occupy this

i've spent most of my life believing that an economic model based upon a basket of the tenets of democratic socialism are the most equitable for a people. the tenet i've held to be the most important has been the idea of a tightly regulated marketplace, with that marketplace doing business under the guiding and watchful eye of the government.

the united states practices this to a degree... but only ever in hindsight. when the market wobbles, or collapses, the government is there to make everything better. laws are made to make sure whatever happened will never happen again. whatever these laws are on their introduction appear to maybe, possibly have a bite and by the time they land on the president's desk have had other, completely unrelated things tacked on and have been emasculated to the point of irrelevance. if the failed enterprise or broken market segment was bad enough, it is rewarded with a cash injection and we are told that this is a good thing for all of us. all politicians do this -- republicans and democrats. this is not ever going to change.

corporations use their influence in our government to have regulations enacted that hinder their competitors. a great example of this is the fcc. the fcc has become a tool of the mega media corporations. colin powell's son ran it for years, handing out all kinds of goodies to companies like viacom and news corp and making it harder for smaller entities to compete.

at this point, the corporate parasite can never have it's death grip upon our government loosened. it needs the government host in order to survive, through the government dole and occasional regulation. all the while, some of us beg for increased regulation that we know will never happen. there is only enough oversight to keep things from collapsing entirely -- to keep the system alive. and all the while, the folks who supposedly demand less government intervention, encourage regulation that limits competition and removes regulation that encourages it and also freely accepts taxpayer handouts without complaint.

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being an avid reader of bloomberg, the economist and reuters, i read firsthand, the official capitalist reaction to the occupy movement. there were the occasional young idealists who feebly attempted to admit the failure of the current capitalist model and express sympathy for the movement. then there were the well established columnists who disdained the movement and heaped scorn upon it to obviously protect their own interests.

the most common criticism of the movement was that it had no agenda. my sense of the movement was that people got sick and tired of the 1% getting away with fucking our country all the way to the bank. they simply wanted to say "we see what you are doing and are tired of it." the only tangible thing i did sense was a desire for change, though no one could, or would define what that change actually would have been. it seemed to be simply a desire to move away from our broken economic model that works well for a few people and not at all for others.

so, now that the cops have run out of pepper spray and rubber bullets and the camps have all been cleared out and the movement is effectively over, how do we make things better? do we beg our government to make things more equitable like we've been doing for the past few hundred years? fat chance. do we elect a new generation of politicians, to be inevitably bought by exxon, koch, tyco, and everyone else? there seem to be no real options. even after the near collapse of our economy, the only thing that has come out of it is a handful of underwhelming regulations and a shitload of money paid out to arrogant assholes like aig, general motors, citi(can you say citi field?) and a host of others. i mean their hands weren't even properly fucking slapped. nothing has been done to keep it from happening again, and guess what? we are supposedly headed into another recession. out of the frying pan and into the fire.

so, again, how do we fix this?

the end result of any unregulated economy is failure, so my answer is, we don't fix it. we stop trying to fix it. we stop regulating the economy altogether.

remove the fed. eliminate all patents and intellellectual property. remove government intervention in the marketplace completely, with the exception of environmental regulations. legalize drugs. eliminate all subsidies(food, oil, etc.), domestically and appearing as aid to other countries. allow monopolies in all industries and watch competition and innovation disappear. allow monopolies to fix prices and gouge us. have a flat corporate tax rate. allow insider trading. allow companies to lie about their revenues with no repercussions. allow giant bonuses for the 1% and let them pay their workers nothing. allow banks to lose everyone's money and ruin the economy. eliminate the minimum wage. allow individuals to run away with retirees life savings with no consequences. allow industries to crumble under their own corruption and incompetence.

once the bandaids have been removed, you will be able to see just how fucked up and incapable this system is. even the obama hatin', joe-the-plumber lovin', git-r-done sayin', permanently unemployed ex-drywaller won't be able to deny that there needs to be definitive change.

we will never move forward until we stop trying to keep it alive. leave it alone and let it die.

link | rss | share | posted: 2011-11-29 10:50:19