Should We Shoot Looters?

I am sure we all remember New Orleans after the Katrina disaster. At the time people were breaking into stores to get food as none of the food that the governments had promised was being delivered. The response from the President an other government officials was to call for the shooting of looters. The number one priority was to prevent looting. While there is more than one definition of "looting", in terms of generally accepted understanding and when you get to shoot looters, it refers to stealing from others during an emergency.

The concern about looting during an emergency is that society will devolve, that lawlessness will become rampant and all order will be lost. I was in Los Angeles during the riots when there was looting going on and it was pretty sad and scary to see. It was also one of the few times I ever carried a gun on me other than when I was target shooting. I had driven into Los Angeles to make sure my elderly grandmother was okay because there had been some looting near her home.

Now here is where the media, government and the financial industry are all hypocrites. If J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, HSBC, RBS and many other banks decided to fix the financial markets during the economic collapse, were they guilty of looting? The banks colluded to fix markets and even took millions in bonuses for having done it. All order has been lost in the financial markets. Heck, even extremist right wingers like Ron Paul would agree with me on this. If a libertarian like Ron Paul believes that Glass Steagel should be the law and that banks should not be able to gamble with our deposits, then why is this allowed to continue?

At a time of our greatest need and challenge, our corporations and financial industry are looting our future. They are also planning on and beginning to loot our retirements and pensions and it is a concerted effort. I don't have a problem with conservatives or liberals, I just can't find any anymore. Conservatives and liberals in America used to worry about the country and not the profit of just a few.

It is claimed that the world has $700 or so trillion dollars in debt and that the annual GDP of the world is about $70 trillion. What would have happened if we had let the big banks fail and not have bailed them out? The answer is, a lot of the debt would have just disappeared. The banks would have defaulted on each other and the depositors equally. We can look to Iceland and see how true this is, they didn't bail out the banks. They lost some money and then made it back without being hampered by debts they did not create.

How is it that a child who was born today is assumed to have $25,000 in debt? What did he buy? How is it that it is assumed that you or I am in any way responsible for hundreds of trillions in debt, I didn't borrow the money? Heck, after getting divorced I paid off all our debt. Should I be held responsible for looters? I believe in capitalism; but, I don't believe in insider trading and thievery. When criminals work together to steal money we call it racketeering. When banks collude to steal money we call it malfeasance, a word most people don't even understand.

Now lets get specific. Back in the 1970s my father told me about the largest theft of all time by the mafia. They created an insurance company and took in over a billion (big at the time) in revenue while not putting enough money aside to pay claims and then tried to claim bankruptcy. They were prosecuted under RICO or racketeering laws and got to go to jail. How is this any different than what the banks and AIG did?

Here is where to look. We as a nation have debt because we spent more than we took in from taxes. A very simple equation. I didn't vote on that and I believe most people are against the government spending more than it takes in. All sort of Republicans claim they are against deficit spending; but, gosh darn-it somehow they continue voting for it. They try and blame it on welfare; but, honestly look at the money they vote to spend on corporations and projects that only benefit their districts. The Democrats are no better and the reason for both parties is the same. It benefits the banks when we deficit spend. I will make it simple, the wars we are waging have cost us trillions of dollars, if we stopped them all tomorrow, do you really believe we would take the savings and pay off the debt or continue to deficit spend? This should be easy if you know history and about the Vietnam war.