Because it happened incrementally, the cause and effect of our Economic Crisis is hard to pin-point, but all along the way, it had helpers. Over decades, both Democrats and Republicans overturned Depression-era laws that let liars on Wall Street sell huge financial bubbles of fake value using fake analysis.
All the rules were swept away, and yet Greenspan and Rubin; Paulson and Bernacke; Geithner and scores of other Goldman Sachs regulators will claim they had no idea it would turn out this way.
[Incidentally, not all business people, rich people, Wall Street types or yuppies should be lumped-in with the privatized public advocates that sold the United States to China--or however one wishes to imagine American economic obligations.]
When the inflated stock prices, housing prices, commodity prices, oil prices and derivative prices reached the absolutely most insane number possible, the markets collapsed, a few times, bubble after bubble, and so continue. When the markets crashed, the insiders lapped up all the assets for pennies. This is the name of the game: using bubbles to steal the investment portfolios of people that don't know this insider trading is happening. Their investment sin is listening to experts' happy talk, which turns into scarey talk by the time its too late. The media is always way too late, and way too happy, and way too in on the insider trading games.
As Treasury's guardian, Goldman Sach's Robert Rubin stopped regulating in the 1990s dot-com era. As his non-action became law, the Reserve's "greenspeaker" Alan Greenspan green-lighted derivatives, stopped all regulation.
This era under their watch, flooded the earth with more and more fake-value. Paper that begets nothing more than paper has become the derivative crisis dangling like a blade, above humanity's head. Rubin and Greenspan oversaw the end of business success based on sound business models and real profits, and created a world of paper nonsense, which they advocated like they had personal interests in doing so--to the detriment of everyone outside their loop.
These government regulators were loyal to their old Wall Street firms, Goldman Sachs chief among them. They knew what they were doing, because they all studied the Depression. They used its lessons to repeat it--magnificently.
The Roaring 90s was a lot of fakery with Wall Street policing itself--all illegal and treasonous stuff. The stewardship of national money is a sacred duty. The tricks used were as old as the hills, and well-known on Wall Street for a hundred years.
Tech collapsed in March 2000. Around that time, Clinton overturned Glass-Steagall and got the ball rolling on growing monopolies that would merge and merge into industry-gobbling investment banks. These anti-democratic institutions became bigger than many nations and now dominate power structures across the globe.
It is such a mouthful to say Glass-Steagall was overturned by Gramm-Leech-Bliley, but that mouthful is what allowed monopoly companies to become too-big-to-fail. Everyone knew the consequences.
But before the consequences, there would be a Roaring Bubble. This was to be the Bush years. The Democrats lost their Housing Bubble to Republicans when the election results in Florida and Ohio were changed to hand the White House to Bush II, loser of the popular vote. Had Gore won, he would have us all suffocate on carbon taxes. Instead we got war taxes.
Through the Bush years, the housing bubble was a major investment for expanding new mega-banks, and without regulation, made sound investments passé, until the housing crash in March 2007.
Investors poured their money into oil, and other commodities, giving the Bush years a second shorter bubble. That crashed in July 2008. There was nothing left to price-inflate. All the industries had been boomed.
That's when Goldman Sach's Paulson recommended a bailout for the monster banks. Talking about the bailouts is encumbered by this very problem of the ridiculousness of it all. Was it $700 billion? No. Amendments, AIG, it's become an ever ceiling-raising promise from us to them.
The ones we read about in the papers--the scandals, the trials, the hearings, the fines--they're all tiny, show pieces--red herrings. Chuck Rangel's abuse of stationery and vacations; the $550 million dollar fine Goldman paid--pittance, a day's profits; the tax hearing for Geithner just before he was confirmed as Treasury Secretary--it's all low-level distraction stuff that pales in comparison to the real crimes against the nation.
The bailouts never stop, they keep growing and growing into the trillions--without any new bubble or boom in the economy yet. The crime is more enormous than any sensationalism on TV. The world-wide derivatives bubble is described as a quadrillion dollars, many times more than the world's GDP. Untenability is the state of affairs. Change is coming therefore--in increments.
The growing panic is: what if there really are no new bubbles? What if the only bubble that seems to be growing is China and the other East Asian countries? --the lands that we built-up with our industrial core?
China's massive power is the guarantee the bankers have that the American tax payer will actually pay the banks the obligations our treasonous politicians made on our behalf.
When there was nothing left to inflate, the next promised bubble became the "financial services industry" itself. This happened under threats as fake as all the happy talk that convinced investors to pour money in. To convince tax payers to pour money into bailouts, you need threats. Paulson pulled Congress into special session and said bailout or Martial Law. It was a stick-up, the first of many more to come.
The next was Christmas 2008. It was an asset-grab by Goldman Sachs called the Christmas Eve Massacre. No one had any money, no one except Goldman Sachs, because Henry Paulson gave his former company control over the bailout money. Using those paychecks that people pay as taxes, Goldman Sachs bought-up those same people's retirement portfolios, which were dirt cheap during the holidays, because they were the only ones in the economy with any money--the taxpayers' money. On behalf of the government? the taxpayer perhaps? No, of course not, that would be reasonable. They used our money to buy up the assets of smaller investors for themselves.
There are plenty of Black people in jail for personal drug offences because incarceration was normally applied for crack possession, while Wall Streeters snorted coke without fear of arrest. I say let-out non-violent offenders and make room for a whole lot of yuppies and the father-figures that trained them for a life of crime in crooked finance.
Under similar threats Bush made to get the first big bailout, Obama said we had no choice but to match the Bush bailout with a $787 billion economic stimulus bill he signed in February of 2009.
Nothing works because we're throwing money into the banks, when there is no economy in real America to take loans and build businesses. America is made of paper. Everything was built to collapse.
The two greatest betrayers of the trust put-in them to steward America's economy are Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, the Goldman Sachs Treasurers, but there are more like them, and we must expose and prosecute them, and clawback the national wealth and build an economy in real produce, not financial paper derivatives.
How did Goldman Sachs and outfits like it, do it?
George Bush's top contributors came from Goldman Sachs. Among Barack Obama's top private campaign donors was Goldman Sachs. That's why Obama does exactly like Bush and makes the crook, the guardian. It needs to stop, with arrests and restitution.
The only thing impeding clawbacks (restitution of fenagled tax money) is the president's loyalty--whatever his party--to Goldman Sachs.
Comments