The current struggle of the rich against democracy started during our contsitutional convention

[rfranklin]

Economic struggles played a huge role in the founding of our country, despite some attempts to revise that history.

Constitutional Convention Delegates Had Common Goal: Ending Democratic Finance

Monday, 04/4/2011 - 11:46 am by William Hogeland

Edmund Randolph of Virginia kicked off the meeting we now know as the United States constitutional convention by offering his fellow delegates a key inducement to forming a new U.S. government. America lacked “sufficient checks against the democracy,” Randolph said. A new government would provide those checks.

Randolph’s listeners in Philadelphia in the spring of 1787 knew what he meant by “the democracy.” And readers of this series probably will, too. He was talking about the 18th-century American popular finance movement, whose supporters agitated for policies to obstruct concentrated wealth and to give regular folks access to political power and economic equality. Amid depressions and foreclosures, ordinary people had long been rioting — they called it “regulating” — to pressure assemblies to restrain the merchant creditors, whose command of scarce gold and silver let them acquire immense wealth by lending at high, even predatory rates to the needier.
--more--
http://www.newdeal20.org/2011/04/04/constitutional-convention-delegates-had-common-goal-ending-democratic-finance-40634/

[The Magistrate]

1. True, Sir: This Is The Great Open Secret Of Our System

[MichiganVote]

2. "Free Market" is as bad as "Shared Sacrifice". Neither is true and never has been.

[Buzz Clik]

3. This story makes Kory Shore cry for America.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdirIfmcuRg

[99th_Monkey]

4. de Tocqueville had much to say about this

"The manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and then debases the men who serve it,
and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public ... the friends of democracy
should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of
conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that this is the
gate by which they will enter".

If only we'd taken this sage advice a bit more seriously as a collective.

[jwirr]

5. They were fighting the teabaggers way back then. Thanks for the

post.