An Association of Vices.

Or Death by the Sword.

"An association of vices will reduce us more than the sword."
Thomas Paine, American Crisis IX, 1780.

Everyone understands, don't they, that the financial industry and "big corporate" are accomplices in the subversion of the Congress? A corrupt government is the symptom. The infection itself is undue influence and the means of transmission is money or, as it's sometimes called, power. This has been the case, by the way, since the founding of the USA with the 1789 Constitution of the United States of America, the law-of-the-land … in name only. Money is King, not law. This is a sort of open secret. On the one hand, Congress was bribed into deregulating the financial sector while, on the other hand, the Chicago and Austrian school economists blew hot air up the pants of anyone naive enough to believe their “trickle-down" and “deregulatory” theories. Americans, short on economic education and long on greed and desparation, ignored history and allowed over one  hundred years of hard-earned economic experience to go down the drain. Forty years of so-called free-market deregulation and what did we get? Trillions of dollars in exotic, non-productive financial instruments -- basically bets leveraged on overvalued mortgages — in an overheated housing bubble. And now crypto. Bad mortgages were the initial domino back in the 2008 collapse. What will pop the enormous real-estate bubble this time? In terms of dollar amount, the bad mortgages and underwater homes are DWARFED by the vastly larger amounts of unfunded funny-money; unmonetized bets placed for and against non-existent or over-valued comodities or other financial instruments. Anyone that believes deregulation is the cure under these circumstances needs an examination of their brain pan.

The cure begins with reversal of Citizens United and publicly funded and administered elections.

The republic was lost long ago. But Americans prefer a comfortable lie to the bald truth. What we have is an plutocracy ... an aristocracy of money. If we decide to move towards a freer society and equality under the law -- in my view the synonym for free society is “democratic republic” -- then we're going to have to struggle for it. We don't have one now and the powers-that-be will neither go willingly nor easily from their positions of control.