Jimmy Copens Wants His Country Back

The video came in the mail with no explanation of hype or even a bio. I like how it sounds but I couldn't tell if it came from a Tea Party member or an Occupy Wall Street activist-- although after listening to the lyrics a few times, I'll guess the probability is better that the songwriter's sympathies are more with the latter than the former. (The Conservative Times liked it too and they liked it but had a different interpretation: "It’s good stuff. I assume, although I don’t know for sure, that Mr. Copens is a Ron Paul supporter.") You can't assume all country music coming out of Nashville is reactionary. Well, you can assume whatever you want; but you'd be wrong.

This ain't no black or white
No left, no right
And DC... they don't know jack
And I want my country back
Billionaires... they don't care
If the working man falls through the cracks

There's nothing wrong with someone working hard and smart and making a lot of money. It's what used to make America exceptional. Now America has one of the lowest rates of upward mobility of any developed nation in the world. If you're born into a rich family you're much more likely to be rich yourself-- even if you're a moron-- than is someone born into a poor family-- even if she's brilliant-- becoming wealthy. And guess who started the ghastly trend away from keeping hereditary wealth at bay in America? No, not Ronald Reagan, although he certainly accelerated the trend. When Eisenhower was president, the top marginal tax bracket protected American society from the inevitable excesses of great hereditary wealth by taxing it at 91%. So who set the country on the path it's on now, where lowlife hustlers and gangsters-- be it a Romney or an Adelson-- can wind up with the kind of excess wealth to buy the political system? JFK, scion of the Kennedy bootlegging fortune. If you vote for a millionaire-- and half the members of Congress are-- you're betraying your own interests, no matter if it's a Republican millionaire or a Democratic millionaire. There are too many of them in Congress as is... way too many.

Tuesday, the House Financial Services Committee, invited Wall Street bankster Jamie Dimon, who should be rotting in a prison cell, to testify. Most of the committee members were, deferential. You had to long for Alan Grayson to be back on the panel, although at least Maxine Waters, Brad Sherman and Brad Miller tried. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) pressed Chairman Bachus (R-AL) to require Dimon to testify under oath. Bachus declined, saying it wasn’t the committee’s tradition to require witnesses to deliver sworn testimony. Dimon and his firm-- as well as Wall Street in general-- have helped to finance the political careers (and lifestyles) of most of the members of the House Financial Services Committee. Baucus has taken 119,000 in legalistic bribes from JP Morgan, $1,297,713 from the Commercial Banks industry, and $965,243 from the Securities and Investment industry throughout his miserable congressional career. The committee's vice chair, Jeb Hensarling, aspires to the same level of corruption as Baucus and he's received $50,962 from JP Morgan, $688,095 from the Commercial Banks industry, and $658,242 from the Securities and Investment industry. These are the industries they're supposed to be the watch dogs over. Among the other big JP Morgan whores are committee members Steve Stivers (R-OH), who's taken $70,350 from JP Morgan-- and he's only a freshman!, and Jim Himes (New Dem-CT), who's taken $51,450. John Campbell (R-CA) was the deputy project manager for JP Morgan's new $1 billion headquarters on Wall Street and was responsible for the bank's lending portfolio in the southern cone of Latin America. He's set. And in the last cycle bankster kiss-ass Scott Garrett (R-NJ) took bribes from 9 of the 10 top banksters, including, of course JP Morgan. But the corruption goes beyond the GOP, of course, In 2010 Ed Perlmutter (New Dem-CO) fought for an exemption for the country's biggest banks from supervision by the new consumer-protection agency; soon after he was rewarded with thousands of "contributions" from the banksters. Can anyone mention some of these galoots recusing themselves? How about the whole concept of "conflicts of interest?"

In this cycle alone, the Securities and Investment industry has bribed members of the Committee to the tune of $4,009,642. We should all want our country back!