We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Power Grab at the Fed

Click here to access article by Mike Whitney from CounterPunch.
Are you ready for a good laugh?
The head of the New York Fed wants Congress to grant the Central Bank extraordinary new powers to deal with future financial system emergencies like the bank run that followed Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008. 
This piece is highly representative of an American liberal's view of the ongoing theft of wealth by the One Percent ruling class. Liberals continue their cynical whining about banksters who refuse to play by the rules of regulation. Meanwhile, most One Percenters couldn't care less. They have the power--and why not use it to enrich themselves? Which is exactly what most of them are doing.

Now that the One Percent ruling class is in complete control of all institutions, they make the rules which, of course, don't apply to them. All evidence suggests this: the handover of taxpayer money to bailout the bad bets of the banksters, no prosecutions of banksters who broke the rules, the ongoing pursuit of world domination by their corporate underlings mostly in the military-industrial complex, their overwhelming ideological control of media and educational institutions so that they can shape citizen awareness and interpretation of their crimes both foreign and domestic to seem like petty misdemeanors, and their increasingly centralized control of police agencies under the Department of Homeland Security to intimidate any individuals who are immune to this indoctrination.

The underlying problem is, of course, the system that has made all of this possible, indeed, inevitable--capitalism which gives ownership of socially produced wealth to private parties. Any system that gives a certain class advantages over others will inevitably over time result in that class of people absorbing overwhelming power for themselves. This has been the disastrous history of the human race for the past 10,000 years when class structured societies started appearing.