Becoming a Product For Sale, Cheaply

FIVE OF THE WORLD'S BIGGEST banks, including Citigroup and the Bank of Scotland, were convicted of crimes just the other day, and fined several billion dollars. Ho hum, what else is new. These five big banks were caught conspiring to manipulate international currency values, communicating in code, meeting in secret chat rooms, and so forth, believe it or not. Regular spy thriller material. Business and Finance professors will tell you that the penalties they paid were ridiculously low, considering their wealth, and the heinous magnitude of their crimes. But, of course, the financial services industry is regulated, to the extent that it is regulated at all, by members of the financial services industry, who go back and forth between government work and working within the industry. A real corrupt incestuous arrangement. Every few months the Bank of America gets hauled into federal court and pleads guilty to fraud charges, pays hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, and walks out happy. What a system. This is only part of the reason that the American people, or at least about fifty million of the poor ones, need to get out in the streets and start a revolution. The entire American economic system is owned, controlled, and operated by the very rich, for the very rich, with the other ninety nine point nine nine percent of us mere units of consumption and marketable commodities. Just remember; when you joined facebook you did not become a "customer" of facebook. You became facebook's product, facebook's merchandise, to be sold to the highest corporate bidders within the advertising industry. Isn't that lovely? Don't you just love unwittingly, voluntarily turning yourself into an item for sale on a store shelf? Makes you really feel empowered, doesn't it?