The Banksters reach into Your Pocket

 From NPR Cartoon site

11 Facts About Banks

Starting with the above link this is part of the picture of what the Occupy folks are looking at.  That your pocket has been methodically raided for the last 15 plus years and that we no longer have the regulations we need to protect ourselves is directly due to the Republican agenda.  Since Ronald Reagan, the dismantling of necessary regulation has taken our rights and protections from us.  Any and every time we relent and allow these thugs into our law making process they unvail yet another assault.

The discussion has been skewed considerably too.  A recent exchange I had with a Righty said that she was for the free market.  Well, so am I but that does not mean a free and uninterrupted assault without regulation.  If we are a country of laws, as I have often heard said, then we are a land of regulations.  That is, every aspect of our lives has some juxtaposition to the laws of the land.  Saying that you are for a free market has become code for, "I don't want to be subject to any laws."  This is just wrong headed.  As a nation of laws we need police powers to hold in check the forces of evil... the banks in an increasingly unregulated environment have become that evil.  There is no mistaking the extent of this fact.  Look at what they have done.  Crashing the economy has worked to their benefit.

We live in, or want to live in, a free society.  Do we not need laws to protect us from murders and criminals in general?  I mean, if we have laws are we free?  Of course we are.  Regulations for industry are the laws that likewise protect us from polluters, or corporate greed or any number of problems business can generate if left to its own devices.  It is just a little over the line to say that we need a country of fewer regulations; to the contrary, we need to reinstate many of the regulations that we have killed off during the last several years.  A government without regulations is not a government at all.  Consider this, the Constitution is a set of laws and we do not want to live in a place without this minimum level of protection.

In the end, laws are protections that WE have put in place for our benefit.  The Right has become the John Birch Society of 50 years ago... they wanted no laws.  This is just code for, "We want to be unfettered in our quest to fleece the public," because it is the corporate Right that is promoting this idea not WE the people.