(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
The American Corporatocray/Plutocracy has unofficially declared war on the general population with the confirmation of Ben Bernanke. The out-of-the-box financial “rescue” solution of Bernanke, triggered by the criminal malfeasance of much of the financial sector, was to MAKE GOOD THEIR LOSSES. This took the Fed into the uncharted waters of trading treasury debt for any toxic garbage presented by a gangster financial institution.
The confirmation of Bernanke indicates that each of the approaching waves of the American insolvency plague will be treated with the same medicine: unlimited taxpayer bailouts. If you tally up the cost of making good all the coming bad debt in credit-cards, commercial real estate, commercial loans, and additional mortgage defaults, you end up with a taxpayer bill of over 20 trillion, and this doesn’t encompass possible derivatives exposure, which nobody seems to understand.
There is no way for the US Treasury to absorb all of these losses without crushing the value of the US Dollar and cratering the general standard of living of the American people. The top .01% however will make out nicely, because Ben Bernanke cannot imagine an American economy without highly concentrated wealth and lavishly paid business leaders. Thus, he will keep moving money from taxpayers to CEO’s and financial racketeers until our money becomes worthless.
Out of the increasing misery of the general population, a new political order will arise. It may be a dictatorship, if the plutocracy can keep the lid on with massive repression, or it may be a turbulent reformed government, but the outcome will be the result of our corporation-controlled Bushbama government giving the Federal Reserve the power to further enrich a tiny elite while pauperizing the vast majority of Americans. Historians will regard the re-appointment of Bernanke as a disastrous error that accelerated America’s economic decline.
Ian Welsh summarizes Bernanke’s mischief very neatly:
Bernanke bailed out the banks and the rich. You know this, but what is not clear to many people is that bailing out the banks and fixing the banking system were not connected at the hip. It was possible to fix what was wrong with the banks by taking the big banks into receivership and then using them to lend directly. Wipe out the shareholders, write down the bondholders to the actual value of the banks, but keep lending to the real economy, and indeed increase lending and capital flows, by, say, deciding to refit every single building in America for energy efficiency and generation, and to take every clunker off the road.
The banking class, and the rich as a group, tanked the system. They committed what amounted to systematic fraud, and earned billions of dollars of bonuses for themselves by crashing out the system and daring Bernanke and other politicians (and Ben is nothing if not a pol) to do something about it. Bernanke folded, and threw trillions of dollars at them.
Despite what Bernanke’s, Paulson’s, Bush’s and yes, Obama’s, apologists say, this was not necessary. It resulted from a deep confusion of banks with what banks do, and a deep desire to keep the same class of people in charge of the economy, despite their manifest failures. Ben Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner, Bush, Obama and so on could not imagine taking out their friends-could not imagine letting them suffer the consequences of their results-could not even understand that their friends were parasites who were not necessary for the continuation of the system but were instead the people who had caused it to collapse.
. . .
Source: http://www.ianwelsh.net/road-t…
6 comments
Skip to comment form
term will not be until January, right? He has only been renominated for a second term, not confirmed.
I agree that the banking system more or less committed massive fraud. But they seized the power fair and square by playing the political game the way it is meant to be played. The left did not choose to play the political game so the sharks have been stealing everything that isn’t nailed down whether it is the Military Industrial Complex or any of the other complexes that dominate our economic and political landscape. The feeble left that has been cocooning in their overpriced houses for the past few decades is to blame for this, in my view.
I don’t know if the system will blow up and the guns will rule. Bernanke has proven that he can “right” the system with smoke and mirrors–he’s done a great job of creating “magic”. Remember all the oligarchs throughout the world have a stake making it seem that the financial system does work with pretend money–but it’s been pretend money since 72. All governments will bring the efficiencies of the global system to bear, not to increase prosperity–that prosperity we think we had was an illusion. Our living standards have been going down since 1980 (depending on how you measure)–yet we believe we have been living through a boom because that is what we want to believe–slight of hand artists know this.
It is still possible that disaster could hit if enough people see through the illusionists tricks–otherwise we’ll all pretend to be rich and happy to avoid cognitive dissonance.