Two things have become crystal clear in the past year or two.
- Conservatives, GOP and conservaDem, don't really have any problem with income re-distribution. What they have a problem with is income that is re-distributed down to us instead of up to Wall Street.
- They don't much care how it gets re-distributed as long as it's flowing in the right direction.
We know this because over the last three decades the conservatives who run both parties (ie, the single corporate party that has split into two factions that spend most of their time pretending to be, you know, different) have been a big help in arranging this:

They've done it in principally 3 ways:
- They wrote laws highly favorable to corporate, especially banking, theft.
- Even in cases where banks and corpo's obviously, even flagrantly, broke the law, there have been NO consequences - no penalties, no jail time, nothing.
- When the plutonomic economy they'd created fell apart, their govt representatives handed them $Trillions$ of our money so they wouldn't suffer the extreme deprivation of having to sell one of their 8 vacation homes or trade in that comfortable 6-seater LearJet for a less comfortable 4-seater.
So not only did the banksters and CEO's steal all your money, leaving you with a mortgage you can't pay because they gave your job to a prisoner in a Chinese slave labor camp for pennies a day, but the govt representatives they'd bought helped them to do it and then absolved them of all responsibility and/or accountability for both the theft and its destruction of your life.
Even that wouldn't be as bad as this: they're still doing it. The banks have no intention of letting one single victim of their scam off the hook for the full amount the bank managed to steal. The contract is sacred even when the contract was a fraud. And where, pray tell, is the Justice Dept while all this raucous law-breaking is going? Good question.
I don't know how you keep hearing these stories of fraud - accounting fraud, investor fraud, what have you - without the Justice Department getting involved. We want to make banking boring again, and the simplest way to do that is by making absolutely clear that anyone who takes these kinds of risks and plays these kinds of games will go to jail for a long time. If we had a culture of accountability in Washington that would already be happening.
But instead, financial reform will rely on regulators. The very ones that failed the nation during the last crisis.
Because we can't punish people when they're paying us not to.
And so it goes.
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