It's not Just the Poor -- American Elites Are Pummeling Everyone Below Them

[marmar]

Alicublog, via AlterNet:




It's not Just the Poor -- American Elites Are Pummeling Everyone Below Them


As conservatives denounce schoolteachers who seek to preserve their collective bargaining rights, it's good to be reminded by Matt Taibbi that the banksters who wrecked the economy have been let off scott free and then some by the government. Lehman Brothers' Dick Fuld, AIG's Joe Cassano, and assorted big and less-big fish have suffered no meaningful consequences for their actions. But that doesn't mean law & order sleeps:

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers — of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses.

So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let's not even make them say they're sorry...

............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/479931/it%27s_not_just_the_poor_--_american_elites_are_pummeling_everyone_below_them/

[rzemanfl]

1. When they have destroyed the middle class, they will next target

those who are merely "well off" or "comfortable."

[xchrom]

2. recommend

[alterfurz]

3. Marx said that the revolution will only take place once the middle classes realize...

...they will never, ever join the upper classes.

Our oligarchs are doing all they can to hasten the realization.

[ThomCat]

4. This article makes you realize what a huge mistake it was

for Obama to stack his administration with Wall Street insiders. All made impossible for his own administration to ever hold any of these criminals accountable for any crime.

And then you have to realize that he wants it that way, because they paid for his election, and they are going to pay for his re-election. He owes them, so they own him, and clearly he known how to be loyally and diligently owned. He doesn't work for us. He works for them.

• This is why nobody will ever be prosecuted for the housing collapse and the illegal activity on Wall Street.
  
  
• This is why all "reforms" will be show-pieces only, with no substance, that cannot and will not prevent any more abuse or another crisis.
  
  
• This is why Obama is making more Free Trade a priority right after Free Trade helped create this mess.
  
  
• This is why we can see Wall Street is already creating 2 more bubbles with their casino approach, and nobody will do anything to prevent it from happening.
  
  
• This is why Mortgage reform for people who are trying to keep their homes keeps stalling. There will never be any help.
  
  
• This is why we can't get any investigations into systematic mortgage fraud and abuse when they lose and forge documents, etc., even though it is all so blatantly illegal on such a large scale. They have preemptive immunity.
  

Until we somehow manage to get the big money and all the lobbyists the hell out of government we will never get rid of this kind of corruption, or the level of it. They own our government and don't want us to have any part of it. Only by driving out all the big private sources of money can we drive them out. We have to improve and mandate Public Financing, and improve transparency.

Most of all, we need to mandate that corporations are not people, and corporations are not entitled to the same rights as people. We have the absurd situation that laws that were passed in order to help people end up helping corporations far more, and far more often than real people. Corporations get vast benefits, while people get only modest benefits coupled with all the responsibilities and liabilities under the law that Corporations avoid. That inequality has made corporations far too powerful, and it has to end.