Most of us know about the economic bubbles, big and small, that hit the economy every few years during the last two decades. All the “economic experts”, politicians and their media clients inundate us with the rationales for why there was a tech bubble blowup, or housing bubble explosion, commodities bubble burst or oil bubbles spill. One crisis after another comes down the pike. “More than $ 5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ [bubble crash] alone.” –Tabbi
Most of us experience how much these bubbles negatively impact on our personal finances from the loss of public wealth to job and personal investment losses. But what we don’t usually know is that almost always, “the financial crisis, is created by huge aggrandized financial institutions borrowing vast sum of money and gambling it all away, knowing that the government will swoop in and rescue them if they failed.” –Taibbi. All while the major players, both corporate and individual, make enough money (not to mention the cost to the taxpayers and real loss to the economy we live in) to significantly bail out the rest of the country from its financial woes. But these facts do not make the agenda, so are never considered in making the policies.
The financial game playing is obscene and all too often criminal. The vast majority of people who suffer from it (not those elites who benefit exorbitantly from these schemes and scams) are left to pay the bill or worse become personally insolvent without having done anything wrong or anything at all. The sound bite response from those who benefitted might be something like, with the housing bubble, the blame lies with the poor people on welfare, the government mandate to get everyone in a home, and on those poor lazy people living in too much house. Or with oil, it’s our gluttony for oil usage in America. Those, it terms out, are the pretexts. Through the establishment media probably most of us are swayed to believe such misdirections, particularly because the truth seldom enters the media’s politicized attention n these regards.
Over-the-counter derivatives, CDOs, credit default swaps, interest rate swaps, US cities literally selling (OK, leasing for 75 years) parts of their infrastructure, like Chicago selling off its meter system, the tax code changes providing tax breaks to giant corporations (especially those in trouble) and TARP, had nothing to do with the problem and its horrific effect for the population.
The facts continually show that the welfare (such as the bail outs and slick tax and interest rate changes) goes to those “systematically important” financial institutions. Too big to fail. The rest of us get the bill.
So where are we? Mostly in a play in which we are pawns to the elite, whether financial, political, or media who in concert run the show and tell us the story.
Our real government is mostly kept hidden from view, and the truly weighty decisions about where our society is going and what rules it is going to live by are made mostly in private, by groups of anonymous lawyers and bureaucrats and lobbyists, government officials and industry reps alike.
Taibbi, Matt (2010-11-02). Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (p. 247).
We have voters who don’t pay attention, a news media that either ignores key subjects or willfully misunderstands them, and a regulatory environment that bends easily to lobbying and campaign financing efforts. And we’ve got a superpower’s worth of accumulated wealth that is still there for the taking. You put all that together, and what you get is a thieves’ paradise— a Griftopia.
Taibbi, Matt (2010-11-02). Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (p. 250).
And this is a place where the vast majority of the people suffer because as Taibbi points out, these “drivers of the Great American Bubble Machine aren’t producers, but takers.” We know this to be fact from any fair review of the bubbles that have burst upon us. They are taking from us, behind our backs, leaving too many in financial extremis.
Learn and speak up to create a challenge and a change.
Robert J. Liptak
Iowa Bankruptcy Attorney