Bank bailouts have not been reciprocated. Small business loans are very tight. Mortgages are hard to get. Citibank will soon charge $15 to 20 a month ($240 a year) for checking accounts with less than $6,000. Finally, someone’s sticking it to those people with less than $6,000! Who do they think they are? Bank of America is imposing a $5 monthly fee ($60 a year) to debit card holders to use their own money. A strange twist, you say, charging even more to those bank customers whose resources dwindle daily from the interest and penalties already in place. There is no law for or against this. The law is whatever the banks say it is. The banks giveth and the banks taketh away.
The lack of law has been perverted by greed the size of which makes anything before it seem puny. The idea that market forces produce the law is now accepted as truth. Regulation and legislation have been compromised by special interests which sustain political campaigns of politicians, maximizing their chances of re-election. So, the law, or lack of law, seen from this perspective, favors business interests. The hidden message is the law is up for sale, and that this is “natural.” Thus, “the political process is taken captive. The law, or lack of it, has been placed at the disposal of the unscrupulous who, without risk, exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. The law becomes the weapon of every kind of greed. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense. Instead of blocking crime, the law itself is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!
There’s a tendency among people to live and prosper at the expense of others. History bears witness: wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions and executions, slavery, dishonesty in commerce, monopolies, and more. Humans are impelled to satisfy desires with the least possible pain, and since labor is pain in itself, will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. Plunder stops only when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.
Generally, laws are made by one class of people. Laws require enforcement which usually is entrusted to those who make them. This explains the almost universal perversion of the law. It is easy to understand how law, instead of blocking injustice, becomes the invincible weapon of injustice. It is easy to understand why the law is used by legislators to destroy the rest of the people’s personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This benefits the lawmakers in proportion to the power they hold. There is no greater evil than the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder. It would require volumes to describe all of the consequences. Briefly, it erases from everyone's conscience the distinction between justice and injustice. No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. The beneficiaries are spared the shame, danger, and loss of integrity which their acts would otherwise involve. Sometimes the law places the whole legal apparatus at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim, when he defends himself, as a criminal. People who profit from the law will complain resentfully, defending their acquired rights. They claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage their particular industry, that this procedure enriches everyone because the protected industry is able to spend more and to pay higher wages, and so on. Acceptance of these arguments builds legal plunder into a whole system. Starting a decade ago the system was supplemented by canceling jobs here and gifting them overseas. Paying foreign workers less, we were told, would benefit all. Instead, the shift of jobs internationally fattens corporate bottom lines. Prices are up, not down.
The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich some at the expense of everyone else. No legal plunder is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability. We say the purpose of the law is to have justice reign, but that’s not a completely accurate statement. In this sense, justice is a negative concept. It too often shines upon those with wealth who then ensure that it 'rains' on the little people. It is better stated that the purpose of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.
So, we have a world of debt. Huge financial interests are clearly calling the shots. How is that in alleged democracies and dictatorial regimes alike, financial high rollers are the only ones who count? How is that banks are allowed to loan multiples of dollars that don’t exist? In effect, banks print their own money with nothing to back it up. How is it that through their own greed and stupidity banks demanded and got enormous taxpayer bailouts and then rating services demand that the government balance its national budget? How do the recipients of citizens’ largesse refuse to loan their unreal money to businesses and individuals struggling to move on? Why has no one gone to jail? Why have there been no hearings or investigations? Why is no one making a case of what really happened? Why is there still no regulation of hedge funds? Why is there no maximum wage law (sounds silly, doesn’t it)? Why is there no law requiring that whatever Congress gives itself must also be given to all?
The mega banks and financial institutions have been given a monopoly on money. They are a financial oligarchy, government by a controlling few. Finance capital has all the power and there is no way to regulate it. In reality, it is regulating us. None of the perpetrators are in jail. They haven’t even been invited to a hearing. Instead, it is they who demand to be heard. And obeyed.
Dick Rozek, Portsmouth, NH
11/06/2011
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