- Goldman Sachs senior executives are arming themselves
with New York gun permits, according to Alice Schroeder on Bloomberg.com.
The banksters "are now equipped to defend themselves if there is
a populist uprising against the bank."
-
- One can understand why the banksters are worried. The
company, now known as Gold Sacks, has a large responsibility for the financial
crisis and the fraudulent "securities" that wrecked the world
economy and Americans' pensions. A former Gold Sachs CEO had control of
the US Treasury during the Bush regime from which he diverted $750 billion
to bail out the banks, thus supplying them with free capital. Gold Sachs
made $27,000 million during the first three quarters of 2009 and is paying
out massive bonuses, leaving the busted taxpayers with the debt and interest
charges.
-
- Little wonder the US can't afford health care for the
uninsured and unemployed. It is far more important to finance multi-million
dollar bonuses for investment bankers. I mean, what would we do without
capitalism?
-
- Of course, it is not really capitalism. It is an oligarchy
or a financial plutocracy.
-
- In a failed state, the government's priorities are totally
separate from those of the people. The US can't afford health care or
a bailout for jobless homeowners, but it can afford a pointless war and
multi-million dollar bonuses for banksters who wrecked the economy.
-
- Millions of laid-off workers lost their health insurance
subsidies on December 1, the day President Obama announced a $30 billion
"surge" in Afghanistan.
-
- The expensive "surge" came 24 hours after the
Detroit Free Press published a 127-page supplement of home foreclosures
in its metro area. In Michigan 48% of mortgages are on properties that
are worth less than the loan, according to a report from First American
CoreLogic.
-
- As bad as it is in Michigan, the state ranks seventh
in foreclosures, so six states are in even more dire straits.
-
- Why does President Obama think the US can afford a war
in Afghanistan when the US economy is falling apart? Massive joblessness.
Massive homelessness. Millions of Americans without medical care.
-
- The additional $30 billion for the war comes on top of
the $65 billion already appropriated for the year. These appropriations
are always fattened with supplementary appropriations. The true cost is
well in excess of $100,000,000,000.
-
- Who's going to pay for it? Democratic Representative
David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee proposes to
raise income taxes on everyone earning more than $30,000.
-
- This is called "trickle-up" economics. You
tax the little guy and give the money to the armaments companies.
-
- There was a time when Democratic presidents represented
the little man, and Republicans represented business. Today both parties
represent the moneyed interests. On December 3 at the Jobs Summit with
business leaders, Obama said, "We don't have enough public dollars
to fill the hole of private dollars that was created as a consequence of
the crisis."
-
- In other words, all the public's money has been spent
on the banks and the wars.
-
- Despite Democratic majorities in the House and Senate
and the ease with which Obama won the presidential election over McCain/Palin,
the Democratic Party has totally collapsed. The Democrats have abandoned
every constituency. Democrats have discarded the American people. Democrats,
in pursuit of campaign contributions, represent the moneyed interests on
Wall Street, the munitions companies, the insurance companies, the agri-businesses
that have destroyed independent farmers, despoilers of the environment,
unaccountable police, and the builders of detention centers. The exception
is Rep. Dennis Kucinich.
-
- The Democrats have become brownshirt Republicans.
-
- The American people, except for the one percent of super-rich,
have been abandoned.
-
- Obama had a different message during the presidential
campaign. On May 4, 2008, he went to Elkhart, Indiana, to sympathize with
the unemployed. On February 9, 2009, just after his inauguration, he returned
to Elkhart to say:
-
- "You know, we tend to take the measure of the economic
crisis we face in numbers and statistics. But when we say we've lost 3.6
million jobs since this recession began nearly 600,000 in the past
month alone; when we say that this area has lost jobs faster than anywhere
else in America, with an unemployment rate over 15 percent; when we talk
about layoffs at companies like Monaco Coach, Keystone RV, and Pilgrim
International companies that have sustained this community for years
we're talking about Ed Neufeldt and people like him all across this
country.
-
- "We're talking about folks who've lost their livelihood
and don't know what will take its place. Parents who've lost their health
care and lie awake nights praying the kids don't get sick. Families who've
lost the home that was their corner of the American dream. Young people
who put that college acceptance letter back in the envelope because they
just can't afford it.
-
- "That's what those numbers and statistics mean.
That is the true measure of this economic crisis. Those are the stories
I heard when I came here to Elkhart six months ago and that I have carried
with me every day since. I promised you back then that if were elected
President, I would do everything I could to help this community recover.
And that's why I've come back today to tell you how I intend to keep
that promise."
-
- What's the story in Elkhart 9 months after President
Obama reaffirms his promise? "Long-term unemployed face dwindling
options." [John W. Schoen, MSNBC, November 20, 2009]
-
- Lawrie Covey, 58, has been out of work for two years.
"I can't even get a job cleaning rooms at a local motel." Her
son, who was night shift foreman for a local manufacturer and who lost
his job after eight years, was splitting the rent. Winter is upon them,
and the heating bill is rising. Their transportation is 20 years old and
needs a new radiator. Both her and her son's unemployment benefits have
run out. Lawrie Covey has fallen back on her experience growing up on
a firm. She is raising chickens and picking wild mushrooms and has a garden.
If she makes it through the winter, she hopes to get a couple of baby
pigs to raise to see them through the next year.
-
- Lawrie Covey, to whom President Obama made a promise,
could just as well be an Afghan peasant. She doesn't count any more than
the thousands of Afghans who have been murdered in their sleep by US air
strikes on "terrorists."
-
- She voted for a president who spent all the money on
wars based in lies and deceptions and on Gold Sacks, the richest institution
in the world.
-
- The maniacal left-wing hates Ronald Reagan because "he
cut taxes for the rich," but Obama is loading up the poor with enormous
debts that imply hyperinflation in order to make Gold Sacks too heavy to
lift and in order to reward the munitions industry for its service to world
peace and American hegemony.
-
- _________
-
- Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
during President Reagan's first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall
Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including
the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution,
Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President
Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's
Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy
and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence
M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats
Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter
Brimelow's Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic
of prosecutorial misconduct.
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