Reading Meteor Blades' Night Owl post, featuring the story of how Coal Operators did a lot of legal tricks to destroy the pensions Miners had earned over the previous decades,...
and then of course with this Cyprus "Saved your money? Presto, it's Ours!" trick...
tells me The Powers That Be aren't even going to pretend to hide where We the People are in their scheme of things any longer: we're something to batten upon.
They used to prefer to do this in the dark. Knowing that even when their corruptions brought news coverage, well, who in the Political Order was going to do anything about it?
You'll find the one or the five in Office who'll bang the drum, but they'll get to do this maybe once or twice where the whole public can see and hear them. Not enough to build traction with the public before they are simply ignored.
Still, easy as stealing from us was, they've found it too much trouble to pretend that law, contracts, or simple human right-and-wrong matter. At all.
Oh, their media employees and just fools who count themselves sophisticates prattle on about "a tax," "a levy," "a one-time fee." As if to make outright plunder seem like some sort of normal process.
And Plunder it is. Getting away with this in the first instance (and they will, whether or not they use the ploy of "oh, did we say 6.75%. We'll do you a favor and make it 4%") just means they'll go for this kind of theft, even more brazen ones, as soon as they feel the need.
And how long then before our Financial Criminal Class and their employees in government decide, "oh, darn the money's no good. Just give us a few hours of free work every week."
I dunno. I just had to say something, after hearing people talk about the Great Cyprus Heist as anything other than a major crime against innocent people.
I'm not knowledgeable enough, or at this point have hope enough, that something can be done to stop these unrelenting crimes against the people of earth by our various Officialdoms. Part of me thinks "well, good people of Europe, rush your banks tomorrow and bring them all down." We know the Banking System is corrupt from top to bottom, and it's going down soon or it's going down later and with much greater expenses to everyone along the way.
So maybe just pull the damned thing and start with something humanly decent. Because our Economic System clearly thinks of "serving the people" in the sense of that old Twilight Zone episode where people find out the Alien's "How To Serve Man" is a cookbook.
The hard part to take: knowing that you'd have to be stark raving mad to bet we'll see even a handful of members of the Democratic Party Establishment talking all Official in the Village about this thing most of the nation sees with their own eyes: that Corruption is King. King in DC, King on Wall Street, King of the United States.
A strange democracy, have we not, where those things that matter most, to most citizens, don't even rate unfettered discussion in the shared Mass Media? That those who raise and pay fortunes for the chance to "represent" us, have nothing to say about so much corruption, so plain and widely spread, so clearly a threat to our nation.