The Terrorists are Wearing Suits by Colin Murphy

The Terrorists are Wearing Suits

While we “recover” from this “financial crisis” that is ostensibly “nobody’s fault”, the number of lies hiding between quotation marks is rising. As bankers and CEOs such as Lloyd Bankfein of Goldman Sachs testify in front of the Senate that they are merely doing God’s work in essentially running the economy, it seems that they plan on getting away with raping and pillaging the coffers of both the public and private sectors without a second thought. Even their recent insistence that any new taxes on banks that took bailout money would just be passed along to customers speaks of a corporate mindset that puts exploitation of the powerless consumer above any responsibility to the taxpayers whose money they are currently spending; yes, we all share the joy of contributing to the current spree of banking bonuses, as a large part of their windfall profits have come from their relatively newfound ability to borrow money at practically 0% interest from the Fed.

It is at this point that hard line Republicans and Libertarians should be throwing their hands up in disgust, for we no longer have the much vaunted ‘free market’ but instead a government-subsidized monopoly, the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism blended into an awful form of financial oligarchy. The big banks are both dining on government bailouts and taking all the risk they like with that essentially free money from the Fed. And the business practices of the most successful “banks” are the most despicable, as evidenced by the unholy kings of the race to the ethical bottom, Goldman Sachs, who employ abhorrently amoral techniques such as high frequency trading to enjoy record breaking profits in the midst of this “Great Recession.”

We are a nation that remains paralyzed in fear of terrorists without, yet it is the well dressed terrorists within that are causing far more untold wanton destruction. I tell you this not because I believe that we have the power to change the course our nation is on – with banks having essentially unlimited funds from the Fed and the Fed being an autonomous, unelected governmental institution, we have been systematically stripped of our power both as consumers and taxpayers. But this is still our fault for preferring to fight over easily digestible issues that could be packaged into convenient sound bites instead of grappling with corporate creep.

While we fought an imaginary culture war, they had already won the fight to control the engines that powered the economy and abused them to fuel their own profits. In our hope for change we elected an inexperienced corporatist to preside over his fellow shills in Washington, and now we are reaping the spoils of those empty promises. We rewarded those who wrecked the worldwide economy with more money, and the stage is set for the cycle to begin anew.

-Colin “blame me, I voted Democrat” Murphy, Slayter Box 8220