Monday, October 19, 2009

Michael Moore: How 'Banksters' Bleed America

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

I have stats that prove just one percent of the US population owns more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined. We are supposed to believe that's just an accident! It was, in fact, a deliberate transfer of wealth to those who benefit from US largesse to the US wealthy, members of the Military/Industrial complex, and, as Michael Moore dramatically demonstrates --a gang of 'banksters' who may have manufactured the recent 'financial crisis'!

Certainly --at the end of this 'crisis', only the 'banksters' will have benefited. Some already have! Everyone else wil be poorer if not poverty stricken. Bluntly --I am not all that excited about the restoration of the 'economic health' of the parasites who have leached upon the labors of those who create real wealth: workers!

It was written recently that Wall Street types were 'mocking' us, 'us' being the people of the US. Well, of course, Wall St mocks us. They're alright! They made out like the bandits they are in fact. Write this down: 1) Rich folk, bankers and elites LOVE recessions; they start them by 'taking their profits' i.e, dumping their holdings and depressing markets. 2) They short sell all the way down. 3) Then, they pick up the bargains when you are forced to sell or have already declared bankrupcy.

The banksters can do this because they control the markets.


Michael Moore 'Shakesdown' the Robber Barons

Clearly, the REAL cause of the economic collapse is the precipitous decline of US productivity over a period of some 30 years. The tell-tale symptom of this decline has been the fall of the dollar since Richard Nixon abandoned the 'gold standard' for the obvious reason that a run on the buck would have emptied Ft. Knox. Given a few ups and downs, the dollar has declined along with purchasing power, wages and living standards since that time.

The truth of my assertions can be found in the CIA's own 'World Fact Book' which lists China at the top of the list with the World's LARGEST POSITIVE 'current account balance'; the US is on bottom with the world's largest NEGATIVE current account balance, formerly known as the 'balance of trade' deficit! The difference between China's positive account and the US's negative account is largely the monies you might have made had not the GOP betrayed the American middle and lowers classes even as it enriched an increasingly tiny, ruling elite!
But it’s not a simple case of flourishing banks versus ailing workers: banks that are actually in the business of lending, as opposed to trading, are still in trouble. Most notably, Citigroup and Bank of America, which silenced talk of nationalization earlier this year by claiming that they had returned to profitability, are now — you guessed it — back to reporting losses.

Ask the people at Goldman, and they’ll tell you that it’s nobody’s business but their own how much they earn. But as one critic recently put it: “There is no financial institution that exists today that is not the direct or indirect beneficiary of trillions of dollars of taxpayer support for the financial system.” Indeed: Goldman has made a lot of money in its trading operations, but it was only able to stay in that game thanks to policies that put vast amounts of public money at risk, from the bailout of A.I.G. to the guarantees extended to many of Goldman’s bonds.

So who was this thundering bank critic? None other than Lawrence Summers, the Obama administration’s chief economist — and one of the architects of the administration’s bank policy, which up until now has been to go easy on financial institutions and hope that they mend themselves.

Why the change in tone? Administration officials are furious at the way the financial industry, just months after receiving a gigantic taxpayer bailout, is lobbying fiercely against serious reform. But you have to wonder what they expected to happen. They followed a softly, softly policy, providing aid with few strings, back when all of Wall Street was on the ropes; this left them with very little leverage over firms like Goldman that are now, once again, making a lot of money.

--Paul Krugman, The Banks are no Alright

The US is now a COW to be milked by 'banksters' at home and the Chinese ruling elite abroad. It was the treacherous, if not treasonous, activities of Bush, Nixon, Reagan and, most recently, Bush JR, who brought the world's great superpower to its knees!

It was Bush Jr who laid the groundwork for Nixon's famous trip China back in the seventies. Today, China props up a worthless dollar so that it can continue to sell US consumers --sheeple --products that were once produced by US industries, US businesses who employed a prosperous US working class that, bluntly, no longer exists. Name a single heavy industry in which the US leads the world (excluding military hardware). Secondly, the US dollar is worthless were it not propped up by China who is just trying to save their own asses by doing so.

Kudos to both Democracy Now and Michael Moore. Beginning with the 1989 classic Roger & Me, the Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore says his films come back to a central core concern: the economic system we have is unfair, unjust and undemocratic.

With his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore tackles the financial system and the interchanging circles of Washington politicians and corporate managers that run it. Moore says 'I thought I'd cut to the chase and propose we deal with this economic system and restructure it in a way that benefits people and not the wealthiest one percent.'

I agree! A 'recovery' in which wealth merely resumes its flow upward to just one percent of the population is just a band-aid on the pulmonary artery. If the flow upward is not stopped, the ultimate collapse of the US economy will make the Great Depression look like a Baptist picnic.



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2 comments:

Angela said...

People are enslaved through the monetary system because the money is made out of debt, so when central banks (PRIVATELY OWNED institutes) make the money, governments get into debt with the banks and through governments also people are always in debt with the banks.
Ezra Pound used to say that politicians are the bankers' waiters: sadly true. People must claim the control of their lives back, this system is becoming unsustainable and approaching the collapse.
Great post as usual!

Unknown said...

Thanks Angela, clearly the GOP mucky mucks figured out that the jig was up! They might have stolen the election but did not! Let Obama take the rap. Everything is according to plan.