A friend of mine posted this article on Facebook yesterday and it’s hands-down one of the smartest takes on the world’s current economic crisis that I’ve read in a very long time. If you’ve lost your steam (and your way) with regards to the Occupy Wall Street movement, you might just get it back — and then some — when you read Robert Fisk’s incredible op-ed piece which he wrote last weekend for The Independent. The following is an excerpt: “The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people’s wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine … Why don’t my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – ‘INSIDE JOB’ started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American ‘peacemaking’ in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are ‘moderates’, the bad guys ‘terrorists’. The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become “anarchists”, the social “terrorists” of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can’t touch them.” You can read Fisk’s entire piece in full by visiting The Independent.
