I confess that I like Ben Bernanke and refuse to believe that he's actually "in on" the Conspiracy to Fleece America. I don't see him as a crypto-member of the Illuminati or co-author of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He's an academic, a very smart and reasonable guy, and in some ways he's our last best hope to emerge from the financial crisis more or less intact, that is, with most of us still living indoors. Henry Paulson, on the other hand, is a former Goldman Sachs operative who no doubt sought unfettered latitude to administer the Big Bailout precisely because he could guarantee that his colleagues and future partners on Wall Street could maintain their gilt-edged lifestyle undiminished by any of these crazy, Socialist ideas of lowering their annual take to a measly minimum wage of $400,000 per year or something. Just because the federal government is saving their fat white asses does not mean the G-Men can bring them down to their level. What next? Do you expect them to drive Fords?
It is an unedifying, not to say nauseating, spectacle to watch the Congress "at work" grilling Ben Bernanke, who has forgotten more about economic history and policy than any of these fancily-dressed Popinjays will ever know. Naturally, this tiresome tribe, like "Chuckie" Schumer of New York, attempt to draw Ben into the political arena, asking why Congress should appropriate $700 billion for a bank bailout when, for one of millions of examples, Bush found it impossible to add a pittance to the children's health insurance fund. And so the Solons thunder on, suddenly the outraged guardians of the commonweal, the staunch defenders of "Main Street" and the "taxpayers."
What a load of bullshit. Schumer's the guy who can't stand the thought that hedge fund managers, who at times have counted their annual compensation in the billions, should have to pay ordinary income tax rates instead of capital gains. How do these guys manage the cognitive dissonance in their heads? Have they actually managed to compartmentalize the public persona who fulminates on television from the backroom pol who does favors for friends so completely that they are, in effect, a Congress of Sybils at this point, whose various selves are unaware of each other?
I'll say this for Bernanke: he's trying to put together a bailout mechanism which minimizes the federal outlay on a net basis. The "toxic" assets (what an overused term that's become) can be purchased by this new federal bureaucracy at a figure representing their long-term worth, or even less, which may be higher than the distress sale, mark-to-market dumping that ruined Merrill Lynch, for example, which received about 22 cents on the dollar. So perhaps (and there is some precedent for this in the actions of the Resolution Trust Fund which bought assets from failed savings and loan banks) the eventual cost will not add nearly so much to the national debt as the face amount of the appropriation would suggest, while at the same time strengthening the banking system. And if this happens, it will owe much to the rigorous hard work of Ben Bernanke and his staff.
Which is a helluva lot more than you can say for Congress. Because Congress, you see, ultimately appropriates all the money for federal operations, not just bailouts. And what these frauds and fakes never ever talk about when they're putting the screws to Gentle Ben is about the rest of the budget. The United States, under W the Idiot, has been adding about $500 billion to the national debt each year. The math is simple; look at that figure to the right that's clocking upward toward its new "ceiling." If I tell you the debt was around $5 trillion when Bush took office, and you divide the difference between today's number and that by 8, what do you get? So never mind these phony calculations of the deficit by the Bureau of Official Lies. And the reason we keep running these humongous deficits, and getting deeper and deeper into the hole, and trying the patience of our foreign lenders to the breaking point, is because we won't cut back on military spending or on waging unnecessary wars of foreign aggression.
The analysis is getting very stark and very simple. The world at large is actually very tired of the bellicose United States and its gratuitous invasions of convenience and resource-grabbing. We add insult to injury because we can't even afford to fight them. We have to borrow money from the rest of the world to finance our militancy. Then unstable madmen like John McCain up the ante by demanding aggression against one of our lenders, Russia. You have to like the sweet paradox of that one. Let's kick Russia out of the G-8, then borrow money from our creditors, oh like Russia, to take on this new Red Menace that we just hallucinated. What McCain and Congress in general don't want to come to terms with is that American Hegemony cannot be financed by the very same world you're trying to dominate. The continued attempt to borrow our way to the top is destroying the country. The next step is the reduction of U.S. Treasury debt to junk status, and when that happens we won't be the world's reserve currency anymore. And then Congress can appropriate all the suitcases full of worthless green paper it wants and nothing is going to help.
Throw all these bums out, every last one of them. The 535 Plan. Reduce military spending to the levels necessary to defend the country and no more. Raise taxes to balance the budget. Resume the practice of regulating systematic fraud instead of enshrining it as the national ethos. And you stuffed shirts in Congress - leave Ben Bernanke the hell alone. He's the only guy in that town working for a living.
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