Wall Street is a step away from crashing the US economy again
Merry Christmas, America. Wall Street stands to be gifted free rein to crash the economy once again if the Senate signs off on the spending bill that cleared the House on Thursday. It's only slightly better than the Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card Obama gave them after his 2008 election.
It's a vicious cycle of give and take between Wall Street bankers and the public, but mostly take. We give them our money and our livelihoods, they take our politicians and representation. Ask Citibank's Jamie Dimon, who personally lobbied members of Congress to vote for the government funding bill known as the “cromnibus”. It sounds like a Transformers' action figure, but it's really just a 1,600 page spending bill with a couple provisions which will spell the end for Wall Street reform.
These provisions were added to the bill by Wall Street lobbyists with the sneakiness of an evil Santa sliding down the chimney of Congress. The first provision would further ease the already absurd lack of restrictions on campaign finance, as if somehow there was a lack of funding for Democrat and Republican candidates eager to please their banking gods.
Consider the 2012 election cycle which kept Wall Street incumbent Barack Obama in power, the same Democrat whose top ten campaign contributors in 2008 included individuals from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup. A record six billion dollars was spent by overwhelmingly corporate interests to maintain the unchecked powers of the two party system in America. Wall Street criminals responsible for the 2008-09 global recession would remain out of jail and bailed out by taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars. Banking CEOs also kept their multimillion dollar bonuses. Can you name any big-time bankers arrested for fraud in the wake of the global recession? If you can, you live in an alternate reality where people come before profits. Or you live in Iceland.
The second provision was largely written by Citibank. It would gut Dodd Frank reforms which were established to prevent Wall Street banks from engaging in the very same risky behaviour which lead to the recession. Instead of clamping down on default swaps and the trading of derivatives and commodities, the flood gates could soon be open again. Current legislation will insure the casino-style betting by Wall Street's top banks. Like the last time when Americans lost their investments, life savings, retirements and homes, the current pyramid scheme would guarantee that Wall Street would keep turning obscene profits in the event of another global crisis.
Not that the Democrats are going to stand up to Wall Street. It's their president who promised to sign the spending bill even with the two largely Republican-backed provisions attached. There's your audacity to hope and your promises of change, Obama fans. 57 House Democrats sided with Wall Street in the 219 to 206 vote to pass the $1 trillion spending bill in the waning hours before a government shutdown. Democrats could have killed the bill if they had the audacity to actually do the bidding of the people they pretend to represent, all the usual excuses aside.
House and senate appropriation committee heads Harold Rogers (R-Ky) and Barbara A Mikulski (D-Md) jointly released a statement after fine-tuning the spending bill. “As with any compromise, not everyone will like everything in this bill. But in this divided government a critical bill such as this simply cannot reflect the wants of only one party.” But the bill does reflect the desires of one party.
Wall Street – the business party with two wings representing it – the Republicans and Democrats. Democracy is dead in America. If we ever required evidence from academia, Princeton published a study concluding that individuals and grassroots organisations have little or no impact on American policies at the voting booth once Wall Street money rains down from the clouds of plutocracy. Not even Elizabeth Warren's band of merry men and women may not be able to pull a Robin Hood out from under their hats with their progressive magic show. Wall Street has proven time and time again that their bulbous, moneyed ass squashes progressive's hats as flat as a mint condition dollar bill.
But at the end of the day, it may be too late to “politely” and financially impact the power that Wall Street has over our governments and lives. We're already party to a 40 year tend of growing wealth inequality in the United States which has seen a fraction of the one percent owning most of the wealth and land. This trend has been exported throughout the globe by the sheer strength of military might and the prevailing capitalist system that perpetuates modern-day empire. If a nation partners with the United States to form economic relations, leaders and citizens should really take a closer look at what's really happening in America today where distinctions between the middle class and the working class are effectively blurred considering that nearly half of all Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and struggle to maintain some semblance of the American dream against the rising tide of the corporate state. They have the freedom to consume and to be marginalised, but they don't have a seat at the table of democracy.
It's a tough notion to accept but easy to see and believe that legislators will legislate on behalf of the one percent – the ones paying for their elections. Follow the money, not their rhetoric. All paths lead to Wall Street. If we ever muster the courage to follow our own paths, it's going to require a great deal of perseverance and organising. And someone will have to gift a new pair of reading glasses for Santa.
That list that he claims to check twice is full of CEOs and politicians who deserve lumps of coal for Christmas – not vast fortunes looted from the pockets of millions of worthy families.