What can I say about the big banks in this country? If we were to believe all the talk of crisis just over a year ago you would think that it would be years before these banks recovered… let alone show a profit. Yet here we are one year after the bank bailout and the big players, you know the ones that got us in this mess, are showing record profits and getting ready to give out some of their biggest bonuses ever!
For the most part they have paid back the loans from the TARP program and are therefore technically no longer beholding to the government and taxpayer. Of course they still are propped up with hundreds of billions of “bailouts” from the Federal Reserve, but nobody outside the elite inner circle really know how much we all have given to them in cheap money, guarantees against losses on their bad investments and who knows what else.
Since they have paid back their TARP loans you would think then that the credit market would be back to normal and everything would be fine. Unfortunately, the only people where everything is now fine are the same people who were most responsible for the mess that we are all in.
Millions of people are unemployed and will probably be so for a long time to come. Lots of people continue to face the threat of foreclosure on their homes, no health insurance, and many other problems caused by this economic downturn.
So… what can be done about this? It’s clear that the Obama administration and Congress are not going to take any serious action. Sure… they will pass some reforms… but I doubt that they will have very many teeth in them. The reason for this is of course money and influence… both of which the banks have in great amounts. I was thinking the other day of the old saying “One person, one vote” which is a pillar of democracy that has actually crumbled to the ground.
Corporations like to talk about freedom of speech when anyone dares try to limit the amount of money they can contribute to politicians. Guess what… corporations don’t have the right of free speech under the Constitution… in fact they don’t have any rights that are contained in the Constitution because they aren’t people. Corporations are legal entities created by various statutes and the rights they have are the ones given to them by statute. At any point in time the laws concerning corporations could be changed and forbid them to contribute to politicians in anyway whatsoever.
Remember, they have no rights other than those given to them by the politicians that we elect. The laws that give the guidelines under which they can operate could be changed to say that corporations cannot be involved in the political process at all. That wouldn’t stop employees of those corporations from being involved, but it would stop the corporate entity from being able to pump huge amounts of money into the political process.
I have no doubt that the billions of dollars put into the political process by special interest groups have poisoned our democracy to the point where it is on life support. Public financing would be a tough sell in these difficult times, but would be a small price to pay for a government that would be more responsive to the interests of the citizens (people) of this country as opposed to the corporations.
Corporations simply care about making a profit for themselves and their shareholders. I am not criticizing them for this as this is what they are created to do. We all need to realize this and get them out of the political process once and for all.
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