The Interest Rate trap and the Tea Party

G***,

I know your heart, and it is good.  If there is hope for this country, it will come from people like you.  But if you're going to be a realist you have to look at the big picture, not just at how things are and how they've "always been".  

This article came across my desktop just a few days ago:  "It's the Interest, Stupid!  Why bankers rule the world" by Ellen Brown

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/

Brown makes the astonishing claim that interest payments to the banks - on personal, mortgage, business, corporate and federal, state and local debt - have reached 35% to 40% of our GNP and is still rising exponentially.  We're talking maybe $6 trillion a year and rising, going to the banks and other owners of interest-bearing paper!  That dwarfs the billions they're trying to squeeze out of government spending - and out of our paychecks.  And it's reaching a limit - the economy is imploding because we don't have nearly enough purchasing power to buy back what we make!

I've been watching Ellen Brown for a while.  She's on the level and her work is solid.

So what do we do with this situation?  

If we join with the Tea Party and the GOP and we succeed in removing the government (but not the courts and police) from our lives, that mountain of debt continues to grow and our economy continues to suffocate and collapse.  The super-rich who are fattening off this meltdown will grow ever more cruel and oppressive.  It will not end well.  

Or rather, it is not ending well.

Romney and Brown had to be stopped, but clearly Democrats like Obama, have no answer, just timid steps sort of in the right direction.  They're paid for and enmeshed with the same web of billionaires.  Obama got his start with Goldman Sachs money, and during his first four years not one banker was even indicted for trashing and plundering the world economy, never mind tried and convicted.  (By contrast, following the Savings and Loan scandal in the 1980's there were thousands of Federal indictments, including many bank CEO's and CFO's, and over 1000 criminal convictions.)

We need a new kind of politics.  We will have to go on creating and supporting it ourselves.