Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Stiglitz: Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1% and the Downward Spiral Into the Abyss, at Jesse's Cafe Americain:

As we can see, the 'crisis' of the US budget impasse was averted, and the theater came to an end. Now the real work of creating a sustainable budget can begin.

The pigmen are going to be unrelenting in their attacks on the middle class and the poor. The attacks are threefold:

- resisting financial and political reform which caused the crisis in the first place.  Three years after the crisis and no major player has even been indicted, the bonus system is flourishing again, and politicians are taking many millions in funds from the bankers and wealthy elite to promote their agendas.

- blaming the victims, and compelling them to take the greatest pain of the bailouts, and continuing bailouts and subsidies to the financial class through spending reallocations. The bailouts and spending on the military industrial complex are crowding out the public functions of government. There are even people trying to justify the theft of the Social Security Trust. Look, the funds are gone, we've taken them and given them to the banks! So no use crying over spilt milk, suck it up, and let's move on and take your cuts.

- shifting the impulse to reform from financial reform to 'tax reform' that further supports the monied interests. Cut taxes for the wealthiest as your primary agenda using a variety of deceptive means like promoting a consumption tax, of a flat income tax with offshore havens and loopholes, so the burden falls most heavily on those who spend the greatest percentage of their labor on subsistence, basic needs.

Listen to what Stiglitz has to say, and think about it. He is not perfect, the documentary Inside Job was not perfect, but start thinking for yourselves, and stop taking the easy route of allowing others to think for you, and mouth their slogans. They are only too willing to tell you what to think, what is real even if your eyes say no, if you let them.

Get back to the basic idea of reform, of at least bringing the banks back under control, of restoring them to some useful function that does not involve easy money and wealth without risk or production.

Try not to allow the pigmen and their piglets, who are being paid by the system in one way or the other, either directly or indirectly, and start thinking hard about what went wrong, what changed in the 1980's that took the country into such a state that it is in today, and then go from there.

He says a lot more, and embeds a couple of videos of Joe Stiglitz talking about his article and our current condition.  Well worth the read and viewing.