Manufacturing consent so the masters of the universe can play
Category: News and Politics
The USA needs to get out of Iraq and focus government spending on public works that will improve the quality of life of the people: education, health care, mass transit, green energy.
The financial wonks came up with the term "illiquid assets" to describe mostly worthless paper that nobody wants to admit (or can not afford to admit) is worthless. The bailout program will replace this worthless paper with money "borrowed" from the tax payer. That money is made up by the private federal reserve out of thin air in the first place and loaned to the government (tax payers). For people that high up in the power structure, they might as well be playing with monopoly money. Of course it is a monopoly.
The government is not about getting our permission but about manufacturing our consent, as Chomsky puts it.
In the case of the bailout, they didn't even get the consent of the people. They just went off and did what they were told to do by the financial bosses with the "or else" threat of their own portfolios becoming worthless if they didn't.
Paulson and his minions will arbitrarily decide what each piece of worthless paper is worth and give money to domestic and foreign banks to replace it. This flood of funny money further devalues our currency. It may unlock the credit market a little bit, but it causes inflation.
The hocus pocus that's supposed to bail out the stock market is not going to change the government's already appalling, illegal misappropriation of funds.
The government should worry about creating value and quality of life for its people.
When the banksters financial models figured out that if everybody continues to cash in their hedge funds and money markets they'd run out of money to pay because the bankers refuse to lend to them, they screamed for a bailout. The problem is that once they get the bailout that will only make people want to cash out these investments more. They'll all say, "I'd better get my money out while I still can." So this will accelerate the crash. The banksters will probably need to print quite a bit more than $700billion before it's all over. Say hello to $10/gallon gas and $10 big macs America. The dollar is toast.
If this bailout wasn't a result of an act of congress, then it's not constitutional and it's not an act of the government. It's an act of the private banking monopoly. What the talking heads are failing to stress is that this is not a "government bailout." It's unauthorized theft of public money to rescue private financial institutions. The powerful oligarchs have decided. Because everybody agrees that something must be done, many people are ignoring the reality of who is really in control of the government. The word democracy does not apply here.
Ron Paul is right. It's basically signing all our bank accounts over to the gambling addicts who caused the problem in the first place. The bankers are huddled like alcoholics in a big virtual AA meeting trying to figure things out, but if we keep handing them suitcases full of financial crack by letting them print more money, what will make them change their ways?
We're coming up on September 11th again. It makes you think.
The mistake many people make is to use the phrase "controlled demolition," in the same way that the experts do to safely knock down obsolete skyscrapers.
Imagine that you're evil Dr. X (replace X with your favorite conspirators) and you want to create a media event that scares Americans into supporting a new war.
First off, you'd want to make it dramatic, like Hollywood... how about, "Airplanes crashing into the twin towers and the Pentagon!"
Second, you know that things don't always go as planned, so you want a backup plan. What if there's a glitch in part about the airplanes. Hmmm... Okay, plant explosives as a backup plan. Even if the airplanes don't hit, you can bring the buildings down.
Unlike controlled demolition experts, you're not staking your reputation on making the building fall straight down. You just have to be reasonably sure it will fall straight down. Buildings are not designed to handle nearly as much tangential load as vertical load. Once the columns start to buckle, the building goes more-or-less straight down. The taller the building, the better chance of bringing it down fairly straight -- good enough not to wreck Wall Street.
You don't need miles of wire and hundreds of cutter charges unless you are a reputable demolition company trying to guarantee a vertical descent. To be reasonably sure it will fall vertically is a lot easier. You plant several batches of remote-controlled explosives.
You start blowing them up at the base of the structure first, then you move up a bit, blow up the next set. You keep pecking away at the structure until it goes. You use a moderately insensitive vibration-sensitive primer so the remaining charges won't self-ignite except from the crushing force of the upper floors, thus destroying evidence of your misdeed. You space the charges far enough apart so they won't all go off at once.
What's the contingency plan? If the planes miss, you can still blow up the buildings. If a mistake causes the buildings to blow up too early, the official explanation can be -- well just like the first time terrorists tried to bring down the WTC towers, they also planted explosive-laden trucks in the parking structure, except this time they had more explosives.
Planes are a lot more dramatic than vans full of fertilizer and fuel oil, although in truth, it's very very hard to get a plane traveling at 400+ miles/hour to slam into a skyscraper by "hand flying" it. Expert pilots tried that shortly after 9/11 using very accurate, high-tech flight simulators and it took dozens of tries to hit the WTCs at that speed. Funny thing that amateurs could get it right 3 out of 4 times.
If you think like a demolition expert, it doesn't put you in the right mindset to do the job. You're definitely not that worried about doing it safely because no matter what, the Islamic terrorists get blamed. You just want to get it done and cover your tracks. So you can use less but bigger explosives and you don't have to engineer it as carefully.
That's consistent with what happened. Eyewitnesses reported a series of massive explosions spaced minutes apart. It seems that they just kept blasting until the first tower fell. Then they took down the second tower, and finally "pulled," WTC 7.
Have you ever noticed how the cost of common household items and food is higher in the less affluent section of town? It's always been that way, but now I've noticed it's become worse.
Another trick stores are pulling is keeping the price of the giant economy size about the same but jacking up the price of the lower count boxes of the same product.
Poor people often have to buy several items and they can't just go ahead and purchase the high-count box because they don't have enough money to go around. They are forced to fritter their money away a little at a time, and pay 50% more than wealthier people for the same products.
It's not a conspiracy to hurt the poor. It's simply some business-types in suits who are playing around with financial models up in some chrome and glass office building. They have zero connection to the actual people their corporations serve so they can't directly know how decisions they might make will affect the quality of life of their customers.
Affluent people can afford to shop at a different store if they are dissatisfied with the value they are getting at a particular store, but poor people lack the transportation options to choose a better deal. So by making smaller quantity product offerings ridiculously more expensive but cheaper than the high-count package, they keep the affluent customers and the take unfair advantage of poor customers. They keep the poor customers only because the poor may have no other option.
infuriated