Everyday Americans, the 99% so to speak, are experiencing the same phenomena as their European cousins-austerity, by a different name but for the same reasons. A mass anti-austerity general strike is taking place today in Portugal, Spain and Italy will follow later this month. Greece is periodically in flames over the austerity package their unelected government is forcing on them. All of Europe's current economic troubles started with derivative type schemes going bad. All of them were caused by the greed of the rich. All of poor are now being forced to pay for them. What a wonderful world eh.
But there is now some hope on the horizon. The banksters have gotten away with their robbery of the 99% by bribing politicians and regulators to be their supplicants, to not pass the type of regulations needed to control the banker's avarice, then not enforce what meager regulations might have been passed anyway. Now though, with governments and public agencies going bankrupt, local and state politicians are under increasing pressure to pass banking regulations and to pressure their well bribed brethren in Washington to do like wise.
As Ellen Brown says, "The creation of credit has too long been delegated to a cadre of private middlemen who have flagrantly abused the privilege. We can avoid the derivatives trap by cutting out the middlemen and creating our own credit, following the precedent of the Bank of North Dakota and many other public banks abroad. Public Banking already works in the United States. North Dakota owns its own bank. North Dakota is also the only state to escape the credit crisis of 2008, sporting a budget surplus every year since."
