(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
The uneasiness I have felt for months about the unraveling economy has come into clearer focus with the realization that America is entering a state of institutional anarchy. We are now in a situation where it is no longer clear who is in charge. The nominal supreme institution, the US Federal Government, is effectively being run by large private financial concerns. Superficially, the Obama administration may pretend to tell Goldman Sachs what to do, but on a practical basis, corporations like Goldman Sachs are directing the economic policy of the White House through a network of careerist influence that they don’t even bother to conceal.
We would not be in an anarchic state if the Government would simply capitulate, and put its economic affairs in the hands of the financial barons, but the fragmentary legal and political apparatus of our Federal system keeps making random and isolated challenges to the defacto authority of the financial oligarchs. It is like watching some great machine break down with a shower of sparks and short-circuiting, as misdirected energy continues to flow through a broken structure. Nationalization is off the table, not merely for political reasons, but because the Federal Government of the United States appears no longer to believe in its own competence. The financial corporations, having demonstrated incompetence, by contrast feel fully entitled to keep running the show.
Just who is in charge here? It’s not Obama. It’s not the bad boy plutocrats. Neither side is willing to take full responsibility. This is an anarchic state, and it will not be long before its pernicious consequences become more noticeable. Anarchy is worse than any system of government, and this awful realization is what will eventually drive us toward a resolution of the current crisis.
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repeatedly voicing a little question in the back of my head is this continual message from the administration, from inside the beltway, and from PR firms, that the government MUST buy up all these “toxic” (read worthless) assets to get them off bank balance sheets because they are ostensibly what is keeping banks from lending.
Banks lending money is one of the major, if not THE major way they produce revenue and profit. In any business, when sales are down you do everything you can do to increase sales revenue – or you go bust – UNLESS you can produce revenue another way.
Yet the real message coming through is that the banks somehow do not want to increase revenue in any other way than simply taking it from taxpayers instead of lending to generate revenue.
This leads me to suspect that they have no intention of returning to providing the “product” they have always provided to generate revenue, but instead have decided to simply and openly steal it, and that the current economic crisis is not something the government is trying to correct but is instead actively a partner in intentionally manufacturing.
With government help. With Geithner’s help. With the presidents help.
We have a big problem. The problem is not the economic crisis.
What is “government”?
Capitalism would be anarchy without Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
But that relatively benign invisible hand has been replaced by the not-so-invisible hand of Goldman Sachs.
It’s as if the Uncertainty Principle has been thrown out and replaced by pure Determinism. A regression into the past.
A regression that allocates power to those who make up the new rules.
I agree that Obama is a mere bystander as all this happens.
And that the result is, there are various power centers acting in their own selfish interests to the detriment of the American People, and nobody’s in charge.
is the cause of all this. I believe it was at that point back in the 18(70’s?) that the constitutional constraints on corporations were abrogated. Correct me if I’m wrong, but were not corporations originally, by law and definition, a concession granted by Congress, in order to provide certain services to We The People?
And if this is the case, wouldn’t it seem that there should be a way to address the situation via legislation destroying corporate personhood?
Oh, that’s right, silly me, the Richy Riches own Congress. Won’t work out that way.