One absolutely key element is missing from this analysis: by keeping the bulk of the US army, sworn to defend the constitution, engaged abroad the way is left clear for Northern Command, a special and unconstitutional force, to seize control inside the USA.
It is becoming clear that the bailout measures of late 2008 may have consequences at least as grave for an open society as the response to 9/11 in 2001. Many members of Congress felt coerced into voting against their inclinations, and the normal procedures for orderly consideration of a bill were dispensed with.
GORDON BROWN’S “DECISIVE” strategy to recapitalise Britain’s banks and get them lending again with a £37 billion bail-out, which he claimed has been copied all over the world, has not worked – and the Treasury has no plan B yet.
If anyone doubted that a class war is in progress, hidden beneath a variety of euphemisms, like ‘bail out’, ‘downsizing,’ ‘outsourcing’ and ‘NAFTA’, their doubts can now be given the decent burial that they deserve. There has been no more blatant act of class antagonism in recent memory than the apparent willingness of Congress and Wall Street’s appointed grifter, Henry Paulson, to let a major part of the American manufacturing sector die.
Nov. 14—The Anglo-Dutch Liberal financial system has failed, the corrupt attempts to save that system through taxpayer-funded bailouts have failed, and the global financial and economic collapse is accelerating. Virtually every sector of the economy, and every part of the world, is plunging into Hell, and the world’s leaders, on the whole, are either paralyzed or rushing flight-forward into the abyss.
While leaders in Peru grapple with the financial fallout, Americans angry at the multi-billion dollar bailout plans are protesting in Washington. They say the U.S. Federal Reserve, far from helping solve the financial crisis, is taking money out of their pockets.
The same people whose reckless practices triggered the global financial crisis are onto a similar scheme that could cost taxpayers tons more.
As if they haven’t done enough damage. Thousands of subprime mortgage lenders and brokers — many of them the very sorts of firms that helped create the current financial crisis — are going strong. Their new strategy: taking advantage of a long-standing federal program designed to encourage homeownership by insuring mortgages for buyers of modest means.
“Banks fulfill no socially useful function if all they do is survive. Lending is their raison d’être. If banks don’t lend to the real economy, there is no reason for them to be in business at all.”
Exactly: but banks have a private interest in surviving. Is there any public interest in their surviving? Does the state not have take over the role of credit provision in order to resolve this contradiction? What is the use of “effectively socialised” banks which don’t do their job. It’s time to resort to that old business dictum: cut out the middle-man.
I am in Slovenia today, talking to bankers, entrepreneurs, managers, politicians, government officials and academics. The story is the same here as in every country I have visited since mid-September 2008: the banks aren’t lending. They don’t lend to each other. They don’t lend to non-financial businesses and they don’t lend to households.
The October 2008 financial meltdown is not the result of a cyclical economic phenomenon. It is the deliberate result of US government policy instrumented through the Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Board.
This is the most serious economic crisis in World history.
In These New Times 