Democracy Now! ran a story about the debt crisis and who will stand to benefit most from its resolution. Hint: it’s the same group of people that benefited from the bailouts. All these benefits, of course, come off of the backs of people that don’t sit on a bank’s board of directors.

This morning, the talking heads on Face the Nation were saying that if we don’t get a debt solution in place, interest rates will go up, and that’s going to be bad for the average American.

So let me get this straight: interest rates are bad when they go up.

Well, that’s what I’ve been saying for a while, with the addendum that interest rates are just plain bad. The only thing they do is move money from the poor to the rich, with concomitant social ills following in the wake of increasing income and wealth disparity.

And what we have now are the ratings agencies telling us that if the banks don’t get what they want, we’ll lose our national credit rating and we all suffer terribly for that. The Greeks are being told to sell off their nation so that foreign banks won’t have to sustain losses. Are we in a similar position? Or at least heading that way?

We are governed by our financial institutions. The Constitution exists now as a framework within which financial institutions must operate if they wish to increase profits. The Constitution has some brilliant ideas in it, but it has been perverted in its current application. This is not a sudden thing: it is a long process that has generated calls for alarm and attention for over two centuries.