Thursday, December 1, 2011

MACED BY WALL STREET BANKS: FOR 99% LIFE STINGS

Public universities: another casualty in the War Against the American Dream.

California has raised tuition precipitously since 2008.  And the college students, children of the middle aged 99% are trapped in student loans and the doubling cost of education without jobs waiting at the end of the tunnel.

So there has been unrest on all the California campuses for some time. UC Davis was the final straw in a cauldron of unrest that has been brewing.  However, this cauldron, even seething volcano of hurt has manifested itself as passive assemblies of students trying to bring their fundamental problem of getting educated to light in a world that has turned away. 

 Can the Chancellor merely apologize? And the two policemen whose pictures are forever indelibly ingrained in the minds of all who care, can they merely be suspended with pay? Is assault still illegal?

How has the betrayal of California students been addressed?  How have all the justifiable feelings of not being able to deal with the growing weight of student loans been responded to? With controls established by California “Chancellors of Education” to keep the unrest at bay; to keep the peaceful assemblies dispersed so no one will know. 
 
And Campus police in true SS style have now responded to orders by spraying mace/pepper spray - sprayed directly in the face of what could have been your child – pepper sprayed all over peaceful human living bodies quietly sitting, arms locked in a field. 
 
Orange is the color of the newest level of the war. And Clockwork Orange is no longer in the future just like 1984 foreshadowed GOP Doublespeak.

Don’t think it was only the two deranged campus policemen who were at fault. Just like it was not only the child molester at fault on Penn State’s storied football coaching team. The two deranged robotic sprayers were surrounded by their uniformed brethren who did nothing to protect students being maliciously attacked. Just like so many at Penn State sat quietly on the sidelines because the Penn State tradition of college football greatness was more important than lives of a few kids.

 Until the Occupy Movement,  started by our newest generation of college students, the conversation in this (our) country was about “deficit reduction” and we can’t tax the “job creators” along with the validity of our President’s birth certificate and country of birth – and of course the sacred pledge to Grover! 

If the barriers against greed had not been torn down; if the SEC and the Fed had enforced regulations against fraud and against “complex financial instruments” too complex too explain – would California have run out of funding for some of the best and least expensive public universities in the country? If Congress had not courted the lobbyists and done its job to protect the public would we now be concerned for how we are now on the road to a police state where the 1st Amendment is being violated everyday on television by mayors and armies of riot police – and now campus police. I thought police were to protect the public, just like Congress.

So now there is a new Rodney King moment in California, and in cities around the United States of America riot police are more concerned about containing valid American Protests – than arresting the perps watching from their glitzy towers of ultra wealth. We have seen bloodied students in NYC and young women clubbed, sprayed in the face and dragged who have been engaged in peaceful protests. Grandmothers shoved around, protesting the lack of jobs and 45,000,000 Americans below the poverty line.  Something that does not resonate in the Hamptons, and is not covered in Town and Country.

An awareness of the fact that most of us are the 99% is spreading which has caused the big banks to start a $1,000,000 fund to fight back against the movement, as reported, ironically, by Bloomberg.  Bloomberg also reported that it found out, by persistent digging, that the Fed has given banks an extra 1.2 trillion dollars over the last few years – and not just American banks. Being the mayor of NYC is not simple but Wall Street rules.

The dots are beginning to come together.

The Super Committee failed. And on Monday, Jon Kyl, a leading GOP humanitarian, told Carol Costello on CNN – “that Grover was not happy” the Repubs had agreed to increase (?) taxes to try to look like they were more interested in the country than in getting rid of Obama, by doing nothing about our depression.  But the taxes were not for incomes above $500,000 or even above $1,000,000, because  Kyl  so brilliantly reasoned, that would be against the “job creators.”  I applaud Carol Costello for being among the few to push a GOP spinner to the wall, but am still waiting for someone to skewer a member of the GOP Groverspeak group by simply asking – where is there one shard of evidence that lowering taxes has produced jobs, or that taxing incomes of $1,000,000 could kill job creation?  The job killing lie is no different than the trickle down one.

All the abuses of the 99% are related. And orange spray makes it crystal clear how little concern there is for how badly life stings for so many trapped in lives canceled by the return to Social Darwinism which has morphed into Financial Darwinism.

So this year Thanksgiving will not be the same and the red and green of Christmas has been replaced by orange. 

E. Henry Schoenberger is the author of How We Got Swindled by Wall Street Godfathers, Greed & Financial Darwinism ~ The 30-Year War Against the American Dream – with a foreword by David Satterfield, former business editor of the Miami Herald, 2 times Pulitzer Prize-winner. Schoenberger posts on Huffington Post -Henry Schoenberger .To learn more: www.howwegotswindled.com.  To buy the book: at Amazon's eStore: www.createspace.com/3710420

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