America Enslaved to the Stock Market

A stock market has a purpose--to provide a means by which people who invest in firms can sell their investments. It is not supposed to be the main purpose of American life. However, judging by the endless horde of media pundits, academic experts, economists and of course Wall Street executives who have announced that in order to survive the US must pay trillions of dollars (is it 2.5 trillion now?) in order to compensate Wall Street and commercial banks for bad decisions, it would seem that the United States exists for Wall Street, not the other way around.

Our current president and Congress, who claim to be the representatives of the poor, seem eager to transfer trillions to the rich. After all, the "financial system" must be retained at all costs. Why that is so, no one bothers to explain.

The most productive decades of American history were when the Federal Reserve Bank had been abolished and the financial system did not exist in its current form. Since Wall Street apologist Franklin Roosevelt abolished the gold standard, Wall Street has felt increasingly bold as to its purpose to steal from and enslave the United States.

I have not been blogging lately because I am working on a research project with some students and a longer term book project. As well, the current parlous state of the United States gives me little to blog about because the nation is past redemption.

America has become a slave state and Americans slaves. They accept 50% and higher taxes just as would slaves who accept that they work for their masters.

There has been a melt down in the national spirit and it is going to get worse. The problem is not the failure of dingbat firms like Citigroup and Bear Stearns, but rather the "cure" that the morons in Congress have passed through while a drooling American public watches their wealth being stolen, stupidly acquiescing to the claims of "experts" who are expert thieves and little more.

I think the best model for today's world is Henry David Thoreau--plant some beans, build a cabin and let the American slave society go its own incompetent way--a once free country that has become the first nation to voluntarily enslave itself to a stock market.

I especially feel sorry for my students, who have watched their birthright stolen by the past four generations of Americans who believed the stupidity of Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly and Franklin Roosevelt; who quietly watched the real hourly wage fall and believed the double talk on CNN. I feel sorry for them because they are not at fault, and will see themselves much poorer than they could have been, but nevertheless will be slaves.