Well in that case let me then argue instead that all rabble about bankers, oligarchs and Feudal Lords of Finance is just a manoeuvre to distract us with while they infiltrate communism through the door of financial regulations.

1. The Committee of European Banking Supervisors aim to raise the quantity and quality of liquidity buffers by forcing banks to hold significant amounts of “high quality” government bonds”.

2. The current Basel regulation permits banks to lend to the government with a zero percent capital requirement, compared to 8 percent when lending to an ordinary citizen.

Are these neo-central-planners building a new wall? With the governments and their special triple-A rated comrades on one side of it and all the rest of us the Pöbel on the other?

http://www.theaaa-bomb.blogspot.com/

If the present is any indication (90 to 95% of the nation’s assets reside with the top 1%) then we may be approaching a tipping point where the proverbial “peasants with pitchforks” (or “with guns” as today’s proxy for pitchforks) may rise up.

Let us hope that cooler heads prevail and the mega wealthy can see past their greed and grasp the historical lessons staring them in their faces.

Geez, robby, where do you think the concentration of wealth comes from? Doesn’t globalization have a lot to do with it? Globalization weakens the control of governments over their own economies and makes smaller governments pawns of multinationals. The East India Company was a multinational. How much did it do to alleviate wealth inequality in either Britain or India? How much has ITT done? Citibank? United Fruit? The list goes on. Globalization feeds off of cheap labor, and not only wants to keep it cheap, but to make it cheaper.

:(

Good point. Here is an example of suppression:

Conventional water heaters are wasteful of energy, radiating a lot of it away just to keep a certain amount of hot water available. In addition, if you have a large enough family, you can easily run out of hot water when you need it. When I was living in Japan some decades ago, my shower had an attached gas heater that heated water on the way to the shower and otherwise was turned off. Water was heated only when it was needed, and I never ran out of hot water. Economical and efficient. When I returned to the U. S. I could find no such heater.

Today, however, I have a portable dishwasher that heats water on demand and costs around $100. I also have an on demand water heater for the house. Unlike the Japanese unit or the dishwasher, it costs thousands of dollars. The reason is protectionism in the form of regulation. I understand safety concerns, but if my dishwasher is safe, why can’t I get on demand hot water for my shower for 5 – 10% of what I had to pay?

To do this, we have to start talking face-to-face with the working-class people who are jobless, underemployed, etc. We have to build a movement thru which people demand good, green jobs. See my article in 12/3/09 Baltimore Sun: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.jobs03dec03,0,2055928.story

Nowadays, they tell us that the ability to take bold, calculated risks and have charisma (“leadership qualities”) is something only rare people possess.

Well, is it so?

Remember, democracy used to be out of the question when the masses were illiterate and could not form an intelligible opinion about domestic and foreign state-wide affairs. Now they are more educated, and many of them have sound judgments. What about the allocation of economic resources? Shouldn’t we all be forced to study some basic finance and entrepreneurship skills and be allowed to do what all the financial elite is doing?