Corporate club

One hears about shadowy groups of people who run things from behind a screen. Some of it's crazy, some of it isn't and with some of it, you just never know. There never was anything like the group said to be behind The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the book was actually re-purposed from an earlier anti-Napoleonic screed to vilify Jews. Rather successfully too.

There are, however uncountable but influential think tanks and other agencies pumped full of cash from the deep pockets of hidden global interests. There is a real Bilderberg group and you'll hear from some that it has all kinds of sinister purposes related to globalism and world government. Whether that agenda includes corporate feudalism or worldwide socialism depends on whose axe is being ground, and their guarded secrecy only invites speculation: but the most successful of secret groups would probably be invisible or apparently innocuous and would include entities quite a bit more powerful than effete European aristocrats and the selection of politicians and industrialists who attend annual Bilderberg meetings.

To me, the most likely home for such a group or groups would be right here in the USA and The New York Times' Jimmy Zuma gives us a candidate: the notorious industrial barons, the Koch Brothers who

"regularly convene secret conclaves of industrialists aiming to prevent government from regulating business."

Has the rightward tilt of the United States Supreme Court been facilitated and encouraged or even paid for by Oil money?

Was the Citizens United decision granting corporate ability to pump unlimited amounts of money into campaigns designed to repay that money, to influence elections and guarantee the allegiance of politicians bought and paid for? Despairing minds want to know. The decisions of Supreme Court Justices allowing corporations the power to slander and libel ad libidum, the decision eviscerating any attempt to influence elections and legislation with secret, untraceable Gigabuck contributions: did the attendance of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia at Koch Brothers secret meetings about which the press never talks ( although it attends) have anything to do with the biggest handover of political power to the very, very rich in our history?

"Now that we know Supreme Court justices attended Koch’s political planning meetings, it is time to ask some important questions… "

Yes it is and now, while we still can.

What's in your wallet?

The prospect of foreclosure is frightening enough to the many people who are having trouble making mortgage payments and who fear losing their homes. It's frightening enough without the prospect of strange men crashing through the back door in the middle of the night.

Even worse for some people here in The Sunshine State, folks who are simply a bit behind in payments but who are not in foreclosure have been treated to a surprise breaking and entering by representatives of one of those banks that love to advertise how they're on your side. Listen to the 911 call from one frightened woman and put yourself in her position and ask yourself what you would do if the man in black kicked in your door. I certainly know what I would do and what the law allows me to do to a possibly armed unannounced midnight caller. It would involve more than an angry letter to J.P. Morgan.

The hired thugs of our friendly banking industry have done worse than frightening people half to death in a way Pauly Walnuts could only envy. There are stories of home invasions at wrong addresses and one Jason Grodensky from nearby Ft. Lauderdale, Florida with the good fortune to have no mortgage at all had his house foreclosed on by Bank of America. What's in your wallet?

The publicity has been bad enough that major banks are curtailing foreclosure viking raids or freezing foreclosures entirely for the moment. Nancy Pelosi and some 30 Democrats in the house are calling for an investigation in their typically socialist way and Attorney General Eric Holder has announced he will be looking into it. Bloomberg News reports that some 7 states are investigating charges that false documents and signatures have been used to justify hundreds of thousands of possible fraudulent foreclosures and their attendant Viking raids against surprised and terrified homeowners.

So it's all going to be taken care of right? The Democrats are on the side of the people and against those huge, ugly hordes of corporate Visigoths and their paper battering rams, right? They control the Senate and the House and they'd never let the Republicans rubber stamp the right of Corporate Huns to lie, cheat and bypass every code of human decency since the Code of Hammurabi and the Proclamation of Telepinu -- right?

Don't be too sure, because a bill that may do just that now sits on President Obama's desk that somehow oozed through our lefty, anti-business, death-to-Capitalism Congress. Stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democratic Senator Robert Casey used some obscure procedure to take the bill away from the Senate Judiciary committee and the Senate then immediately passed it without debate and by unanimous consent. There was no one in the gallery to sing Whose side are you on.