society again.