Pre-Script: Personal
income fell in August (from July), says the Commerce Dept, while the top one
percent of the population rake in 24% of all US income -- their biggest haul
since the 1920s.
While Wall Street does sorely misuse our money, should they have our money in the first place?
The wealth belonging to others on their ledgers is prodigious: much of our savings -- stocks and money market funds; most of our pension funds; and just about all of society's debts -- government deficits, private credit cards and mortgages -- are Big Bankers' credit. Yet it need not be that way.
We can stop sending all our surplus cash to Wall Street right now. We can:
* keep our savings in community credit unions;
* use cash or debit cards and credit cards only as a last resort; and
* lobby government to keep our commonwealth at home.
What is the wealth that already belongs to us, which we overlook and upon which Wall Street feasts, empowering itself to lord over everyone else? Our common inheritance is largely the worth of Earth, the value of land and resources. It's society's spending for sites and ecosystem services. We pay for land and oil not only when we pay rent or buy gasoline; the value of nature is embedded in the price of everything we buy. This flow of dough is ours, since we all have an equal right to Earth, and it is trillions of dollars every year that now end up in the wrong pockets.
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