Nobody really cared about her. She was passed from one welfare office to another, only to be turned down by social workers, one after another. Her story of suffering didn't fit into the success story of Wall Street, which in 2010 slowly recovered from the crisis of the century.
Meanwhile, for untold millions of Americans, the year 2010 unexpectedly became the year of growing poverty. For a large majority of Americans, hourly wages have been shrinking for years (as the rich siphon off virtually all the benefits from the nation's strong worker-productivity growth), and last year was particularly bad -" for most Americans, the ones who are taking the brunt of the beating.
And so the question arises: Are Pam Brown and the millions of American taxpayers like her all across America the victims of a Wall Street criminal conspiracy?
To begin to answer that question, we must first pose several others:
- Who benefits from the weak American social safety net?
- Who profited from the taxpayer-funded Wall Street bailout?
- Why is the American criminal justice system sitting on its hands and doing nothing about what Der Spiegel correctly characterizes as a "monumental insider bank robbery"?
Instead of criminally prosecuting the masterminds of this conspiracy to defraud the American working class taxpayers and investors, our "Justice" Department targets defendants that may best be characterized as "Bernie Madoff-wannabe small fish." These small fish are substituted for the big fish because the big fish are too big to go after. Why too big? Because they essentially own America's government. (For students of literature, all this is reminiscent of German playwright Bertolt Brecht in his Three Penny Opera wherein the robbers buy a bank because they can make more money as embezzlers and con-artist fraudsters working from within the bank.)
As the Der Spiegel article states, the stockbrokers are celebrating the end of the crisis. And now as the crisis is beginning to repeat itself, the banks are behaving just as recklessly in their speculation as they were before the crash. The last 2 years were nothing more than a monumental insider bank robbery, which has long since been forgotten by most Americans, who are much more interested is sports and shopping than politics and economics. For these folks, the system is hopelessly corrupt, and so they figure, "Why bother worrying about it? There's nothing I can do to correct the situation." And perhaps they're right about the total corruption part, for not a single defendant from senior banking management was criminally charged. Instead, it seems, the US Department of Justice would rather pursue the many small-fish swindlers whose unbridled avarice qualified them as mini-BernieMadoffs. Why the small fish and not the well connected banksters? The small fish are much less risky; the small fish don't own the government.
The subtext of the Spiegel article is that there is a moral emptiness in America's political-economic establishment, and for that reason among others, the country has the weakest social safety net of any major industrialized country in the world.
Consider these tragic examples of that same moral emptiness:
- after three decades of wealth transfer from poor & middling, to rich & superrich, the total annual income of the wealthiest 12,000 American households is now bigger than that of the country's poorest 24 million households; the wealthiest 1% of American households have ended up with more accumulated wealth than the bottom 90% of American households!
- Meanwhile, America, primarily run by the wealthiest 1%, allows 59 million of its citizens to go without medical insurance;
- 132 million to go without a dental plan;
- 60 million to go without paid sick leave
- 40 million are even forced to collect food stamps in order to get by.
- 20% of our children are now living in poverty
- new college graduates are burdened with decades of repayment of student loan debts,
- ever growing numbers of home "owners" are having their homes taken away,
- there is a justice system that turns a blind eye to the biggest conspiracy of bank fraud in the history of the planet, yet no one is charged, no one is prosecuted, no one is seriously investigated, even though their crimes nearly collapsed the world financial system!
Now understand that, in stark contrast to the American financial and political elite's cruel punishment of the poor, virtually everyone in the European Union has a medical plan, has a dental plan, paid sick leave, paid maternity leave, and paid annual leave for a 4- to 6-week vacation, low-wage workers included.
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