TRICKLE UP ECONOMICS

I've fallen short of the mark..Nevertheless, I read books, special reports and listened to tapes on the subject. I speak to wealthy friends and acquaintances, and try to learn more.

A common theme always pervaded every book, conversation , tape and

report. It always boiled down to three letters..OPM. OPM simply means "

other peoples money."

An uncontroverted lesson of financial history is that the folks who are

the very best at using other peoples money are the people who use

publicly traded securities to finance business ventures. Investment

bankers, CEO's, savings and loans, insurance companies, and the mortgage lenders, and just about every other financial institution functions on OPM. When they sell stock, meaning investments in their ownership or equity, they have no loans to repay, no collateral to post and rarely surrender actual control. Being corporations, they are insulated from personal responsibility for failure.

When the companies fail, and fail big time, they can resort to using the

bankruptcy courts and discharge their obligations, essentially using their

creditors money without ever paying it back.

Now they have failed big time, and the scare mongers in Washington who

received huge campaign donations from the deal makers and the movers and

shakers on Wall Street are telling us the economy would collapse if the

elites didn't get $700 Billion to make the same mistakes over again.

That's $700 billion of other people's money, ie mine and yours.

As a taxpaying American, I have long hoped and prayed that my hard earned

money would help the Wall Street elites pay for those ten million dollar

homes on Long Island Sound or those palatial cooperative apartments on

Park Avenue.

I understand the government runs on OPM too. I understand the government needs money to defend us from terrorists, to build a national defense, an infrastructure and a safety net for the less fortunate, and a plethora of other things, some necessary, some not.

But the latest fiasco , in bailing out the elites while hundreds of

thousands, perhaps millions of folks are losing their homes, are unable

to send their kids to college and are barely surviving, is an insult to us all. Moreover, it is reverse class warfare by the very rich and their political prostitutes in Washington, against the rest of us.

Unfortunately, it is part and parcel of a long pattern of betrayal and

exploitation from Washington, and by legislators in both parties.

They have sided with the credit card industry by permitting interest rates without limit, using ‘federal preemption" to overturn usury laws in every state that still had them. Thanks to the friends of the credit card lobby, some folks are paying 38 % interest on credit card debt, and cannot discharge the debts in bankruptcy.

They have allowed the Federal reserve banks to inflate the currency by

running the printing presses, increasing the amounts of money in circulation, and precipitating the hidden tax known as inflation. While the secretive clique that owns the Federal Reserve Banks becomes wealthier

and wealthier, the currency they foist on the public shrinks in value.

It gets worse. Class action suits by investors swindled by the Wall Street insiders have been greatly limited by federal legislation. Investors lost as much as $34 trillion when the dot com bubble burst. The rich and well connected went home and called it a day.

But where does it all end? Students of history can tell you that when

the middle class gets squeezed badly enough, extremism, violence and

totalitarianism can easily follow.

While the United States has a tradition of democracy, tolerance and

peaceful transitions in government, there are limits on what we can endure.

If meaningful access to the economy, fairness and renewed prosperity

do not come our way again, we retain alienable rights to alter and reform

our system of government.

The present situation is not tolerable.

The author is General Counsel of the National Writers Syndicate. A

practicing attorney in Newton, Massachusetts, he is also known for his work

in runing training programs for pro se litigants. Visit his website at

www.citizensjustice.com

Lawyer and Business Consultant

617-965-9300