Americans have been worshiping a bull. Too many citizens, and particularly politicians, prostrate themselves to Wall Street's bronze idol.
They revere financial titans who pay themselves and their minions millions to manipulate money and gamble recklessly. Politicians gave tribute to the financiers with tax breaks and bailouts when the bankers' bad bets threatened to bankrupt their institutions.
This false idolatry produced a nation gripped by massive unemployment, a nation in which destructive income inequality has risen beyond robber baron levels, a nation where greed has been perverted from sin to good, a nation where politicians genuflect to money changers, not majority citizens.
Salvation for the majority is not more failed trickle-down economics or more deregulation so that Wall Street can resume committing unfettered wagering. Redemption is political and economic systems devoted to serving the common good, not the affluent few.
These concepts -- that governments should protect majorities and that the international financial collapse is an opportunity to transform the system into one supporting a more fraternal and just human family -- are contained in a report released last week by the Pope's Council for Justice and Peace. It says:
The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence.
Those values mandate economic and political systems that transcend "personal utility for the good of the community," the report says, then adds:
The primacy of the spiritual and of ethics needs to be restored and, with them, the primacy of politics, which is responsible for the common good - over the economy and finance.
This is exactly what the 99 percenters -- the Occupy Wall Street activists of every faith -- have been saying. They want systems that work for the vast majority of citizens, not just the 1 percent at the top.
A day after the Pontifical Council reported that inequitable distribution of wealth has increased both between individuals and nations, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office documented a massive spike in income inequality within the United States from 1979 to 2007.
The household income of the nation's richest 1 percent grew 275 percent during that nearly 30-year period, according to the CBO report.
By contrast, the income of the middle class rose by one-seventh of that -- 40 percent. For the poor, the increase was one-fifteenth of that for the rich -- only 18 percent over 30 years.
The result is that the richest 20 percent of households got more money in those 30 years than the entire bottom 80 percent. That is redistribution of wealth -- moving it from the poor and middle class to the richest.
The CBO study cites several factors contributing to the rising inequality, including federal tax policy. The CBO says tax policy fed inequity as the incomes of the wealthiest rose astronomically and their federal tax burden shrank.
This pattern is consistent internationally. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development determined that from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s income inequality increased in three-quarters of the 30 developed countries studied.
If basic morality fails as a reason to reverse these trends, then the Pontifical Council suggested another. Such inequality leads to instability and violence:
If no solutions are found to the various forms of injustice, the negative effects that will follow on the social, political and economic level will be destined to create a climate of growing hostility and even violence, and ultimately undermine the very foundations of democratic institutions, even the ones considered most solid.
So far, the violence surrounding the 99 percenters in the "Occupy" movement has come from the government and police and not the other way around, thus the photos and videos of defenseless women pepper-sprayed by an officer in New York and a bleeding, critically-injured Iraq war veteran struck down by police in Oakland.
Historically, it wasn't always that way. During another spike in the nation's history of income inequality, in the first two decades of the 1900s, violence was turned on the rich. An anarchist shot robber baron Henry Clay Frick and bombings terrorized industrialists. As the socialist movement surged, Andrew Carnegie wrote that the gulf between rich and poor threatened the survival of capitalism.
Also ignoring morality, just consider that income inequality impedes economic development. An International Monetary Fund study found high levels of inequality retards economic recovery while relatively equal income distribution supports sustained growth. Numerous academic studies have reached the same conclusion - inequality diminishes economic expansion, for many reasons, including its tendency to provoke political and social unrest.
Yet conservative politicians continue to demand changes that would make matters worse. Candidates Herman Cain and Rick Perry, seeking the Republican nomination for president, have proffered flat tax plans that would compound the burden on the middle class and poor. On being informed that his would increase income inequality, Perry said, "I don't care about that."
When Democrats on the debt-reduction super committee suggested raising $1.3 trillion in tax revenues, including levies on the rich, a measure consistently supported by huge majorities of the American public, Republicans summarily rejected the proposal, calling it absurd.
The answer to the question, "What would Jesus do?" in this case is clear. The only gospel story in which Jesus engaged in violence is the cleansing of the temple of moneychangers. Morality demands an end to Wall Street worship and a new era in which both politics and financial markets work for the majority, for the common good.
Follow Leo W. Gerard on Twitter: www.twitter.com/uswblogger
Perhaps the question we should ask ourselves whenever it comes time to make a decision is this: "Does it support, nurture and honor life, in all its many forms?" IF the answer is no, let's stop doing it.
"Investing in the stock markets" became a "con game" that substantially boosted the profits and wealths of the "insiders". The markets have become so complicate by the frauds of the "derivatives", the MBS's, the CDO's, etc. that there REALLY IS NO INTEGRITY in the markets . . . individual ivestors have absolutely no way of knowing what liabilities there are in ANY of the companies . . . it is like the fraudulent, worthless assets have become mixed in with the scrambled eggs; and there is no way to discern or to separate/identify the bad and worthless assets, which is exacerbated by the lack of requirements for FULL DISCLOSURE and TRANSPARENCY. The stock market as it exists right now is a "fool's market".
"whatever" applies here
"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Fascism usually wraps itself in religion..... the better to get converts from the usualy biased and intellectually deficient in the commuities. converts that are pliable as long as you let them sing their religious songs. .
All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?
But don't let facts get in the way of a perfectly good argument.
http://news.investors.com/Article/590383/201111030805/Income-Inequality-Rose-Under-Clinton-Obama.htm
Should hav chosen a better source for this article.
It pays off.
Golden Calf or "bull" -- either way to the Biblical Hebrews, all idolatry.
And the allusion, the metaphor, applied to America's "progress" for the last forty years is more than apt.
Blame the thieves, not the victims.
Either credit cards should be illegal, or what the subprime lenders did was legal. It was like buying a house on your credit card, or not paying your credit card debt back. I called that predatory borrowing, you can think otherwise.
Read my other post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/ThatsTheTheWayItIs/sacrilege-wall-street-wor_b_1066797_115948929.html
HP interviewed 57 borrowers being foreclosed. They all blamed themselves, every one, not the bank. They went to legit lenders, were told they couldn't afford the house. So they went to subprime lenders who advertised "no borrower refused!", then essentially bought a house on a credit card. They went to the lenders, unlike credit card offers that are mailed to you. They wanted a house that they knew they could not afford, assumed that in a year or two they could sell it for a profit. They speculated and lost, just like buying stocks. 40% of foreclosures were a 2nd home or a home-equity loan, not people getting their first home.
The victims of the fraud were the buyers of the CDOs, not those who got houses they couldn't otherwise afford. Those victims are mainly rich, some pension and municipal funds, and Wall St itself. And F&F, us taxpayers, though they are suing the banks to take the bad loans back, and that will happen.
And you obviously don't follow the stock market, or you would know Wall St was destroyed by this while Main St has recovered. The S&P is now down only 15% from before the crash, and that's completely due to the fall in financial stock, Wall St. The banks were loaned money, they paid it back. Now they have little profit, or future. The big banks are no longer big, never mind TBTF. Apple can now by BofA with cash. Stockholders own corporations. Stock prices before crash and now:
Lehman and Bear Sterns went bankrupt, to $0
Goldman was $240 now $103
Citigroup was $55 now $3
Morgan Stanley was $73 now $14
BOA was $55 now $7
AIG was $1440 now $25
if we don't need investors, then why don't workers just go and start their own companies?