Originally posted at Writeindependent.org on November 16, 2011
“The big problem in politics always is excessive concentration of power and wealth in too few hands. We’ve seen that in Wall Street where the first principle of capitalism was detonated by the bosses of the banks, investment banks and brokerage houses, and insurance companies. Namely, the shareholders who own their company do not control their company. And under the first principle of capitalism is that if you own something, you should have reasonable control over it. It’s the lack of control by the mutual funds, pension funds, and other investors of their bosses, that allowed their bosses to engage in what the Federal Reserve chief in Dallas TX, Richard Fisher called the other day “a sustained orgy of excess and [reckless] behavior.”
“The second principle of capitalism which is apparently only reserved for small business these days is that you sink or swim, based on your merits. But if you’re a big enough corporation, you can say ‘we’re too big’ to be allowed to fail, AIG for example, and they go to Washington for a bail out. This not only concentrates more and more power, because you see all the acquisitions of the big fish by the bigger fish: Bank of America acquires a big company, and JP Morgan Chase acquires another failing company. But it concentrates power.
“And the concentration of power strips the American people and their various roles of deciding anything in public life, unless they’re part of the power structure. So we have the taxpayer dollar, devastated, misused, and wasted in Washington, we know plenty of that. [We] have consumers being ripped off by high energy prices, high drug prices, credit card gouging etc. We have the workers, 47 million of them, one out of three, not making a living wage, they make Wall Street wages, 7, 8, 9 10 under 11 dollars an hour.
“So what we need here in politics is parties that break the grip of the two-party system which is basically indentured to the corporate supremacists who’ve taken over our government.”
–Ralph Nader, 2008