THIS is a very long, thorough, sophisticated and complicated article by Matt Taibbi in the current Rolling Stone issue about what's happened not just to our economy, but to the entire power structure of our country. Dwight Eisenhower once warned of the extreme dangers of the "military-industrial complex" taking over the reigns of power from government. What Ike couldn't foresee was a global "Corporate-Wall Street complex" overrunning government.
Here's just two mouth-drying quotes from Matt's piece:
"So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream."
"The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second."
And the guys who lost all that money? They got $165 million in BONUSES!!!
Hmmm... maybe it wouldn't be that hard, after all.
Wow! I actually read through the whole article. It's extremely sobering, but at least it cast a light on what's really going on. The last section about keeping us in the dark with language we don't understand was really interesting.
ReplyDeleteI think he missed one point on the whole matter though that's kind of important.
We all participated in one way or another in the benefits of the bubbling of the stock market. Whether directly if we own a few stocks or mutual funds, or whether we have retirement plans that participate in the market. Or indirectly if we were employed by a company being propped up by false balance sheets and phantom profits. I for one, have a couple of mutual funds, a couple of stocks and a union pension plan that's all affected by the performance of the market. It's really easy for us to turn a blind eye as long as we're all getting a little scratch - if you know what I mean. No wonder they were able to get away with it. If you involve everybody in your scheme whose gonna' say anything? (As long as it's working)
Clearly they went too far, and started playing with things that they themselves probably didn't fully understand. And now we're in the situation that we're in, and it doesn't look like we'll get out of it anytime soon. I'm sure when the smoke clears there will be a whole bunch of new regulations to keep the schemes that caused this particular problem at bay. But, seriously, are we all collectively going to be able to get over the addiction that we got from the contact high? That's a tall order. And something that's not being addressed at all!
I think Obama's doing a lot of great things, but enticing private investors to buy up toxic assets was definitely not one of them. How do I know? The stock market went up 500 points on that news. Business as usual - we all got that long needed fix.
We the people need a detox - and fast!!!