09 February 2011
Griftopia
Our collection of Dolts on the Hill are toying with the definition of “rape” today in their distinguished deliberations. I don’t know why, exactly. It seems to be part of the assault on the right of woman to have access to abortion in the case of pregnancy resulting from violent sexual assault.
I know that is an important issue, but since you and are I are victims of an assault so intimate that I am hard pressed to call it anything else, I would hope those elected fools might take note of it.
I don’t do book reviews as a matter of course in these pages, but I got so worked up over one that I have to let you in on the secret. We do not live in a Republic any more. We reside in a Kleptocracy are corrupt as any Banana Republic in the third world, and neither the Right nor the Left have any clue about who the real threat to our national security has been all along.
I also am guilty of intemperate language, so if you want to avoid that, you might just want to move along right here.
The threat is- and has been for some time- Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the investment banks. Those sleazy mother-fuckers.
The poor befuddled Right is manipulated by the banks and the Astro-turf Tea Party. They rightly oppose government intrusion into our lives, and generally resist increased government intervention in our personal lives, which I support, but extend that to give a free pass to the treasonous blackguards on Wall Street.
For their part, the Left is furious that the Administration is moving to the center, accommodating the moderate middle, just as Mr. Clinton did.
The whole thing is hysterical. There is no middle. This is just a sideshow to a violent rape on the body politic.
There is no dialogue whatsoever on what is really happening, an act of continuing thuggery that renders all the political discussion irrelevant. The jackals have been robbing us blind, ripping our flesh with sharp teeth while hiding in plain sight the whole time.
(Lobby poster for the documentary “Inside Job.”)
There is the film documentary you will probably never see that you really should. “Inside Job” is still in a few theaters, I would imagine, though I had to work pretty hard to find a screen in town that had Charlie Ferguson’s little revelatory film. It documents the sensational and traitorous conduct of a small group of elite thieves and crooks who masquerade as the financial sector of our economy.
It manages to make Eliot Spitzer look like a hero, which is an astonishing thing.
They are thugs and criminals, and they have, so far, paid nothing for their crimes against our persons, properties and laws. Three of them- Rubin, Paulson and Geithner- made off with hundreds of millions of dollars wrapped around their service as Secretaries of the Treasury. Another, the renowned Larry Summers, is tainted by clear conflict of interest and should be in jail, not teaching at Harvard.
Then there are three books you need to at least thumb through:
“The Big Short- Inside the Doomsday Machine,” by Michael Lewis.
“Panic- The betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington,” by Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante.
“Griftopia: Bubble machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America,” by Matt Taibbi.
“Griftopia” was a revelation. The bastards stole trillions, working up their expertise. The Savings and Loan Bubble cost $161 Billion in government bailout. The Dot Com bubble (5), the Housing Bubble (13), the Commodities bubble ($110 Billion in 2008 alone) and there is a trillion out in outstanding Student Loans to a damaged generation, even as the commodities bubble is starting to inflate again, for exactly the same reasons.
The aggregation of theft leaps from institution to institution as the crooks forage for new markets to loot. Commodities should have been sensitive to what was coming. It was thirty years ago that the Hunt Brothers attempted to evade the strict rules on Commodities trading and corner the market on silver.
It is a cautionary tale as investors large and small crowd the market in precious metals to hedge their bets against the rapacious Smart Guys.
The Hunt brothers of Dalles had invested heavily in silver futures contracts through the brokerage firm Bache-Halsey-Stuart-Shields (now Prudential Bache). At one point, it is estimated the two had a full third of all the silver in the world not owned by governments. They drove the price of the metal up to $50 an ounce. On March 27, 1980, the price of silver dropped below their minimum margin requirement and the Hunts were hit with a margin call of $100 million that they could not meet.
Facing a potential $1.7 billion loss, the panic began and it spread to the financial markets in general. Stop me if you have heard this before, but Government officials feared that if the Hunts were unable to meet their debts, some large Wall Street brokerage firms and banks might collapse, and then Fed Chairman Paul Voelker stepped in to provide $1.1 billion in bail-out money to save the day.
The Hunts eventually went bankrupt, which is the only happy note I can see in the whole sorry story.
That creep Alan Greenspan was installed as a more Reagan Administration-friendly voice at the Fed to replace Volker, and it was on his watch that the real unraveling began.
Incredibly, in 1991, a woman named Laurie Farber of the government’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sent a letter to a wholly-owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs which permitted the firm to specifically evade the prohibition on long-term speculation by investment banks in the key commodities on which we all depend for daily living.
Oil is one of them. The Commodities market had been strictly controlled since the Great Depression to ensure that no one would try to corner the market on strategic materials a la the Hunt Brothers? Laurie’s letter permitted long-term speculation in the markets by investment banks like the Vampire Squid of Goldman-Sachs and Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase is starting again. Bastards.
Remember the discussion about the soaring oil prices? The debate over SUV’s and rising China? It was all bullshit. It was Goldman Sachs, and it’s ability to bring vast pools of money into the long-term commodities market that caused the prices to rise dramatically. There were no lines at the pump, and there was no shortfall in production.
But by their shenanigans, we paid at the pump, we pumped vast profits to the oil companies and we incurred the debt to keep importing it. Bastards.
Let us put that all in perspective. The Commodities bubble, at a little over a hundred Billion, is said to have cost each American household a little less than a grand in real dollars- something that those of us who pay taxes had to earn something like $1300 dollars. That means, adjusted for inflation, the numb-nuts stole...what? a trillion is a thousand billion? I can't even count that high.
I know what I lost on the housing bubble, and keep a little tally. I was shaken to learn how much I had low-balled our collective losses in the rampage of the Smart Guys. I did not count the S&L bail-out, or the Dot Com bust, or what was stolen from us in the Commodity scam. I figure these smart guys are into us for a couple hundred grand, every one of us, since they used- and continue to use- the US Treasury as a private piggy bank.
And we pay twice- we pay in real time with our resources, and then again as crushing national debt.
It was all avoidable. All of it. I am simmering with rage.
Plus, at the same time, and right along, the collective crooks who allegedly run our government spent the Social Security receipts that were conveniently placed in the General Fund, issuing what will likely be worthless paper when we get to it.
All Ponzi schemes. All criminal, except that our own beloved Congress and Executive Branches, packed with the criminal class who re-wrote the rules to suit.
And ObamaCare?
Shoot, Svengali Rahm Emanuel did not address the first issue that should have been on any objective menu- the 33% of health expenses consumed by the rapacious insurance billing system. That full third of all health costs is devoted to…why yes! Containing benefits paid to citizens and preserving profit.
Oh, did I mention that the insurance companies engineered legislation (The McCarran-Ferguson Act) that ensured they are beyond the provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act law and not subject to anything like Federal oversight in their inter-state wheelings and dealings, screwing the customer?
There is nothing else really worth discussing than this appalling, horrifying mess. We poor pathetic chumps have permitted our country to be looted.
Fine. This is far worse than anything I could have imagined. I said this the other day- it is fine to throw grenades, but there has to be something to lob at our representatives. Something concrete in the way of laws that can be passed with an actual understanding of what those greedy traitorous criminals have been allowed- no, fucking encouraged- to do to us.
Like take apart those financial institutions that are “too big to fail.” Fuck that. And fuck them.
Those fucks.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
vicsocotra.com | Subscribe to the RSS feed!