Who says the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have no demands?

You want demands? I'll give you demands. I've posted them on a blog called No More Mister Niceblog, where they're attract more eyeballs than the eyeballs scanning my own blog. But I encourage you to visit No More Mr. Niceblog and examine the post entitled, "A list of demands for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators."

Among the topics covered are reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall act, laws preventing commercial banks from operating across state lines (as used to be the case until the 1980s or so) more income tax brackets, with steeper brackets at the top. And even more demandsmore.

More? The demands also deal with Social Security and Medicare, college tuition and college loans, and the need for a constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people, but artificial constructs.

Just go here and scroll down until you can read the damn thing.

"Too big to fail" is too big, period!

Before Republicans and a few Democrats began deregulating the United States economy to hell, we had the financial and business equivalent of traffic cops who actually did their job. And we had laws with teeth that gave financial cops the authority to do that job.

Their job was to keep the equivalent of drunk drivers at the heads of corporations like Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, General Motors and others from letting their companies get so big that their intemperate greed and dunderheaded incompetence could sink the entire nation.

It’s time to bust up the banks,
the brokerage companies, the car makers
big drugs and big nationwide utilities

When we had the Glass-Steagall Act, financial institutions had to make a choice. They could be in the investment banking business, the savings bank and mortgage loan business, or the checking account and business loan business. Pick one.

That ended, under the Democratic Clinton Adminstration I’m ashamed to say, but under fierce pressure from a then-Republican Congress. It’s time to restore Glass-Steagall. But that's just for starters.

There was a time when every bank had 50 choices of the state where it wanted to do business. But every bank could only do business in one state. That kept banks local and fairly responsive to the needs of their local constituencies.

The town banker knew the town merchants. The savings bank knew their mortgage customers. Any local bank that began handing out fly-by-night loans would self-destruct, the banker would get driven out of town on a rail, the depositors would get paid off by FDIC insurance, the taxpayers would be in the hole but only for chump change relative to the mess we’re in now, and that would be that.

Strictly local banks were never too big to fail. But most of them were too smart to fail — because they were smaller, more agile, and more aware of what was going on their markets. It’s time to revert to local banking. Let Bank of America, and Chase, and Wells Fargo, and what’s left of the mess that’s Citibank each pick a state, any state, and do business there. And then get the hell out of the other 49 states.

Shrink banks and you'll shrink
bonuses and credit card interest

That one move will eliminate greed-driven bank managements because there simply won’t be enough money there most of the time for double-digit million dollar bonuses. It will eliminate the probability of massive bailouts of banks too big to fail. It will simplify the audits that state and federal bank examiners ought to be conducting every year. And it will keep banks out of the stock market, and vice-versa.

Oh, and by the way, it will bring credit card interest rates and penalties back under the control of the states, which in many states will mean the end of outrageous 30% credit card interest rates and heads-you-lose, tails-you-lose “terms and conditions.”

Give General Motors
a general bustup

General Motors? It would be a lot less of a threat to the economy if instead of General Motors we had a Chevvy Motors, a Buick Motors, a Cadillac Motors and a Saturn Motors, each with its own board of directors and its own more agile management to respond to its own market. If we did that to each of the “way-too-big three,” you can bet that, for example, Ram Motors would be doing okay now, even as Chrysler Car Motors sank like a shot, its market quickly taken over by somebody who wants to build an electric hybrid instead of a soused-on-petroleum SUV.

We still have a Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Breaking up the Big Three automakers is the sort of thing it was designed to do. Mr. Obama , get out that Sherman hatchet and start chopping up car companies.

The Sherman anti-trust act was used against AT&T back in 1982. Suddenly, instead of a single sleepy telephone monopoly, we had lots of little regional phone companies competing. Before you could hiccup we had cell phone networks, phone companies competing with cable companies, cable companies competing with phone companies, and rate wars. But then guess what happened?

Laissez-faire economics is what happened. The so-called “Baby Bells” starting merging. Rates went up. And now the cell phone innovations are happening at Apple, not New York Telephone. No wait, New York Telephone became part of Bell Atlantic. No wait, Bell Atlantic got swallowed up by NYNEX. It’s time to start un-merging them again — and the cable companies along with them.

Big Pharma? It’s a few corporate behemoths, their huge, powerful hands maintaining a choke hold around the necks of Congressmen and Senators that are keeping drug prices in the stratosphere. Break the bastards into a thousand little pieces. We’ll get smaller, smarter, faster-moving, more innovative pharmaceutical companies — and better drug prices while we’re at it.

Demand an end to
Socialism for corporations

Breaking up big business, regulating it into behaving as if it belongs in a civil society, detoxifying it so it can’t poison the economy and steal your job — that isn’t Socialism. On the contrary, it would be the end of a bigger evil, Corporate Socialism.

Small business that’s small enough to fail is capitalism. Let’s demand some capitalism for America, despite what those conservative Republican Socialists say.

Are you listening, Mr. President? And what about you, Congress?

The birdbrains who are pecking America to death. Part 2.

Back in May, before the election heated up, I posted a piece called “Pecked to death by birdbrains.” I was railing against the U.S. Post Office. That was nothing compared to what’s going on today.

Now I have to rail against my fellow citizens — a nation overwhelmingly of birdbrains about to pigeon step in single file off a cliff.

As I write this, the stock market is failing. Our savings institutions are trembling on the brink of collapse. The newspapers are beginning to write stories about potential runs on banks, something that hasn’t happened since the Great Depression of 1929, which threw our nation into ten years of abject poverty.

Right now, Americans are still dying in Iraq, while the Taliban is regaining territory in Afghanistan, and Iran may be futzing around with a nuclear bomb.

And how are Americans reacting to this? According to the polls, we’re drifting from favoring Obama to favoring the know-nothing McCain-Palin ticket. Which essentially means four more years of mindless Bush policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

We’re talking, folks, about two people who know zilch about what affects stock prices, less than zilch about banking, and squat about how to deal with the mess we’re in today.

Denial of on-the-record facts

John McCain recently denied he said he didn’t know much about economics. If he truthfully believes his denial, he’s also suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Here, Senator McCain, is the truth:

Actually, the quote came from a 2005 piece by Stephen Moore, in which McCain said: “I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics that I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.”

McCain also said this, per a December 2007 Boston Globe article: "The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should. I’ve got Greenspan’s book.”

He’s “got” a book? One book, by one at least partially discredited economist? And on that, assuming he ever reads it, he’s going to base policies that could help the United States survive hard times or drown in a sea of red ink? He's going to get an economic education when he gets around to it, and meanwhile sink the rest of us if he gets an F? Or even a C minus?

What McCain, Palin and Bush are for is “less government.” Except, it was “less government” — the elimination, for example, of the Glass-Steagall Act — that sent the banks and brokerage firms of America reeling toward a round of disaster that hasn’t been equaled since, but may be equaled again shortly.

The U.S. Government lacks the money to pay off all the FDIC-insured bank accounts that will become worthless along with the banks that hold those deposits. Yet John McCain, who may or may not have gotten around to reading one not-entirely-trustworthy book on economics, wants to cut taxes as a cure all for everything from low housing prices, to collapsing banks, to failing brokerage houses, to troubled automobile companies to — well, to warts, for all I know.

But wait, there’s more!
Like starting a nuclear war!

Georgia invades South Ossetia. So Russia invades Georgia. And suddenly, we’ve got Bush-McCain-Pallin responding to this near-nuclear situation by pouring gasoline on the fire and encouraging NATO membership for Georgia. This would require us to invade Russia. And you know what that means in terms of nuclear war.

Kaboom!

McCain-Pallin agree with Bush that we should surround the Russians with NATO nuclear missiles, right in the countries that border them. When the Russians tried the same trick in Cuba back in 1962, we wouldn’t stand for it. The event was called the “Cuban Missile Crisis” remember? We nearly risked World War III to get the Russians out of a neighboring country. Why should the Russians stand for it when we wouldn’t?

We’re heading for a meltdown — financial, international, diplomatic, nuclear. When it comes, most of the people reading this won’t be alive long enough to get past the next sentence.

But America “feels good” about the McCain-Palin continuation of the Bush program of national suicidal idiocy.

P.T. Barnum and the
North American Birdbrain

P.T. Barnum, the father not only of the three-ring circus but also of the theatrical con job once said that, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

But today’s North American Birdbrain exceeds anything even P.T. Con-em could have imagined.

The one thing I don’t have to worry about is this: When your bank collapses and your city explodes, you won’t come running to me. The reason?

Both of us will be nothing but a small, radioactive cinder.

Al Quaeda agent?

When Al Quaeda hijacked four airplanes on 9/11, bringing down the World Trade Center with two of them, Americans experienced a sense of righteous rage that won't go away in the lifetime of anybody who witnessed it.

To this day even the most liberal of us – including this cranky writer who is a usual opponent of the death penalty – wouldn’t shed a tear if Osama Bin Laden were shot or blown to bits in his cave, executed by lethal injection after a trial in the United States, or decapitated by a man swinging a sword in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. In fact, my sense of justice and a lingering fury has me longing for the last alternative.

9/11 was intended
as economic sabotage

It’s important to remember that Bin Laden’s intent was more than just to murder Americans. Those 3,000 lives were "collateral damage." The 9/11 operation was an act of economic sabotage aimed and wrecking havoc on New York, disrupting the nation’s financial markets, and shaking the world’s faith in the invulnerability of the United States.

So what is an American citizen who deliberately sets out to tear apart a strong American financial system—thus disrupting the financial markets, shaking the world’s faith in America, and possibly driving the entire United States to the verge of another Great Depression?

I’m talking about former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm, a man with more unsavory behavior in his background than a stray dog has fleas.

The man who created
a financial avalanche

Gramm is the Texan responsible for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. This law repealed Glass-Steagall Act, which once protected the financial integrity of America's banks.

Even more horrifically, Gramm was behind the stealthily-enacted, so-called “Commodity Futures Modernization Act,” which prohibits the government from regulating or even looking into the kinds of complex financial transactions that brought down Bear Sterns, threatens many banks including those where you may have deposits, and which may, as you read this, be snowballing into a financial avalanche that will bring down the United States economy.

I’ve previously railed against the repeal of Glass-Steagall here. And you’ll find a good – if simplified – summary of the havoc Phill Gramm has brought down on the United States economy here.

It seems fairly clear that Gramm did what he did for personal gain in the form of generous campaign contributions from doomsday business entities ranging from Enron (remember them?) to UBS, a now-shaky (thanks in part to Gramm-sponsored legislation) Swiss Bank on whose board Gramm sits.

“Dear Phil, Thanks for the great work.
—Your Pal, Osama Bin Laden”

If Gramm were on the payroll of Osama Bin Laden and did nothing more than what he has already done, an alert U.S. Attorney General would have a field day looking into charges of sabotage and treason relating to Gramm.

Of course, Gramm sabotaged the American economy in the U.S. Senate, which is to say he sabotaged our nation fair and square. So it’s doubtful that he will ever spend so much as a millisecond locked in the slammer. So much the worse for the future of America.

However, it is worth noting that Gramm is the chief financial adviser to Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain. If McCain becomes President, we’ll have the functional equivalent of an Al Quaeda agent of economic sabotage sitting in the Oval Office.

And that’s not just unjust. That’s economic terrorism.