The Leisure Class amuses itself

The following is from the Caucus99percent site. This is where all the good writers from Daily Kos went after it became abundantly clear in 2016 that Kos had no tolerance for the Progressive / Populist / New Deal wing of the Democratic Party and went out of his way to annoy the Bernie Sanders supporters.

The Russia Hoax sickens me. I have precious little tolerance for these sorts of maneuvers but this is worse than even the 1950-60s. My problem is that I have seen Russia, read her literature, listened to her music, and marveled at her playwrights.

And Ice Hockey—it's damn easy to follow the game in Minnesota and watched when Herb Brooks spent six seasons at the University of Minnesota reverse-engineering the hockey theories of Anatoly Tarasov—the supreme genius of Russian hockey. His efforts were rewarded when he coached a bunch of college kids to a Gold Medal in 1980 beating the top ranked teams in the world to do it—vs Czechoslovakia 7-3, USSR 4-3, Finland 4-2. Their only blemish was a 2-2 tie against Sweden who had the utterly awesome Pelle Lindbergh in net. Tarasov himself, who through bureaucratic Soviet stupidity was no longer the coach of the Big Red Machine, recognized that Brooks was his peer. How can such a relationship NOT be a good thing? And yet 39 years later we are being told that our diplomats are criminals if they even talk with their peers in Russia—thanks for nothing Russia bashers.

For me, the Russians are fellow people of winter and I find it exceeding difficult to watch politicians and news media defame these people for some cheap political advantage. They have suffered through great hardships over the last 150 years, and I find it disgusting to watch an ignorant weasel like Adam Schiff look into the camera and tell us easily refutable lies about one of the great cultures in history.

Moreover, the world is facing a climate calamity. Time is running out quickly. Our tax money should be spent of remediation, NOT on some exercise of "who can tell the biggest whopper and get away with it."

If You Have Been Playing "THE RUSSIA HOAX" at Home, along with Our Studio Audience, You'll Want to Grab this Clue!

Do the Leisure Class pundits know how anything works?

It's a damn chore to keep track of the Predator Class economic arguments. Which is why I am so grateful that Bill Black takes the time and effort to do those ugly chores. That the banksters are a gang of thieves is no surprise. After all, Veblen's core definition of the Leisure Class is that of the people who fasten themselves on the backs of the productive segments of society through force and fraud in the often successful attempt to get something for nothing. These people contribute nothing to society yet fancy themselves extra-smart because by their definition, cunning is the nearest synonym to human genius they have.

The great scene in Wall Street where Gekko gives his "Greed is Good" speech was hardly original. After all, the whole point of Leisure Class intellectualism is to come up with justifications for plunder. But what made that movie moment interesting is the number of movie-goers who actually thought that speech was wise, bordering on profound.

There are many who believe that such as Gekko should be accorded positions of leadership in democratic societies. Wrong! When the casinos are run by greedy crooks, the rest of us don't much care. It we don't want to do business with such people, we simply don't enter their establishments. But when those same greedheads start messing with the affairs of state, then what they do becomes everyone's business. And if these people decide that some easy money can be made by deindustrialization, the whole economy staggers. And if these people decide to rip off the system by deferring maintenance, sooner or later bridges start to fall down.

And if there is a crying need for massive infrastructure upgrades to avoid the calamities of climate change and the greedheads decide this is something we cannot afford, why then the necessary investments will not be made and the planet heats up to the point where human life becomes essentially impossible. Dangerous racket you got there, greedheads.

Tucker Carlson destroys Max Boot

Tucker Carlson used to drive me into fits of rage. So now he has a gig at Fox News and suddenly, he has almost become a voice of reason. Yesterday, (12 JUL 17) he has Max Boot on his show and proceeded to tear him a new one on the subject of foreign relations in the age of Trump. Whatever feelings I may have had for Carlson (an arrogant, overprivileged rich kid with a career path greased by well-connected parents, for example) they pale in comparison to my loathing of Max Boot, one of the nastier house neocons over at the Council on Foreign Relations whose lies have caused the deaths of thousands (if not millions) of people. As John Lennon once wrote:

There is room at the top they keep telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be just like the folks on the hill

A Working Class Hero

After Carlson got done with him, Boot was NOT smiling—even though I am certain he smiles a lot for his employers over at CFR.

Glass-Steagall, now more than ever

For those of us who have watched in absolute horror as the neoliberals have retested their crackpot theories on a country too ignorant to know better, our response is usually some variation on the theme "we know how to do it better because we have already demonstrated that our ideas are pragmatically superior." Paul Roberts is another throwback to the time when industrial "capitalism" created generalized prosperity and rewarded hard work and innovation rather than the scam of the month.

In some ways, it is almost impossible to imagine that something as honest, basic, and necessary as Glass-Steagall needs to be defended. Yet it was repealed, the banking systems blew up, and the taxpayers were put on the hook to save the perpetrators of deregulatory madness. Of course, the original act was put in place to prevent exactly the problems that showed up in the real estate bubble. In a sane world, Glass-Steagall would have been reinstated in 2008. But NOOOOO! The Predators want their bucket shops because it beats the hell out of honest work. And so the USA staggers from one economic crises to another.

Iceland and USA vs banksters

Of all the forms of human behavior I have paid attention to in life, the one that continues to baffle me is the "soft power" of the creditor classes.  Yes, they provide essential services, but that is a trivial fraction of their activities.  The rest of what they do is just plain naked money-grabbing.  But to hear them describe themselves, they are paragons of financial, political, and moral virtue.  Then, they surround themselves with the trappings of power—bank architecture is so predictable as to be a cliché.  And it works.  They keep their power and no one of significance goes to jail no matter the outrage.

So far, the only place that has managed to rise above the soft power of international finance is Iceland.  It requires a uniquely egalitarian society to rise above the bankster bullshit and they have one. Part of this come from the fact that it is a country small enough so it is possible to actually know who runs the significant elements.  But part is probably the Viking heritage—during a storm in a longboat, no one escaped the dousing when waves broke over the gunwales.  In such conditions, people who didn't understand the concept of "we are all in this together" didn't last all that long.

And so Iceland has thrown their banksters in jail while in USA, they have been returned to their power to loot and given handsome bonuses for keeping the specter of meaningful regulation and enforcement at bay. Not surprisingly, I much prefer the Icelandic approach.

One of the more recent Wikileaks dumps shows how Citigroup managed to surround young Obama with layers of advisors whose job it was to argue that their naked criminality should not have been a crime in the first place.  Notice how accurate Citigroup's list of cabinet appointees turned out to be and this was written well before the election even happened.  To show how successful this operation was, compare it with the Icelandic outcome.  And so the global economy remains in the hands of criminals who can only destroy.  This simply cannot continue.  Turns out the banksters are so destructive, they are about to destroy life on earth as we know it.  It's possible someone will organize resistance to this madness.

Moneylenders and their illusory social utility (update)

One of the more popular posts recently was Tony' epic takedown of those who believe that money-lending is an unalloyed good.  That this is not true should be blindingly obvious to anyone who can count.  Tony made sure everyone could understand.

The biggest problem, by far, is the excessive size of the financial sector.  The society simply cannot support such a huge parasitic / Predatory population.

Of course, since the real economy needs nowhere near such a large financial sector, there is almost no way for them to generate enough income from legitimate business to keep the doors open—much less provide for the pay scales the banksters seem to think is their due.  So not surprisingly, eventually all of them resort to fraud. Bernie Sanders made the claim “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” That was the statement Tony was defending, after all. In fact, as William Black argues below starting at the 17:30 mark, fraud has become the organizing principle of banking—without it, most large banks are unprofitable.

The British people have forfeited the confidence of their government

The Saker is not a big fan of the USA empire.  Anyone who has carefully followed the crimes of humanity carried out in the name of said empire eventually reaches a stage where even the tiniest stumble of the global ruling class is cause for at least a little celebration.  So there is a small amount of celebration mixed here with a stern warning of what how the Empire will react to a rejection from one of the founding members, and arguably the main inventor and designer of that Empire.  Brexit made a lot of very rich people very angry—not least because a lot of them lost a large pile of money.  Brexit was a peasants' revolt and like such revolts in the past, the big hammer is about to drop.  The slander against the peasants has already started.

I am not so certain that the ruling classes are beyond redemption or as unwilling to accept a new set of operating instructions as The Saker.  In fact, I grew up in a country that had accepted Keynesianism as an alternate instruction set to the neoliberal swill that dominates economics today.  It was what made the economy so much better for the average worker that even today, that is what made the old days "good" in the minds of so many—especially the Brexit supporters in the English Midlands.

But the Saker is probably right for one simple reason—the English economy today, such as it is, is mostly the banksters in London doing things that are criminal or should be.  Hoping a criminal will go straight is usually misplaced because going straight is so much more difficult and risky than making money by stealing.  Criminals usually win because they will stop at nothing.  Crushing a peasants' revolt is a small price to pay to keep that gravy train rolling.

Panama and money laundering

The recent revelations about the use of Panama as a tax haven have largely slipped under the radar.  I think I could put people to sleep at great distances by merely bringing up the topic.  But these revelations are very important because they expose a world where banking and organized crime meet to party.  Someone needs to explain why this is important and how it works.  So here is Michael Hudson on a 17 minute video.  I have also posted the transcript below.

Hudson bemoans the incredible entrenched power represented by these financial institutions and how difficult they will be to dislodge.  And there is nothing to make one believe he isn't absolutely correct.  Unfortunately, the powers they have are for looting and pillaging and we are in dire need of the power to build and remake.  So instead of trying to dislodge these casinos, perhaps is is simply more prudent to create alternative institutions.

TBTF Banks Still being Allowed to Cut Deals to Avoid Prosecution

Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute the largest banksters because, he said, doing so might ignite another huge crisis in the financial system. Now its clear that Obama's new Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, is continuing Holder's policy: this past week, no less than Goldman Sachs was allowed to a $5 billion plea bargain rather than facing a real court of justice for its role in deceiving investors and causing the 2008 financial crisis.

$5 billion may sound like a lot of money, but as various experts are pointing out, it is really not that much. First of all, the actual amount of cash extracted from Goldman Sachs will probably only be around $3 billion. Second, much of that $3 billion will probably be accounted as an expense as thus deducted from what Goldman Sachs pays in taxes, meaning that part of the agreement is actually being paid by USA taxpayers, not Goldman Sachs. Third, even the full $5 billion is a small amount when compared to Goldman Sachs's $32.9 billion in profits on $102.5 billion in revenues the past three years. David Dayen notes in a posting at The New Republic, that the settlement is for deceit in about 530 mortgage-backed securitizations between 2005 and 2007. Each securitization probably averaged  $1 billion in size, and it would be a stretch to assume that Goldman Sachs did not make well over $2 billion on them.   

Finally, as Allie Conti notes in a posting at Vice, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has estimated that the fraud committed by Goldman Sachs and other banks cost American homeowners $9.1 trillion on paper, while the resulting Great Recession cost the economy $22 trillion. so, Goldman Sachs caused trillions of dollars in damages, but is going to cough up mere billions - less than one percent - for its misdeeds.

Micro-lending

In her desperate attempt to escape the labels of "war criminal" and "Wall Street sellout," Hillary Clinton likes to trot out her longtime support for micro-lending.  The story of Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank is pretty well known because it has been featured favorably in the big USA press like CBS.  In their telling, this bank has empowered women to free up their entrepreneurial passions and has brought prosperity to the rural poor of Bangladesh.  Yunus and his bank were even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for the achievement of putting a small smiley-face on neoliberalism.

Under the happy talk of micro-lending, unfortunately, we are still talking about a scheme to drive the poor into debt (as if they don't already have enough problems.)  And while I am certain that the Grameen Bank's rates are better than the rural loan sharks will offer, we are still talking about 20% in 2016.  Considering the prices for commodities are falling which removes income from rural economies, interest rates should be less than 1% (unless the goal is only to enslave people.)  Usury is a vicious business—there are sound reasons why Christianity considered it a sin worse than murder for its first 1500 years.  Happy talk can change the subject but it cannot change the facts—20% loans cannot be repaid with honest enterprise.

Bill Clinton actually took it as a compliment when folks would compare him to Grover Cleveland.  Cleveland was a tool of Wall Street too so the comparison is pretty good.  And for services rendered, the most Predatory of the finance capitalists have made him goofy rich since he left the White House.  Hillary has done all right for herself shilling for the likes of Goldman Sachs so perhaps she aspires to become Grover Cleveland squared.

Thomas Frank over at Harpers has written a fine piece dissecting the latest outburst of Radical Chic.  It is hard to imagine what it must be like to be so rich and out of touch that 20% micro-lending seems like a good idea.  Hillary Clinton, meet Melinda Gates.  You two have SO much in common.

HSBC stays in The City

We are not big fans of the HSBC bank (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) around here.  This is an institution that was born in the imperial corruption of the British opium trade in China and they haven't done much to improve their image since.  (Tony included their criminal past in his Who Murdered Capitalism post.)

Recently, HSBC had a chance to move their legal headquarters from London to Hong Kong.  They chose London—largely because of the heavy investment they have made in corrupting the British government over the years.  The City of London is well-known for its "tolerance"  for financial crime.  The HSBC vote of confidence will only further cement this reputation.

The second article is from Reuters which claims that there are some who wish HSBC had moved their headquarters to Hong Kong so it seems there are "reasonable" people who think that it is legitimate competitor for City tolerance for criminality.  That also sounds about right.

The tragedy of allowing such a gang of criminals to make economic decisions for the rest of us is intolerable.

Has the Fed screwed up once too often?

Today's treat is Michael Hudson being interviewed by a Finnish journalist on that most important of subjects, the Federal Reserve.  The most obvious fact about Fed policy moves is that while they can quite easily slow down the economy by committing industrial sabotage, they have absolutely no mechanism for getting it going again.  Some of those assets these neoliberals so gleefully destroyed took decades to build and yet those ubër-fools seem to believe that lower interest rates to the banks (and not the real economy) will actually fix things (or so they say.)

The fatal flaw in their reasoning is that because the Fed is the banker's bank, they believe that if the banks and the stock market is flourishing, they have done their job well.  The rest of us do not even exist for their calculations.  Which is too bad because we do socially and economically important things and if we don't thrive, eventually they don't thrive.  So now we see the Fed in policy meltdown because their belief in magic has failed them just as their irresponsible financing of de-industrialization has exploded in their faces.  35 years of wrecking things has taken its toll.

The Saker on Putin's neoliberal obstacles

The levels of vitriol directed at Vlad Putin are way out of proportion to any real crimes he may have committed.  I mean, seriously, we want to go to war over Crimea???  Germany is willing to put at risk over six thousand businesses with Russian operations over eastern Ukraine???  The number of USA citizens who could even find Crimea on a map is miniscule.  The latest poutrage from the UK is the official assertion that Putin was responsible for the the death of a rogue secret agent.

None of this makes a lick of sense.  Compared to our drone-assassin Obama, Putin is damn near a saint.  The resurgent Orthodox church in Russia certainly thinks so.  He is astonishingly popular with the voters.  He is, by far, the best leader Russia has had since at least Catherine the Great, and perhaps ever.  Any country that cannot get along with such a leader should probably examine its own foreign policy failures.

So what is the story???  I have been thinking about this for quite a few years now and my pet theory has long been that Putin's real "crime" was that he actually sent one of those thieving oligarchs (Khodorkovsky) to prison.  These were the pirates who ripped off the assets of the Soviet Union during the Yeltsin years.  The rest of the crooks got the message and fled to London with their loot.  For a TINY fraction of their ill-gotten gains, these oligarchs were then able to create the Putin-is-evil-personified story and sell it to the UK and USA press.

In the story below, The Saker argues that the neoliberals who organized the plunder of USSR assets are still alive and well, still very much in power, and screwing up the Russian economy for Putin in a plan to destroy him and his government.  And so we see that once again, the neoliberals will stop at nothing to get their way.  In fact, the Saker argues that if Putin were to do something basic like getting rid of the neoliberal crazy who is running the Russian central bank, the international reaction would be at least as harsh as the response to the annexation of Crimea.

Climate change and Big Oil

The stories about what the oil industry knew about climate change just get juicer.  Probably the main reason I am so hooked on these tales is because Institutional Analysis could have predicted (and probably did somewhere) exactly the behavior of the oil companies.

Start with Institutional assumption #1: The oil companies always know.  They have to know everything possible about the crude they will turn into gasoline and jet fuel—including which oil fields it comes from.  These people build and maintain infrastructure so complex, massive, and expensive that most folks find it incomprehensible.  Their work is not only difficult, it is very dangerous so getting the answer right is often a matter of life and death.

Because this basic assumption is true beyond rational debate, it follows that the oil industry employs the best scientists on earth.  They have the most money to pay for top talent and plenty of good reasons to employ them.  The science of climate change has been pretty much settled since the early 20th century and is simple enough to explain to a reasonably alert 7th-grader.  OF COURSE the oil scientists understood climate change.  And now we see that they relied on their calculations to makes design changes in their infrastructure.  That's called putting your money where your mouth is.

What Big Oil chose to do with all this leading-edge understanding of climate change was not so predictable but in retrospect, quite understandable.  Because it is quite obvious that they looked at the climate change problem and concluded that even with all their massive scientific expertise, they didn't know what to do about it.  And so they chose to make the environmental pests go away.  They concluded that the environmentalists didn't know how to fix things either but they did know how to write regulations off-loading the fix on someone else—such as the oil companies.  So the environmental scientists had to be neutralized, and for an astonishingly small amount of money, they were.  Turns out it isn't hard to confuse the general public about matters they already find confusing.

The real lesson here is not about the power of Big Oil, but their self-defined powerlessness.  It's easy to sit on the sidelines and wonder why the oil companies didn't just turn their immense scientific and technological skills towards the problem of building the new green energy infrastructure.  But having stared into that abyss, they chose to muddy the academic debate while corrupting the processes of democracy.  Turns out that was a whole lot easier.

Banking as an act of war

One of the lasting lessons of the early 1980s economic catastrophe was that for much of USA, local law enforcement didn't have much to do besides throwing good honest farmers off their land.  After awhile, Nancy Reagan's War on Drugs would give the local shire reeves something else to occupy their time but in 1982, I remember a Minnesota sheriff explain that except for farm foreclosures, his department had only made four arrests in a whole year.  That's when I first learned how little "law enforcement" had to do with protecting the average citizen and everything to do with protecting the interests of the usurers.

Of course, if I had already heard of Smedley Butler and his idea that the USA military was merely muscle for Wall Street, the 1980s war on agriculture would have not come as such a shock to me.  As a multiple-decorated Marine Colonial, his thoughts tend to have weight.

So now we see Michael Hudson explain that the IMF has become little more than muscle for the current crop of banksters and warmongers.  It could be argued, of course, that the IMF has never been anything else.  Which is a damn shame because if the financial system were to be run by other than crooks and liars, maybe it could come up with the $318 Trillion the IEA says we will need to do something meaningful about climate change.

The Big Short reviewed

Movies can be important—even if most are not,  The Big Short has the smell of an important movie and since the story of what happened to the economy in 2007-8 has barely been told and even more rarely understood, there is a huge awareness gap that needs filling.  Whether that actually happens I don't know and won't have an opinion until I actually get to see it myself.  But I hope.

There are conceptual problems with this book / movie.  The biggest is that the protagonists are a bunch of short sellers—easily the most useless flotsam floating on the seas of finance capitalism.  I am already certain that this movie will inspire many a young greedhead to seek out a career in short selling.  But since there were no good guys in this sordid tale, making the short sellers who were betting against perhaps the greatest corruption in banking history the somewhat lovable protagonists is about as close to heroic as the author and movie-maker could find.

Of course, the real story is about the millions who did their small parts to make the original property boom happen.  Veblen used to claim the the main job of civic organizations and governments was to increase the value of the real estate.  Considering USA was a continent-sized real estate project, it can be easily argued that petty real estate speculation was the #1 occupation from day #1.  And it was this foundation fantasy that was being corrupted by the folks who were now bundling and dividing home mortgages.  Yet people wanted to believe.  They wanted to think that their homes had somehow magically become more valuable because of their personal good judgement and virtue.  They did not want to question why a house that was built for $20,000 in 1961 was now "worth" $1,400,000 even though it was now 50+ years old and and a lot of expensive systems were ready to break.

So one of the reasons 2008 doesn't came up that often is because it was an economic event that challenged a whole lot of people's belief systems.  The Big Short will not fail if it doesn't mention all the true believers who got burned.   Because from the sounds of things, this is a movie about people who were aware enough to realize their core beliefs were flat wrong.  And if this awareness is well explained, this will be an important AND great movie.

The Big Short has been made into a movie

Tony and I are big fans of Michael Lewis.  Personally, I don't think of him as especially profound when it comes to the big matters of macroeconomics, but he makes a huge contribution to our understanding of how economics is played out in the real world.  If you believe that the folks who are moving large sums of money around and making major impacts on the global economy don't really know what they are doing, Lewis will provide you with ample and detailed evidence for why such a belief is perfectly justified.

Not surprisingly, his book detailing the story of what created the catastrophes of 2007-8—which he called The Big Short—is still one of the best.  Tony did a huge review of it in a June 1, 2011 post.  Fortunately, a movie has been made of The Big Short that has won the approval of Lewis himself.  Considering how many great books have been turned into truly wretched movies that infuriated the authors, this is no small accomplishment.  If this movie turns into the definitive description of the Wall Street corruption / stupidity that spawned the economic disaster that still negatively impacts billions of people to this day, then it may become one of the more important movies of all time.

TPP—even worse than expected

The TPP covers 5,554 pages of dense legalese which probably means there are at least that many really bad ideas contained therein.  As far as I am concerned, however, the biggest problem of such agreements are twofold:

• The real economy has many elements.  Trade agreements tend to focus on the merchandising side to the exclusion of almost everything else—most especially manufacturing.  Here in USA, this sort of unbalanced approach has led to an almost complete de-industrialization while at the same time, has caused retailing space to skyrocket to over 85 square ft. per capita.  The structural problems this unbalanced approach has caused to the economy is almost incalculable. 
• Agreements like TPP essentially outlaw any attempts citizens might want to try to bring some balance to the public sphere including local-content laws, environmental controls, and most especially public banking.  Private finance will NEVER create the funds necessary to address big problems like climate change.  As a result, agreements like TPP will make meaningful attempts to correct the problems that lead to climate change legally and structurally impossible.

As a result, stopping TPP is literally a matter of life and death.

Military Keynesianism is the lamest variant

This story about military procurement depresses the hell out of me

• The free time of my youth was spent in the passionate pursuit of all things aircraft.  I had several relatives who worked for Boeing so I had a tribal rooting interest.  The 50s and 60s were the golden years of USA aerospace.  When I was young, the fact that USA aerospace was #1 was a subject beyond reasonable debate.  So it pains me to admit that my favorite high-performance airplane these days is the Sukhoi Su-35 (of course, my favorite when I was in high school was the F-104 so what do I know?)
• As someone who believes in the necessity for government spending on basic research, I hate it when such spending stops producing results and is instead squandered on various sorts of corruption.  A society can get into a lot of bad habits when the principles of a building culture are lost.  I just hope they haven't been lost forever.

It is tempting to discuss government spending in terms of those projects that were so successful.  Without it, there would be no cellphones, or GPS, or mass-produced antibiotics, or personal computers, etc.  But the F-35 is a perfect example of why reasonable people often wonder if governments can do ANYTHING right.

Debt Jubilee or destruction

Perhaps the most depressing element of the financial crises in Greece is how the moneychangers can make a society essentially uninhabitable for generations.  Because of decisions made by some greedy and corrupt "leaders" back when Greece entered the EU, current Greeks are just barely hanging on with mass unemployment, spikes in otherwise treatable diseases, an epidemic of suicides, the exodus of the best and brightest necessary to operate a successful society, among other measures of complete social breakdown.

Of course, anyone who has followed the grotesque evils of the organs of the creditor classes like the IMF and World bank will find absolutely nothing new about any of this.  Back in the 1980s I met a young woman who was taking a break from her career as a legal assistant.  While she was good at what she did, she had come to the conclusion that the law firm she was working for was populated by thoroughly evil people and had reached the stage where she couldn't even watch them work.  The event that had triggered her crises of conscience was some meetings where her firm was conducting workout arrangements for some Latin American debt.  Watching a bunch of comfortable Edina attorneys cynically destroying the lives of millions of Mexicans and Columbians had made her quite literally very sick.

I understand how she felt.  There were times during the Asian crises of 1997 where I couldn't watch either.  And I am reaching the same stage with the current catastrophe in Greece.  Yes, I know I should care but I already know that the only thing the Predator classes can do is wreck things.  And I also know that even though Germany has a superb Producer class, it has allowed its Predators to drag its international reputation to its lowest point since 1945 over their bullying of tiny Greece—all just to save the profits of Deutsche Bank and her equally evil sister institutions.

Time for global debt restructuring.  It is the most necessary thing to avoid a complete calamity.