How Wall Street and the banksters are perilously postponing America's economic recovery so that they can extract ever more wealth from American taxpayers
Last two sentences in Matt Taibbi's recent Rolling Stone article:
"Our burglar class now rules the national economy. And no one is trying to stop them."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle/print
With their reckless behavior and unparalleled greed, the banksters have caused the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. We were told we had to bail the big banks out so they would start putting money back into our communities--and then our jobs and our homes would be saved. So taxpayers stepped in and bailed them out. A year later, what have we got for that investment? From each and every man, woman, and child in the United States, there has been a wealth transfer that's averaged about $15,000 to our bankster overlords. But of course they didn't hold up their end of the bargain. Their financial institutions have bounced back, but they have done nothing to fix the overall economy that they crashed.
While ordinary Americans are still struggling to stay afloat, the banksters are back to business as usual, paying out billions in bonuses, making profits on the backs of the very taxpayers who bailed them out, and throwing up roadblocks to meaningful regulatory reform that would prevent a repeat of the crisis.
http://ss29.squarespace.com/storage/Trillion_Dollar_Bank_Job.pdf
How Goldman Sachs Secretly Bet on the US Housing Crash
WASHINGTON -- "In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.
"Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.
"Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.
"Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws."
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/77791.html
Excerpt from Paul Craig Roberts' recent article, "The US is a Failed State"
"Evidence that the US is a failed state is piling up faster than one can record it.
One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government -- using government to protect and to advance their private interests. And this is leading to ever increasing income inequality as the insiders manipulate economic policy for their enrichment, at the expense of everyone else.
