By John Ballard
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. With their customary clear thinking we have this...
With all due respect, we can only wish those Tea Party activists who gathered in Washington and other cities this week weren't so single-minded about just who's responsible for all their troubles, real and imagined.
They're up in arms, so to speak, against Big Government, especially the Obama administration.
If they thought this through, they'd be joining forces with other grassroots Americans who in the coming weeks will be demonstrating in Washington and other cities against High Finance, taking on Wall Street and the country's biggest banks.
The original Tea Party, remember, wasn't directed just against the British redcoats. Colonial patriots also took aim at the East India Company. That was the joint-stock enterprise originally chartered by the first Queen Elizabeth.
Over the years, the government granted the East India Company special rights and privileges, which the owners turned into a monopoly over trade, including tea.
It may seem a bit of a stretch from tea to credit default swaps, but the principle is the same: when enormous private wealth goes unchecked, regular folks get hurt - badly. That's what happened in 2008 when the monied interests led us up the garden path to the great collapse.
So the Tea Party crowd should be demanding accountability from Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and scores of hedge funds and private equity firms that constitute what we loosely call Wall Street.
More at the link, but you get the idea. They conclude with this:
Bottom line: "The Wall Street banks are the new American oligarchy - a group that gains political power because of its economic power, and then uses that political power for its own benefit." So write Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund; and James Kwak, former management consultant and software entrepreneur, in their important new book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown.
Their words of warning and the past year and a half make you realize that as usual, Thomas Jefferson, whose birthday we celebrate this week, had it right. Back in 1816, he wrote, "I sincerely believe... that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies."
Getting to be like a broken record, no?
Oops, sorry.
Nobody remembers what a record was, much less what it sounded like when it got a scratch.
The Republican's plan to dumb down America has worked. None of the teabaggers have a clue as to what the Boston tea party was all about. It was about tax breaks for the largest multinational corporation at the time, The East India Tea Company.
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