A Nation of Pawn Shops, Rigged Casinos, Payday Loan Bloodsuckers and Wall Street Mega-thieves

By Dan Hagen

The parasites of the finance "industry" accounted for 47 percent of total U.S. corporate profits in 2007.

Throw in the real estate and insurance crowd, and you get a nation that has decided to stop manufacturing anything. Instead, the kleptocapitalists of the 21st century just pick other people's pockets through number manipulation and debt. American productivity is dead, dead, dead. We're now just a nation of pawn shops, rigged casinos, payday loan bloodsuckers and Wall Street mega-thieves.

“(T)he version of Econ 101 familiar to most politicians and pundits ignores the distinction between productive activities (e.g., making useful appliances or lifesaving vaccines) and pure rents (profiting from real estate appreciation, stock manipulation or the accident of owning mineral deposits that become more valuable),” wrote Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind in Salon. “If the greatest fortunes are to be made in financial arbitrage, gambling in real estate or exploiting crony-capitalist political connections, the argument that private profit-seeking maximizes economic welfare and the public good is undermined.”

FYI, the cause of our 2008 economic disaster was the financial deregulation for which the Wall Street-controlled Republicans SCREAMED for 40 years. When they finally got President Clinton to sign off on it, it took less than a decade to smash the world economy through derivative and credit default swap financial fraud.

Following the Great Depression, the “socialist” New Deal financial regulations were in place for 60 years of unprecedented growth in this country. In fewer than 10 years after they were repealed, the economy was ruined.