The inherently divisive and exploitative nature of capitalism, is readily apparent when one draws back the curtain of the global banking system. One peak reveals their inner workings, where it becomes clear that it looks less like a legitimate business enterprise and more like a criminal syndicate running a lucrative extortion racket. In the Wall Street economy, money is both means and end, and the primary product is phantom wealth-money disconnected from the production or possession of anything of real value. In our era of deregulation on Wall Street banks have moved away from their traditional role of providing loans to consumers and businesses. Instead, they have created a new business model that specializes in charging excessive fees and usurious interest rates, provides excessive leverage for risky bets for hedge funds, extracts subsidies and bailouts from governments, launders money from drug and arms traders, and use offshore accounts to hide their profits. While the middle class melts away, banks have profited at every step. The forty-year experiment of “trickle-down” economics has favored the interest of Wall Street speculators, but has been a dismal failure for the average working man and woman. Thus, this book of poetry is subtitled, The Voices of the Bankers and the Thieves.
