The Gangbanksters of Grab-it-All Street

 

 

Greg Maybury (👉) is a freelance writer based in Australia. His main areas of interest are American history and politics in general, with a special focus on economic, financial, national security, military, and geopolitical affairs. For 6+ years he has regularly contributed to a diverse range of alternative, independent media (AIM), news and opinion sites, including OpEd News, The Greanville Post, Consortium News, Information Clearing House (ICH), Dandelion Salad, Global Research, Dissident Voice, OffGuardian, Contra Corner, International Policy Digest, Principia Scientific, The Hampton Institute, and others.

—

Preamble: As so often happens at pivotal crisis points in America’s history, in the fallout from the Great Financial Trainwreck (aka the Global Financial Crisis or GFC), of 2008-09 there was and continues to be much righteous indignation, hand-wringing, finger-pointing, existential angst and ardent analysis and reflection by all and sundry about everything from why it wasn’t foreseen, how it could get so bad so quickly, who might be held accountable, how it might have been prevented, and what should be done to avoid it in the future. Putting aside for the moment whether any lessons have been learned from the financial markets’ near-death experience, or for that matter whether any progress has been made in coming up with answers to these questions, many stunning revelations and insights have come to light as a consequence. Greg Maybury offers a few for posterity.

—

—‘…the banking industry…is the most guarded and powerful oligopoly of all….[t]he legitimacy of this cartel on the one hand, and American hegemony on the other, are two of the chief tenets of orthodox western ideology: all western practitioners of the social sciences that wish to advance in the incumbent power structure know that these are never to be questioned overtly – i.e. pricked in their neuralgic nodes. Among other aspects of the question….these two articles of modern political faith (money and US primacy) are intimately tied, so much that, as evidenced by the [2008] Global Financial Crisis, it is nearly impossible to discuss national monetary/economic issues – European or otherwise – without making constant referrals to the role of the United States. 

Extract From: “Of Money, Heresy, & Surrender”, Guido Preparata, (formerly Ass. Prof. of Political Economy, University of Washington, 2000-2008)

—

Yankee Doodle went to town, Riding on his crony, He stuck a feather in his hat, Yet knew it was all phony,

Yankee Doodle keep it up, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mind yo’ def’cit & yo’ debt, ‘Cause you’ll run out of candy!

Old American Folk Tune – Adapted for the zeitgeist. (C) Anon.

——————#——————

 – Head We Win, Tails You Lose –

Karl Marx once said capitalism contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For now, let’s place to one side the various faults, failings and shortcomings of his theories — not to mention those culminating from the cataclysmic forces he unleashed upon humanity by proxy via the machinations of his numerous disciples, who themselves saw fit to firstly proselytise to, then impose his philosophy upon, the world in their respective, grandiloquent ‘utopian’ experiments in building a better life for their fellow comrades. That will have to do for another time.

Nonetheless, we might further riff on Marx’s ‘seminal’ (sorry) allusion by speculating that it’s on Wall Street where those “seeds” are being genetically modified. Like their counterparts in the globalised agribusiness and food industry, the folks engineering the metaphorical modifications in the financial sector appear to have little idea, and even less interest in or concern for, how their reckless jiggery-pokery with the commonsensical, natural order of things might play out down the mountain. 

Again to name-check Marx, the Gangbanksters of Grab-it-All Street are akin to ‘sorcerers…. [who are] no longer able to control the powers of the nether world [they] have called up by [their] spells’, whilst remaining increasingly at pains to preserve the illusion their ‘business as usual’ legerdemain is a good thing for all. 

Yet although they long ago lost any battle upholding the fantasy they have anyone else’s interests at heart but their own (as it transpired not unlike Marx’s own disciples with their megalomaniacal, largely self-serving, utopian ambitions), this has yet to reflect itself in sustained, widespread discontent in the heartland, certainly not enough to effect the change that might come close to proving Marx wrong.

‘They have slowly but surely managed to sell off much of what the American people used to own under the guise of various fraudulent ideologies such as the “free market”. This is the “American way”, a giant swindle, a grand hustle. In this sense, the victims of the racket are not just in Port-au-Prince and Baghdad; they are also in Chicago and New York. The same people who devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimizes theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest.‘

For his part James Petras, after noting in a recent piece titled “Pillage and Class Polarization: The Rise of ‘Criminal Capitalism'”, [that] US employees faced the ‘greatest jump in income inequalities’ over the past decade, observed that ‘profits, as a percentage of national income’, have increased significantly. Further, the lion’s share of this increase in income and profits went ‘to the banks and investment houses’ of Wall Street; in fact they ‘increased at a faster rate than any other sector of the US economy.’ Along with observing these polar opposite trends, Petras’ key point goes like this:

‘[T]he employee-finance capitalist polarization is the direct result of the grand success of the trillion dollar financial swindles, the tax payer-funded trillion dollar bailouts of the crooked bankers, and the illegal bank manipulation of interest rates. These uncorrected, unpunished crimes have driven up the costs of living and producing for employees and their employers.’

In order to come to grips with the state of play for average working- and middle-class Americans twenty-five odd years after Ronald (the ‘Gipper’) Reagan rode into the political sunset, some hard-core context and perspective is apposite. For many folks who’ve spent time probing the issues arising from the GFC and more broadly those to do with the modern global economy and financial system (the Great Ponzi Scheme), the Gipper’s election in 1980 is the closest (albeit not the only one) garrison point to which we must return if we are looking at battling the inequities, anomalies and iniquities that corrode not just the capitalist edifice, but democracy itself.

That said, whilst many of capitalism’s less ardent admirers might welcome its demise, the so-called free market — the cornerstone of its edifice — will not go quietly into that good might. The “racket” is just too damn good. To the extent that free-market capitalism co-existed or was perceived to be synonymous with liberty, democracy, freedom, egalitarianism and opportunity of access to the American Dream prior to the 1980s, since Reagan rebooted the U.S. economy with his Milton Friedman–inspired neo-liberal (aka ‘voodoo’) economic policies, such deeply and widely held tenets became wholly owned and controlled subsidiaries of capitalism. From that point the aspirations embedded in them held hostage to the increasingly unregulated free market, no longer as achievable or accessible because the playing field was no longer level.

Reagan’s belief that the private sector, private enterprise, low taxes for the wealthy, and the profit motive is the answer to America’s problems was to have an extraordinary impact not only on how domestic and foreign policy was developed; it became the primary foundation of economic policy in general, and particularly that which affected how America’s financial sector operated. One of several mantras defining “Reaganomics”, that of the so-called ‘trickle down effect’ (aka the ‘rising tide that would lift all boats’), was decidedly more a torrent than a trickle, and said “torrent” was going up not down. 

Now whilst this was not clearly spelled out in Reagan’s glossy economic brochure, some folks still argue he truly believed that letting the bulls run free would actually benefit everyone, when in reality we might safely argue most “everyone” got trampled in the slow-mo stampede that unfolded over time. Others less kind might say it was because he simply got his prepositions confused. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion the Old Hoofer in the timeless tradition of PT Barnum (he of the ‘there’s a sucker born ev’ra minute’ dictum) played carny-barker to the masses, with the “masses” lining up to buy the ‘every child player wins a prize’ shill en masse.

In any event it culminated in a free-for-all, dog eat dog, everyman for himself form of ‘Bizzaro’ anarcho-capitalism — an updated, much improved riff on the no-holds-barred mercenary mercantilism much reminiscent of the Gilded (or more apposite, ‘Gelded’) Age, only one that doesn’t just eat its young, it eventually eats itself! 

Via the main pillars of neoliberalism, the Wall Street money mongrels, along with their counterparts in the City of London — facilitated by the respective central banks, the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England especially, along with other European financial hubs and other entities which comprise the edifice such as the BIS, the IMF, the World Bank etc. — assumed even greater control over the workings of the financial system than they had since the onset of the Great Depression. The latter of course was much, much more than a direct, supposedly unintentional outcome of uninhibited laissez-faire policies and deep-seated political and civic corruption that facilitated rampant systemic fraud, bribery and exaction, economic opportunism and market manipulation.

From Reagan’s time onwards, they and their successors, heirs and descendants have effectively written the rules of the game everyone has to play. That this reality is even more evident now is axiomatic for all but the most ignorant, partisan, arrogant or deluded. These institutions — Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, CitiBank, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and others inside and outside the U.S. — are all run by avaricious, amoral uber-executives, who make the infamous Robber Barons of the Gilded Age look like blood descendants of the Good Samaritan. This cabal blithely buys and sells everyone from political candidates to party power brokers, think-tank heads, influential academics, researchers, regulators, lobbyists, lawyers, [to] members of Congress and yes, presidents even, as if they were acquiring a brand new, perfectly tailored suit. They are the ultimate welfare recipients of the socio-economic zeitgeist; they add nothing, pay for nothing, and snatch ‘n grab everything they can get their greasy mitts on.

And ordinary folks are all but lining up to let them repeat history. Why? Because secretly deep down they like being penetrated up the ‘patootie’ and having the lifeblood sucked out of their respective and collective jugulars? One hopes for the majority of Americans that scenario is not their first preference — or worse still — their only option. But at present and for the foreseeable future it might just as well be the case. The conga line-up on both sides of the political divide aspiring to snatch the keys to the White House in 2016 is ample evidence of that, a goodly proportion of whom will be bankrolled one way of another by the above.

As indicated, today — seven years after the biggest economic implosion since the Great Depression — the Gangbanksters are more powerful, influential and criminally inclined than ever, the carnage ushered in by their Mephistophelean mendacity and malignant greed all but a fading memory. They are also unrepentant, evidenced as much by their recidivism as by their pathological resistance to greater transparency, accountability and control, highlighted once again by one of redoubtable Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi‘s more recent exposes.

– A Trillion Dollars Here, a Trillion Dollars There – 

Taibbi of course is a man known for his pitiless excoriations of the ‘Gangbanksters’; he once memorably described Goldman Sachs as a ‘…a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.’ Yet whilst Goldman might be the Monsanto–like poster boy of Wall Street, even Taibbi surely would have to admit it has not cornered the market on avarice, deception, market manipulation and criminal fraud.

For example, he also had a lot to say about the foreign currencies and interest rates rigging scandal which involved CitiGroup and JPMC in the U.S., and Barclays (who incidentally took over the remnants of the mortally wounded Lehman Bros. in the wake of the meltdown) and the Royal Bank of Scotland in the U.K., all of whom pleaded guilty to conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. dollars and euros in the $5 trillion (yes, trillion) foreign exchange marketplace, aka the Forex spot market.

The Swiss giant UBS pleaded guilty for its role in manipulating the standard rate that some of the world’s banking behemoths charge each other for short-term inter-bank loans, the so-called LIBOR benchmark interest rate. No individual senior bank executives of these banks were charged with – much less jailed for – criminal offenses as part of the out-of-court settlements.

And whilst on the subject of trillions, in order to prepare ourselves for what follows, we should pause here to get our heads around exactly what one trillion dollars might look and feel like if one were standing in the same room as it. For a deeper conceptual and graphical appreciation thereof, readers are encouraged to click on the YouTube animation below. This one short video is worth (ahem) a trillion words, and is an eye-opening jaw-dropper to be sure. Even in denominations of single ‘Benjamins’, as the animation vividly demos it amounts to Wal-Mart warehouse-sized amounts of ‘moolah’. It is here that indelible sound bite from the former US senator Everett Dirksen comes to mind and into its own at the same time, to wit: ‘….a trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and pretty soon we’re talking serious money’!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4-4bvuX7qA?rel=0&w=560&h=315

Now let’s keep this animation in mind as we move forward so we might begin to get a true ‘optic’ on how much taxpayers’ money it took to keep the Good Ship America afloat. According to Pam and Russ Martens of Wall Street on Parade, around thirteen trillion dollars has been pumped into the financial system since 2008! This represents almost twenty times more than the original Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) had allocated for the rescue. 

To put that rescue figure into perspective, the notional value of the US economy (its annual output/GDP) is approximately seventeen ‘trill’ — give or take a trill — so the bailout represented about seventy five per cent of this amount! And when we are talking about ‘giving or taking a trillion’, we know we are definitely not in Kansas anymore! An even more alarming consideration is America’s current national debt –– now over $18.25 ‘trill’ and counting!

And here’s another important angle worth pondering. At the time of the introduction of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) bill into Congress in 2009, whilst estimates varied, it was generally considered the cost of launching and maintaining a universal health care system — one providing coverage for up to fifty million Americans for ten years — would have been in the vicinity of one trillion dollars. And yet from the Congress to the Heartland, and from Wall Street to K Street, immeasurably more collective angst was evident over how much ObamaCare was supposedly going to cost the country than there was over how much it was actually costing Americans to bail out the too big to nail bankers. This is one helluva “go figure” mo’ to be sure!

All this to say nothing of the cost of the Iraq debacle — once again an expenditure about which most Americans appeared much more sanguine, in fact preternaturally so — where we can add upwards of possibly another 3 ‘trill’ to Uncle Sam’s tab over the long haul. You know, the “tab” that comes as the increasingly exponential cost of ‘doing the business’ of empire, and at the expense (in more ways than they seem to be able to comprehend much less embrace) of the taxpayers.

Moreover, although fewer in number, the big Wall Street banks still standing are now almost twenty-five per cent larger than they were pre-crisis. The top six hold more than $US10 trillion dollars in assets, about sixty-three per cent of total output of the US economy, up from 43 per cent 7 years ago. If that doesn’t provide a taste for anyone interested of the astronomical influence, access and power that comes with either having such income, wealth and assets or even just being ‘in the same room’ with those that do, the following should do it.

One firm alone (JPMC) is said to hold upwards of $US19 ‘trill’ in custodial assets for its clients. Along with highlighting the real costs of rescuing Wall Street, the Martens in the same piece also point to the fact that the Street folks are still seeking, with commendable chutzpah one imagines, further assistance from Uncle Sam and his hapless heartland minions!

Yet even here the above numbers pale when we look at the shadow banking system (aka the ‘dark markets’), in particular the so-called ‘over-the-counter’ derivatives market. These hair-trigger dirty bombs of the system are less an accident and more a catastrophe waiting to happen, and the GFC merely gave us a taster of what’s to come if they aren’t properly regulated. They include the notorious Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) and Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) that very much were at the heart of the GFC.

It is at this point we have to conceptualize amounts of money that almost call for the use of scientific notation to represent numerically, although the above video is an excellent tool for at least visualising it. Whilst estimates vary as to how much ‘money’ floats around the dark markets, the quantity by some accounts is truly, truly staggering:

Anywhere between US700 trillion to 1.5 quadrillion dollars, the upper amount roughly 100 times the size or value of the US economy (GDP), or again roughly 50 times the value of the global economy! 

Yet no-one really knows, presumably because no-one can ‘count’ that high!

– Another Crisis (In the Heartland) –

In his post-mortem of the GFC, “Crisis in the Heartland — Consequences of the New Wall Street System”, Peter Gowan gets to the heart of the matter in a way that it seems few do or have done since the meltdown. Gowan proposes nothing less than a program for an alternative public-utility credit system, and an international financial and monetary systemunder national-multilateral co-operative control, both propositions that would have the long-since departed Jekyll Island conspiratorial cabal that concocted/plotted the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and who ‘quietly’ spirited its passage through Congress on Christmas Eve of that year — ‘serendipitously’ whilst the majority of key legislators who were either opposing the Act or had serious reservations about it, were ensconced back home sipping their egg-nogs whilst awaiting Santa Claus more or less none the wiser — spinning furiously in their tax-payer funded mausoleums.

Moreover, after noting that the structure and dynamics of Wall Street began changing dramatically from the mid-1980s onwards (and with it the fundamental relationship between key Washington players and the Street elites), Gowan then identified the main features of what he calls the “New Wall Street System”, which themselves proved to be, individually and collectively, major catalysts for the onset of the Crash. These included (the):

–  rise of the lender-trader model; 

–  speculative arbitrage and asset-price bubble-blowing; 

–  drive for maximizing leverage and balance-sheet expansion; 

–  rise of the shadow banking system and associated ‘financial innovations’; 

–  salience of the money markets & their transformation into funders of speculative (bubble) trading; and

–  new centrality of credit derivatives.

Gowan says these changes mutually re-enforced each other, forming an ‘integrated and complex whole, which then disintegrated in the course of 2008.’  He explains each of these features in turn, and in doing so we get some idea of how out of control, top-heavy and unstable the new “System” had become. As a case in point, contrary to popular belief the so-called housing bubble was not the sole or even main cause of the resulting credit crunch after it burst. The property bubble was more of a symptom of the underlying fault lines in the new system; in any event, as Gowan states clearly, after noting the ample evidence the Wall Street banks “quite deliberately” planned the house-price bubble, they then,

One also wonders to what extent the conditions that gave rise to the housing bubble were knowingly manufactured and sustained for so long by the banks, policy makers, legislators and regulators.

As noted, for those that still had a job and a reasonable income — a not insignificant qualifier here — it is an undisputed reality that real, if not actual, take home earnings (and therefore purchasing power) for most American Dreamers had at best remained stagnant throughout the period Gowan has identified, whilst corporate earnings and executive salaries had enjoyed unprecedented growth, much of it at the expense of jobs themselves and/or reduced incomes and wages.

For those that didn’t have a full-time secure job or were on low incomes, the only way to access the Dream was via the sub-prime back-door.

And once folks bought into the sub-prime American Dream and watched the value of their houses rising – or inflating – as the bubble got bigger, in response to seeing their real and actual take home earnings falling over the same period and after being lulled into a false sense of financial security and unending material prosperity, they then hocked themselves via further debt to maintain the fantasy of that seemingly never ending “prosperity”. Keeping up with the Joneses’ had never been a more expensive, futile or precarious endeavor, with Middle America increasingly resembling Middle Earth moreso than anything connected with reality!

– If You’re not Cheating, You’re not Trying –

In that 20+ year lead up to the GFC then, it seems safe to conclude the following then. Never before have so many of the already wealthy few elites accumulated so much additional wealth they didn’t need, had not earned and therefore didn’t deserve, at the expense of so many others who could least afford it. Never before have so many ordinary folk been conned, then shafted so slowly, so inexorably and so unwittingly, by so few for so much for so long and with such dire consequences and lasting impact.

Moreover, never before have these “few” been aided and abetted by the negligence, incompetence and/or complicity of so many others who should have known better; [who] turned a blind eye and deaf ear; [who] were in on the game and/or getting a cut of the action in some way, shape or form; [who] should have done a hell of a lot more to prevent it; whose very job and civic duty required them to take effective remedial action; and who have never been held to account for their own actions and inactions, or for their crimes of omission or commission.

This was also a period punctuated and characterized by some of the most shameless, unrepentantly flagrant and fraudulent scams in America’s and anyone else’s history, none of which show any signs of abating anytime soon. As the Martens chronicle in a recent piece on the LIBOR case mentioned earlier, UBS actually drafted an instruction manual for traders, teaching them how to manipulate Libor to benefit trading positions of the firm. It would be naive in the extreme to doubt whether other firms adopted similar methods. The Martens also reported on the prevailing motto in financial services: ‘If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying,’ a trader’s chat room mantra revealed in the recent FOREX charges brought by the U.S. Justice Department.

And whilst it also ushered in a period of unprecedented economic instability, uncertainty, chaos and fraud, for those who were willing to see it for what it represented, it also brought into sharp relief the existing inequality and socioeconomic divide in the Land of Opportunity — indeed, across the Western world — and created a scenario where that socioeconomic disadvantage, insecurity and disenfranchisement will become even more pronounced over time. And the more pronounced it has become, so too does it become more entrenched and accepted as the norm.

Of course we cannot emphasize enough that when the reality of the GFC hit home, a very large cohort of life-members of the free marketeers club had to face their putative worst nightmare — unholy government intervention in the holy markets. Which is to say, all this from a bunch of folks whose once inviolable mantra was that the markets could, would, or should always sort themselves out when things go pear-shaped, and that government should just get out of the way and stay out. It would take a cold, cold heart indeed to not feel any empathy for the ‘poor’ sods when said “reality” did hit home, and that such “intervention” on a massive, unprecedented scale was their only option in order to stave off financial Armageddon, one that bears repeating, was of their own making.

In this one might readily posit that the mysterious spate of banker/financier related deaths on both sides of the Big Pond in recent years are predominantly suicides prompted by the belated onset of unbearable guilt and remorse at the part they as individuals have played in sacrificing this sacred cow of the free-market edifice. Either that or it is because of the “unbearable guilt or remorse” associated with their role in destroying people’s lives and in the process placing the global financial system in jeopardy!

Yet I digress.

In the fallout from the Train-wreck of ’08 then, there was and continues to be much righteous indignation, hand-wringing, finger-pointing, existential angst and ardent analysis and reflection by all and sundry about everything from why it wasn’t foreseen, how it could get so bad so quickly, who might be held accountable, how it might have been prevented, and what should be done to avoid it in the future.

Doubtless such considerations will continue to be part of the narrative of the next election campaign, as will exhortations from respective candidates as to what they will do to restore the American Dream to something more than the chimerical construct that is is now.

But we’ve heard it all before haven’t we?

When Obama was elected, there were plenty of folks who rightly anticipated that he’d address some if not all of these questions, his election win attributable in no small part to this expectation. Yet as indicated, in the mold of Bush 2, Clinton and Bush 1 before him, Obama has turned out to be nothing more than just another White House ‘bank bitch’, to employ the popular vernacular. The evidence for this is irrefutable, some of it cited earlier with the abject failure and/or unwillingness of the Justice Department under the incumbent POTUS to prosecute and jail some of these folks, both for crimes committed before and since the GFC. And we’re not talking bit-playing pick-pockets like Bernie Madoff here!

In his 2011 book Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, Ron Suskind relates a story that amply illustrates Obama’s response to addressing the issues arising from the crisis. The freshly minted president called a meeting of the top Wall Street players at the White House, to which they came fully expecting the POTUS to ‘chop them up’ big-time. Yet the president had already positioned himself as their guardian and virtual champion.

Instead of standing up for the folks who’d been adversely affected most by the crisis — without whom he might never have made it to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — Obama sided with those who’d precipitated the collapse, albeit the ones who ponied up with much of the big bucks that financed his grass-roots campaign. Here’s how Suskind retells Obama’s pitch to the money moguls at this pivotal meeting:

‘My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks….You guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem…. And I want to help. I’m not here to go after you. I’m protecting you….I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger.’

‘The sense of everyone after the meeting was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t — he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.’

Now herein we might reasonably speculate as to whether the president had his eye on re-election even at this juncture, as going against Wall Street — now matter how much kudos that might’ve garnered him with the ‘pitchfork mob’ — was not going to position him well for a shot at a second term in 2012. Which of course begs the key question: Where did the president’s true allegiances lie from the beginning?

Paul Street, in a recent piece in Counterpunch, underscores Obama’s “true allegiances” by reference to his zeal in pushing — in a rare and unholy alliance between the White House and Congressional Republicans — the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. Such deals have proven themselves time and again not to be in the best interests of ordinary Americans. After noting that labor unions, environmental groups, food safety activists, civil libertarians, civil rights groups, and a good number of Congressional Democrats know that [it is] “all manipulative business propaganda, and [that] the [TPP] isn’t really about trade or improved standards”, he says:

‘The real thrust and significance of the TPP is about strengthening corporations’ ability to protect and extend their intellectual property rights….and to guarantee that they will be compensated by governments for any profits they might lose from having to meet decent public labor and environmental (and other) standards, something certain to discourage the enactment and enforce of such standards.

– In the Land of Bilk ‘n Money –

The American Dream has long over-promised and under-delivered; this is not a new revelation for those folks inclined to look beyond what the MSM and the powers that be tell them to look at and what they should be grateful for.

The GFC brought this reality home big-time. It was the end result of a Ponzi scheme to top all such schemes, facilitated amongst other factors by a mad scramble by every president from Richard Nixon and Reagan onwards to dismantle the structural, legislative and regulatory foundations of the financial system, [to] privatize, outsource and/or downsize everything that quacked like it was owned, funded and/or administered by government, and find new and innovative ways to tip the scales in favor of the banks, the corporations and the wealthy at the expense of those populating the Great American Heartland.

As for the Gangbanksters, in the final analysis they weren’t too big to fail after all; as we all know they did so in spectacular style. But it seems in the final wash-up, unlike the hapless Bernie Madoff — whose scam only affected a relatively small number of players and involved a minuscule amount of money — a lot of Bernie’s former partners-in-crime on the Street were just too big to nail much less jail.

Overall, the GFC adversely affected just about everyone in the heartland, with the exception of the ‘perps’ themselves, their direct beneficiaries and their accomplices, and all the other ‘chancers’ who correctly identified a once in a lifetime, ‘step right up’ opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow Americans, their economy, their country, even their own precious national security, to say nothing of the rest of the planet.

Come to think of it, when it comes to global, existential and/or national security threats, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Harum et. al. ain’t got nothin’ on these guys. They’re just a side-show! Bring out the pitchforks I say. And a few AK-47s whilst you’re at it!…In the immortal words of the Governator – the man who by some accounts rescued California from solvency – I’ll be back! As for the economy — the American or the global one — I’m not as confident.

© Greg Maybury, 2015

Related Links: