I think it's fair to assume that the majority of people have heard of the two American movements called "The Tea Party," which advocates for smaller government and lower taxes, and "Occupy Wall Street," a nationwide movement that advocates for better regulation of corporations, increased taxes for the rich and for businesses, and for better banking regulation.
Most people assume these two movements are completely opposed to each other. After all, how can you raise taxes and lower them at the same time? But what the
#TeaParty and
#OccupyWallStreet don't realize is that they have a common enemy: and that the common enemy has divided and exploited them, to take control of the system.
It's complicated. Here is how it went down.
In the early 2000s, there was a corporation called Enron. It willfully committed fraud, abused the system, engaged in energy speculation and messed with price controls of energy. Eventually the whole thing was exposed as a fraud and it went bankrupt, some top executives went to jail. That's that, right? Bad guys go to jail, everything's fine.
But wait. There is a catch. What happened to the former employees of Enron? The people who didn't go to jail. They couldn't all go. There were 22,000 of them.
They went two places after the fall of Enron: Into the oil industry, and into the banking industry. And what did they do there? The same thing that they had done at Enron. They entered the oil futures speculation racket, which the government allowed to happen. Trading on futures had the effect of pushing up the prices of oil further and further, till it reached over $100 a barrel.
When we pass $100 a barrel for oil, we go into a recession. It's the tipping point. Because past $100 a barrel, the cost of food, heating, etc. is so expensive, that everyone is paying so much more for energy that the majority of people are unable to keep the economy functioning normally; they're spending the majority of their disposable income on transportation or increased heating costs.
But even once the traders passed $100 a barrel, they kept pushing for more and more profit. Higher and higher, till they reached $150 a barrel and until the bottom fell out of the market in 2008.
At the same time this was happening, their counterparts working in the banking industry took advantage of the removed regulations and created the mortgage crisis, a huge housing speculation and money grab which collapsed around the same time oil prices skyrocketed to the levels we couldn't sustain. We were hit on both sides due to lack of regulation and corruption in two major industries, many of which avoided paying taxes all together on the billions of dollars they made in profit.
Meanwhile, these two industries lobbied so hard and with so much money that the government looked on, nodded, bailed the banks out after their speculation mishap, and gave the oil and gas companies the go ahead to continue their futures trading speculation, which has now pushed oil back up to the prices it was before the collapse. Oil prices bottomed out briefly, but then rose slowly and steadily again.
Basically, we are now in a perpetual, self-sustaining recession. Any money that comes into the system is leeched out by one of two industries: the banking industry and the oil and gas industries, which make the largest profits in America. There's no viable job creation because small businesses can't thrive in this sort of economic climate.
So yes, the government is to blame for the state of the economy today. And so are corporations. What it comes down to is that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are basically on the same side; corporations need to stop greasing the palms of the government, and the government needs to stop allowing it to happen and letting the money feed their machine.
In some areas, the government
does need to be scaled back. We need major reform in the areas of judicial power and sentencing laws. We have the highest prison population per capita on the entire planet. We need to scale back the "war on drugs," and we need to stop spending billions of dollars on wars in foreign countries, especially those that have oil.
But mainly, we NEED government to function as it used to, in the regulating and breaking up of monopolizing corporations. We need them to break up the largest oil and gas companies and make the price of energy more affordable; there should be no more futures speculation allowed on the oil markets which drives prices higher and higher. At some point this even becomes a global problem, because most of these companies (especially oil and gas) are world-wide; they operate in numerous countries.
We need tax reform, we need banking reform, and we need to stop bankrupting ourselves because the oil and gas companies have their hands in our pockets. After all, when gas for your car goes up 40 cents a gallon on a weekend, what can you do besides shrug your shoulders and pay? There is no viable alternative energy solution at this moment, or is government likely to push for the creation of one, because they are being well paid to look the other way.
Where the Tea Party goes wrong is in insisting that the way out of this is to cut social services programs in government. Those aren't the things sustaining the recession. And cutting them won't fix it, because any money saved from cutting Medicaid, Medicare, etc, would quickly be put back into the pockets of the industries that already exploit us. These industries don't reinvest in the public. It stays in their pockets, their accounts. They use it for further futures trading speculation.
The only thing that is going to take us out of this recession is major lobbying reform, the reinstitution of the anti-trust laws like Glass-Steagal (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act) that should have allowed the banks and oil companies to remain separate and small. The banking industry pushed hard for its repeal- and they won, in 1999. Just 2 years before Enron would exploit energy markets, be exposed for fraud, and fall.
At the end of the day, corporations and government have conspired together against the people; and whether you're in the "99%" or the "1%," or you identify with the Tea Party, it is in your best interest to see the entire picture, and to demand a more balanced, regulated economic system, or your children and grandchildren are going to inherit an extremely violent, bankrupt, and dystopian society.
