Given that the banks did nothing to stimulate the economy via lending to medium and small businesses, let alone individuals, at least on any kind of significant basis, we now see that "lending" them this money was a huge mistake.
Or was it?
The irony of pre-TARP scare line "Too big to fail" not being lost on me in the post-TARP era of the recently conglomerated super banks, I wonder:
1. Ex Goldman CEO Paulson, as Secretary of the Treasury, lets Lehman Brothers, one of the few remaining competitors with Goldman, die. Doesn't that reek of conflict of interest?
2. How did they substantiate the TARP amount of $700 billion? To date, I've no clue. No one in mass media even asks, let alone with any semblance of consistency.
3. Why were there no stipulations on the money that only allowed Goldman, JPMrogan/Chase, Wells, B of A... to serve themselves with our money?
4. Why is it that as a result of bailing them out we now own GM and Chrysler, two crappy companies with four decades of shitty business models and clueless dinosaurs running them, and yet we do NOT own AIG, contrary to what the press has said. This reasoning is because AIG's stock has taken a meteoric rise Post-TARP. This would equate to massive earnings on our money, surely headline news. To date, nothing of the sort has broken in the media. This also applies to all of the newly conglomerated super banks - with all of the massive earnings Goldman and JPMC have made post-TARP, why is it that we only own the toxic, poisonous debt they gave us, nothing more, while they get to take our money, conglomerate and post record earnings that they horde to themselves???
5. Why has the government not told the American public the true cost of the bailout, which is now at over $14 TRILLION? See below, from Nomi Prins, for October, 2009, at:
http://www.nomiprins.com/bailout.html
[The owner corporations of America] spend billions of dollars every year, lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else....
...They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people … they’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them, it’s against their interests. You know something? They don‘t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting’ fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want?
They want obedient workers. OBEDIENT WORKERS.
People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, AND NOW, THEY'RE COMING FOR YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY MONEY. THEY WANT YOUR FUCKING RETIREMENT MONEY.
THEY WANT IT BACK SO THEY CAN GIVE IT TO THEIR CRIMINAL FRIENDS ON WALL STREET. [Remember these shitheads? Eeeeyeah.]AND YOU KNOW SOMETHING? THEY'LL GET IT. THEY'LL GET IT ALL FROM YA SOONER OR LATER, CUZ THEY OWN THIS FUCKIN' PLACE. It’s a “Big Club.”
AND YOU AIN’T IN IT.
You and I are not in “The Big Club.”
By the way it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell ya what to believe… with their media … what to think, what to buy…
The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice, no body seems to care. Good honest hard working people, white collar, blue collar, doesn’t matter what color shirt ya have one. Good honest hard working people continue… these are people of modest means… continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you.
AT ALL AT ALL AT ALL.
And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care… THAT’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day.
Because the owners of this country know the truth: it’s called “The American Dream,” cuz you have to be asleep, to believe it.
-Saint George of Carlin
Malcolm and Huey spoke about the role of anger in resistance, and I remember Yuri Kochiyama telling me that she believed in righteous anger, that there was nothing wrong in it, but that it shouldn't be an end point.
We're way beyond the point of righteous anger by a factor of 10, at least in my reality. And yet, there's no collective will, nothing pragmatic, direct and constructive toward resistance. In fact, it's the worst "response" of all, the modern-day equivalent of the verbal "like, you know" tick; a shrug of the dis-empowered shoulders and a faux helpless look.
MoveOn dot org, indeed, these people make me sleepy.
