Trouble With Labor, Trouble With Capital

Trouble with Capital

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

"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."

 "The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They're attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality."

 The failure of justice is a continuation of the ethic which refused to prosecute Nelson Rockefeller and one of his family's companies for supplying fuel to the Nazis for cash (and thereby fueling the war machine which killed American soldiers and sailors and many others) while Rockefeller was in a State Department position during World War II which enabled him to facilitate the sales, the ethic which granted a pardon to Richard Nixon, the ethic which refused to prosecute Ronald Reagan for selling arms to a nation he described as a terrorist nation and using the proceeds to import drugs into the United States, and the ethic which refuses even to investigate (let alone prosecute) George W. Bush for the war crimes and torture he has in writing in his own published book admitted committing.

 Trouble with Labor

• Wisconsin Gov. Walker Creates A "Crisis" Then Uses Alleged "Crisis" To Attack Unions. Also here.
• Assault On The American Worker
  " If you weren’t aware that the tea party push [n.b. financed by the Koch interests] to elect Republicans was more about union-busting than liberty or freedom, you weren’t paying attention"
  "The asymmetrical warfare, where Republicans keep to their goal of total destruction and Democrats seek to make nice and negotiate, has to stop. It has to stop first in Wisconsin."
• Roger Ebert Tweet from Dan Grobstein: My dad was right. "The Republican Party is against the working man."
• Labor's Last Stand  As that great Republican Abraham Lincoln said: "United we stand, divided we fall." Or maybe it was: "A house divided against itself can not stand."

• Fraudsters Try More Fraud To Protect Ability To Continue Fraud
• Dear Poor People 
• Torture also here, here and here. I thought we didn't torture people.