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Bailouts, Bondage and Political Bankruptcy - by Stephen Lendman
Policies adopted are digging bigger holes for troubled countries heading for insolvency.
Europe and America perhaps face their gravest ever economic crisis. Growing millions are impoverished, unemployed, and out of luck.
Hunger and homelessness are increasing. So is unaddressed anger over handouts to bankers, not people facing crushing hardships.
Economist Michael Hudson calls finance a new mode of warfare. Generalissimo bankers run everything. Co-opted politicians serve them. In return, they're rewarded handsomely.
Ordinary people lose out entirely. So do economies being strip-mined for profit. Hudson asks what's to stop major Western banks from creating any amount of money they wish?
With it they can "buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale, in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1% interest cost?"
What's to stop them from bankrupting nations to buy valued assets cheap? Who'll stop them when governments play ball? Bankers, in fact, run countries like Greece, Italy, America and Britain. Washington is Wall Street occupied territory. So is London.
Scottish political commentator Ian MacWhirter calls bankers "an untouchable elite, beyond any civil constraint." Once upon a time, governments ran countries. Today it's bankers, at least in America and Europe.
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