Dirty Politics Breed Inequality

By SACHA BRENAC

The death of organized labor, technological advancement and globalization are joint forces contributing to the richest one percent owning 25 percent of the America’s wealth. This income disparity brings a seemingly natural decay of a system dedicated to equality. That decay is corruption.

The American ideals of freedom and democracy are under attack from this significant threat.

For the past century, the people of the United States have been deceived by three major powers at work: the financial sector, the military industrial complex and the federal government.

The financial sector of the economy establishes credit. In the U.S., they establish this with relatively little regulation. This has dire consequences, especially during the 2008 financial crisis and still today, with massive home foreclosures. Predatory lending and the exploitation of the subprime market are nothing short of corrupt.

The Federal Reserve influences how much money is printed to limit this “boom and bust” cycle. This gives the Federal Reserve the power to raise the money supply, which is what’s currently happening. As the government continues to borrow and print money from the wars we wage and banks we bailout, inflation occurs, straining the lower the middle classes of America. Politicians still refuse to discuss rising price indexes and inflation.

The military industrial complex was built during World War II to secure our interests around the world and to contain the Soviet threat. For the first time in U.S. history, there would be standing armies and career soldiers. This very system makes war profitable and creates an unhealthy alliance between the government and industry.

While the federal government supports both of these systems, they also have physical force that is used to maintain the status quo. It’s ironic that when citizens are forcibly removed from a public space in Egypt, it’s totalitarianism. Yet when citizens are removed from a public space in the U.S., it’s for “law and order.”

Corruption is astronomically high in this country, though almost nobody would admit it. People generally think of corruption happening Third World countries where wealthy ex-military presidents take bribes from business moguls. What people do not understand is that this form of corruption is relatively the same.

Perhaps the epitome of corruption in all three of these systems is the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United verus Federal Election Commission. The Supreme Court declared corporations to be people. Spending money is now an articulation of free speech.

Part of this meant that they can be charged with manslaughter, but the most frightening aspect of this ruling was that now corporations have free reign to spend as much money as they please in political elections.

This is not a partisan issue. This is not the fault of the Democrats, or of the Republicans. This is the fault of over a century of a culture of corruption in this country that has mounted up to this point in history, a point when the people have to wake up and fight back to restore their freedoms, before it is too late.