Clamping down on bankster power

Over the years, a pattern has emerged on how societies deal with social chaos.  At some point in these troubled societies, people--especially rich people--will insist that a military government be formed to provide order.  Martial law is imposed and some form of order is returned.

Military governments can hang around for a long time but eventually, they are usually invited to return to their barracks.  And there is a reason why even law-and-order rich folks grow tired of military rule.  Armies may be able to provide order, but they are notoriously lousy at almost every other function of government.

The most accurate way to describe economic history after 1973 is to point to the repeated coups d 'etat of the moneychangers.  Around the globe, the bankster agenda was imposed on all sorts of governments from military dictatorships (Chile) to radical democracies (Jamaica) by institutions such as IMF and the World Bank.  In USA, the method was much more simple--the banksters simply bought the congress and the courts.

And like military governments, the rule of the banksters has been notoriously incompetent.  It is time for them to go back to being the boring dullards on the fringes of a society bent on industrial renewal.  They can still make their fees, but it is TIME for them to stop running things they clearly don't understand.

Sticking the Public with the Bill for the Bankers' Crisis

By Naomi Klein - June 28th, 2010

Published in The Globe and Mail

My city feels like a crime scene and the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I’m not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop cars on Saturday.

I’m talking about the heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession. Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world’s wealthiest and most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most vulnerable people in their countries with the bill.

How else can we interpret the G20’s final communiqué, which includes not even a measly tax on banks or financial transactions, yet instructs governments to slash their deficits in half by 2013. This is a huge and shocking cut, and we should be very clear who will pay the price: students who will see their public educations further deteriorate as their fees go up; pensioners who will lose hard-earned benefits; public-sector workers whose jobs will be eliminated. And the list goes on. These types of cuts have already begun in many G20 countries including Canada, and they are about to get a lot worse. For instance, reducing the projected 2010 deficit in the U.S. by half, in the absence of a sizeable tax increase, would mean a whopping $780-billion cut.

They are happening for a simple reason. When the G20 met in London in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, the leaders failed to band together to regulate the financial sector so that this type of crisis would never happen again. All we got was empty rhetoric, and an agreement to put trillions of dollars in public monies on the table to shore up the banks around the world. Meanwhile the U.S. government did little to keep people in their homes and jobs, so in addition to hemorrhaging public money to save the banks, the tax base collapsed, creating an entirely predictable debt and deficit crisis. more