Posted on 04/01/2009 8:10:45 AM PDT by Candor7
Can we just drop the pretense and start calling the bank bailout what it is: Financial terrorism.
Terrorism can be defined as achieving one’s aims through fear. And it sure seems to me that bankers and their friends in government are extorting money from the taxpayers (you and me) with a threatening “or else” that goes something like this: “Give us the money or the entire financial system will implode.”
And as we fork over the extortion money, these corporate gangsters put us on the hook for trillions of dollars MORE.
Obama’s bailout of AIG is just one example of Washington robbing you of your hard-earned money under the pretext of “fixing” the problem.
For example, AIG posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — $61.7 billion — for the final three months of last year. That means the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, or $7,750 a second.
As a result of its losses, AIG has been awarded hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Otherwise, we’re told, the company’s collapse could devastate the economy.
And that’s just ONE of the companies robbing you of your hard-earned money under the pretext of “fixing” the problem.
In fact, one of the ways we know this is financial terrorism is that the steps being taken to “fix” the problem aren’t fixing a single thing.
The Roots of the Crisis Go Back to 1999
Glass-Steagall was passed after the Great Depression, the last time outrageous financial chicanery brought our country to its knees economically. This law placed a barrier between everyday banking, such as lending and deposit-taking, and riskier areas, such as derivatives trading.
But the law was repealed in 1999, thanks to lobbying by the very companies we’re bailing out now. And the effort was midwifed by Phil Gramm, a laissez-faire-lovin’ Republican senator from Texas who co-authored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed many key provisions of Glass-Steagall.
Gramm quit the Senate to go work for UBS AG, one of the beneficiaries of the repeal. I believe that kind of thing — passing a law to help a future employer — should be illegal. We can only be thankful that Gramm didn’t go on to higher office — he was an advisor to McCain’s Presidential campaign and probably would have ended up as Treasury Secretary had McCain won.
But this isn’t just a Republican problem. Oh, if it were only that simple. You see, there were shady characters on both sides of the political aisle in this terrorism caper.
Instead of Gramm, we got Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. He’s a protégé of Robert Rubin, former co-CEO of Goldman Sachs and one-time Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, who went on to work for Citigroup after whole-heartedly supporting the Glass-Steagall repeal. Due to the current financial crisis, Citigroup lost $27.7 billion last year and has needed $45 billion in government funds to stay afloat.
Santelli now has a LOT of Company.
I am mad as hell and want my country back.Zero has GOT to go.
Perhaps we will luck out and Zero will stay in Europe for good.
Obama means to bring his fascism to G20. This promises to be good!
I hope Zero is laughed into the sewers of London where he belongs.
And the MSM is the problem, they should be all over ZERO. Its laughable that they too will be looking for bailouts as their advertising revenues shrink to guess what number........ZERO
Buahahahahahahahah!
G20 is planning the future of all of us. This meeting should be open to the public via TV.
Great post.
I have a fairly freshly minted MBA, 6 years old, from Rice University so not an Ivy League one but a serious effort to get through it I promise you.
We did not spend one minute studying “credit default swaps”.
They never covered “quantitative easing”.
The banksters have made all this stuff up: society is getting robbed and thrown off the cliff.
That describes it well.
But the behaviour of the stock market shows that soon, no one will be really listening to him much.
We are simply tired of the idiot.
Thanks for ther ping, Candor 7.
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