Well, it looks like its here. The recession, I mean. Some people think we are seeing the start of something big, if things aren’t bad enough for you already. What seems to be happening is that the Koreans, the Chinese, and the Arabs are buying up our banking system.
Meanwhile Fed chairman Bernanke’s answer seems to be to pour a few buckets of water on a raging forest fire. People’s houses are in the way and their lives are endangered. The question we should be asking ourselves is who benefits from all this.
One thing we do know is the executives at these firms will still get their bonuses, and some already have collected them, but for WHAT!? For making money using schemes which used to be called fraud. While this was being perpetrated it was called “innovative finance”. This actually means “We found a cool new way to steal the money of ordinary working Americans, and to rob the bank at the same time.”.
The problem with Bernanke is that he is not addressing the source of the problem in any way. No measures are being put in place to regulate these folks so they don’t commit crimes against the American people, and no measures are being put in place to prosecute those who have robbed the country.
What is becoming more and more obvious is that the Republicans’ philosophy of free markets and deregulation has become (or was it always) a cover for organized crime.
The forces of ignorance, fear, and greed have pushed this nation dangerously close to bankruptcy, but what happens when the people who will hold our notes don't give a damn about America's future?
There's another excellent article at huffpost on this topic here.
Now that Wall Street has finally hit the skids as a result of the disastrous class-warfare policies the investor class and its puppets in the form of George W. Bush and Alan Greenspan unleashed on the American people, maybe -- just maybe -- all of those Republican charlatans who were pushing hard for Social Security privatization will finally shut their traps and admit that their ideologically-driven assault on the vestiges of FDR's New Deal was a failure and a fraud.I just wish David Brooks and Richard Stevenson and Steve Moore and Grover Norquist and George W. Bush and the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform and the Cato Institute and the Wall Street Journal and all of the other class warfare enthusiasts will have the guts to finally admit that their economic forecasts and predictions were wrong. I wish they would admit that their radical privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthiest people and corporations, and all of the other neo-liberal claptrap they've rammed down our throats in recent years -- from Reaganomics and Rubinomics to Bush's kleptonomics -- have resulted in huge budget deficits, record national debt, scandals and rip-offs, trade imbalances, stock market sell offs, and inflation.
Welcome to the world of the George W. Bush Recession!
Hey, David Brooks, What happened to your "ownership society?"
And the only thing the brain-dead Republican presidential candidates, along with Bush and his gang, can come up with is making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Yeah, that's going to work.
If you weathered the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the puncture of the mortgage bubble, stay tuned for the next big pop!: The credit card debt bomb.
This really is going to get ugly.
This all brings to mind the parable of the Slave, the King, and the 10,000 talents.
Matthew 18:21
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?"22Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.[a]
23"Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents[b] was brought to him. 25Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
26"The servant fell on his knees before him. 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.' 27The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
28"But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii.[c] He grabbed him and began to choke him. 'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded.
29"His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
30"But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. 31When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
32"Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?' 34In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
35"This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."
Obviously here the metaphor is that God has forgiven us so much (1 talent = the wages of a laborer could expect for 15 years work, so consider the massive debt owed in 10,000). This is the largest amount conceivable, multiplied by the largest amount conceiveable in biblical times. Our debts are that great, and God's forgiveness great enough. But the wrath comes when the slave (mankind) fails to show compassion (astonishing that the Bush era has even made compassion a foul word).
What if it's not God we are looking to for forgiveness, but foreign bankers. And for what reason should they show mercy on this country, when by our own bankruptcy laws, we show ourselves incapable of forgiveness.
The house of cards of human interaction is predicated not on wealth, but on generocity; not on power, but on faith. In profane slander of decency, American conservatism has sullied the human spirit, but it may be America herself who will seek and not find mercy.
Consider Bush's feeble, pitiful, and unheeded pleas to the Saudi's this week, and you see the truth: when America broke faith with the world and with her people, the nations of the world were taught to only look out for themselves.