A mad weekend on top of a madcap week! The markets are repeating last year’s ‘swan dive’, this time wiping out trillions of dollars of taxpayer bailout funds…so what did Mr. Bernanke ‘save’, exactly?
I guess it depends on your political leaning as to whether you interpret Frank Rich’s Open letter to the President as a guide to alter the course of this administration or a trip to the political woodshed…
Me, I think it’s too late to ‘save’ anything, the quicker we accept that life as we have come to know it is gone for good, the quicker we can adjust to the, er, ‘new normal’.
Left to our imagination is just whose ‘version’ of ‘the new normal’ will be inflicted upon us?
Which brings us to tonight’s offering for a rather grim look at one possible outcome…the Big D of dictatorship.
[Hat tip: Cryptogon ]
(Note: this is merely an excerpt from the full article, for the whole thing, click on the ‘tonight’s offering’ link.)
The people no longer have elected representatives; they have elected traitors.
The enslavement of the American people has been orchestrated by a pernicious Master Class that has taken the United States by the throat. This Master Class is now choking the nation to death as it accelerates its master plan to plunder the people’s dwindling remaining assets. The Master Class comprises politicians, the Wall Street money elite, the Federal Reserve, high-end government (including military) officials, government lobbyists and their paymasters, military suppliers and media oligarchs. The interests and mindset of the Master Class are so totally divorced from those of the average American citizen that it is utterly tone deaf and blind to the justifiable rage sweeping the nation. Its guiding ethics of greed, plunder, power, control and violence are so alien to mainstream American culture and thought that the Master Class might as well be an enemy invader from Mars. But the Master Class here, it is real and it is laying waste to America. To the members of the Master Class, the people are not fellow-citizens; they are instruments of labor, servitude and profit. At first, the Master Class viewed the citizens as serfs; now that they have raped and destroyed the national economy, while in the process amassing unprecedented wealth and power for themselves, they see the people as nothing more than slaves.
America’s public finances are now so completely dysfunctional and chaotic that something far worse than debt enslavement and monetary implosion, terrible curses unto themselves, looms on the horizon: namely, a Master Class-sponsored American dictatorship. [There’s a mighty HUGE assumption at work here; that a sufficient number of men with guns can be ‘bought off’ with empty promises of payment once the ‘chain of command’ breaks down…something that is ‘co-incident’ with paychecks that either go ‘boing’ or won’t buy you a single cup of coffee.]
Throughout history, the type of situation in which America now finds itself has been a fertility factory for tyranny. The odds of an outright overthrow of the people by the Washington and Wall Street Axis, or more broadly, the Master Class are increasing dramatically. The fact that so few people believe an American dictatorship is possible is exactly why it is becoming likely. [I have repeatedly stressed the ‘helplessness’ of our situation now that the ballot box, and by extension, the media can no longer be trusted.]
Dictatorships have blighted history and ruined lives since the beginning of civilization. In recent times alone, tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ceausescu, Amin, Hussein, Mussolini, Tojo, Kim, Pinochet, Milosevic, Tito, Batista, Peron, Pol Pot, Mugabe, Marcos, Somoza, Mengistu, Bokassa, Sese Seko, Franco, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, and Castro have power-sprayed blood onto the screen of time and ravaged mankind with murder, torture and human oppression. A full catalog of history’s tyrants would require a book of hundreds of pages. [That depends on who is pointing the finger…] In the past 100 years alone, over 200 million human beings have been annihilated by wars, ethnic cleansings and government assassinations. [Not only sad but true, and it is still going on today!] Just when we think that civilization has been able to rise above tyranny’s inhumanity and disgrace, a new dictator appears on the scene to start the process all over again. Every time this happens, fear and submission paralyze the vast majority of the affected masses, leading them to “follow orders” and lick autocracy’s blood-stained boots. [All it takes for evil to succeed is for honest men to do nothing; that’s where this gem of wisdom is most useful. If we fail to recognize tyranny, what else have we missed?]
History has proven to tyrants that oppression works. In fact, it is easy to control a populace, once you control the money, markets, military (including police), media and minions (the recipients of welfare, social security, free health care, government jobs and the like, who are dependent upon the state and likely to be compliant). This is exactly where the United States is today.
Recent American events paint an ominous picture of a Master Class that is now in total control.
When 90% of the American people vehemently rejected the $700,000,000,000.00 ($700 billion) TARP bailout plan, the Master Class put it on a fast track and approved it anyway. [As I have pointed out repeatedly, what were YOU going to do about it? You, who can’t even get your rep on the phone, never mind get him or her to read (much less answer) a letter/e-mail!]
When a clear majority of the American people said no to a government takeover of Chrysler and GM, the Master Class poured billions of taxpayer dollars into those corporate sinkholes and took them over anyway. [Again, what were you going to do about it? Work yourself up into a frenzy? Why? Why waste your time, it changes nothing…you have been ‘eliminated’ from the decision-making process…completely.]
When the people said no to multi-trillion dollar crony bailouts for the bankers and insurers whose corruption had caused global financial mayhem, the government pledged to those elite insiders more than $13,000,000,000,000.00 ($13 trillion) of the people’s money anyway. [Perhaps we should be asking, ‘What CAN you do?’…no irony should be lost on the fact that ‘legally’ your hands are tied, ‘voting’ gives your representative ‘carte blanche’ and there’s no way for you to revoke it! It may suck but that’s the way it was ‘designed’…and it wasn’t designed by ‘riff-raff’ like us, nor was it ‘approved’ by the ‘paycheck peasants’.]
When the people expressed astonishment and anger that Wall Street planned to pay itself record 2009 bonuses, in the midst of America’s worst-ever fiscal and financial crisis caused by them, Wall Street stuffed its pockets with taxpayer-supported bonus money anyway. [Seriously, what were you supposed to do about that? Go and burn their house down?]
When the people said no to a proposed $40,000,000,000.00 ($40 billion) bailout of AIG and its elite trading partners such as Goldman Sachs (an amount that subsequently exploded to $180,000,000,000.00+ ($180+ billion)), the Master Class went underground, covertly misappropriated taxpayer money and made the payoffs anyway. [This stank beyond belief…and Geithner was STILL appointed Treasury secretary! WTF!]
When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were nationalized at enormous taxpayer expense, the government approved $6,000,000.00 individual pay packages in 2009 (150 times the average American wage) for the CEOs of both failed companies anyway. [And once again we see ‘household income’ being passed off as ‘average wage’, which is really $30k FOR MEN, women make considerably less (and there are more of them in the workforce!)]
When a clear majority of the people said no to nationalized health care, even after being bombarded by a multi-million dollar, lie-drenched propaganda campaign designed to bamboozle them, the House and Senate passed nationalized health care bills anyway. [Um, once again we become aware of ‘factually challenged’ conservatism at work…a ‘clear majority of US citizens FAVOR universal, single payer healthcare…but ‘goldbugs’ are ‘cuckoo’ anyway.]
When more than seven million American workers lost their jobs and were subsisting on unemployment benefits and food stamps, federal government employees, who now earn DOUBLE what private sector workers earn, were given another round of pay and benefits increases anyway. [This last is perhaps the most dangerous sign that our civilization is out of control. Civil order will collapse if these people are not ‘appeased’. (When the cops walk off the job it’s ‘goodnight Irene!’)]
When private sector workers’ 401Ks and IRA retirement plans plummeted in value due to economic collapse and endemic Wall Street-orchestrated market corruption (including systemic front running, flash trading, naked short selling and other manipulations), government “defined benefit,” lifetime-cost-of-living-adjusted pension plans, despite already being underfunded by $2,000,000,000,000.00 ($2 trillion), were made richer than ever anyway. [???]
The long, shameful litany of events signaling the total divorce between the Master Class and the people of the United States doesn’t stop there. It goes on and on. [Much of this ‘angst’ comes from the fear goldbugs have that their ‘money of choice’ will remain ‘forsaken’ by those damn ‘tax and spend’ liberals…]
The message from the American Master Class to the American people is simple and clear: We Defy You. [Which is somewhat of an overstatement, what you’re really being told is ‘What are you going to do about it?’ because they already know the answer…nothing. They got away with it once (nobody was ‘punished for the first Great Depression) and they fully expect to get away with it again…the question is ‘will they?’ We have all of the ingredients in play for a repeat of ‘The Horror’ that swept the Monarchies of the world during the French Revolution.]
Governments that openly defy the people are either already totalitarian or in the process of becoming so. Monetarily, the United States clearly functions as a totalitarian dictatorship already, with a Federal Reserve that operates in secrecy, creates limitless amounts of debt and currency at will, and showers trillions of dollars upon favored Master Class insiders with zero transparency or accountability whatsoever. The Federal Reserve is so shameless about its dictatorial powers that it flatly refuses to provide details about multi-trillion dollar bailouts and rescues of privileged elites, in open defiance of Congress and the people. The fact that they get away with these blatant acts of defiance demonstrates the true extent of the Master Class chokehold on America. [And once again we are ‘powerless’ to do a single thing about this repeated failure of what passes for our ‘justice system’.]
If the Master Class were a benign despot and if its policies and programs actually worked, that would be one thing. But that is not the case. Rather, its programs are in a complete shambles.
Perhaps the most disturbing part about this ‘rant’ is the writer, like most ‘goldbugs’ is a, er, conservative (who genuinely loathes liberals.) This comes shining through if you read the whole article, although some of it is apparent in this excerpt.
Um just a little ‘historical note’ to give you an idea how the people of this nation were ‘taken for a ride’ from the get go. The fact that the Constitution was only ‘ratified’ by the legislatures of each state, back in a time when many key political positions were appointed rather than elected.
Sort of like the UN, you know? Can you say ‘stacking the deck? Because this is the same reason why we find ourselves powerless to stop our so-called ‘elected representatives’ from selling us down the river every chance they get!
Um, if any good is to come out of our current situation it is the fact that the ‘golden trough’ is finally, if only temporarily, going to ‘dry up’.
The trick, if we’re up to it, lies in insuring that the ‘pigs’ are prevented from claiming the trough as their own once again…even if that means we have to live without pigs.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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