-- Buffalo Springfield " For What It's Worth
"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. -- George Orwell
The Crisis constellation of generations is always the same:
As visionary Prophets replace Artists in elder-hood during a Crisis, they push to resolve ever-deepening moral choices, setting the stage for the secular goals of the young.As pragmatic Nomads replace Prophets in midlife during a Crisis, they apply toughness and resolution to defend society while safeguarding the interests of the young.
As team working Heroes replace Nomads in young adulthood during a Crisis, they challenge the political failure of elder-led crusades, fueling a society-wide secular crisis.
As Artists replace Heroes in childhood during a Crisis, they are overprotected at a time of political convulsion and adult self-sacrifice.
This generational transition is the reason for the mood shift that is occurring today. Those in power are getting nervous. The population didn't act this way during the 1990's. Town hall meetings were barely attended. No one called Congressmen's offices or flooded their mailboxes with emails and faxes. Something is in the air, and those in power ignore it at their own risk. This country is about to explode and the intellectuals in the positions of authority and thought control are trying to apply reason and the usual mainstream media PR spin. They sit in their extravagant offices at polished mahogany desks on the 45th floor of their glittering office towers, eating gourmet meals in executive dining rooms, writing the pabulum that passes for journalism today and descending from upon high on the Sunday morning talk shows to grace us with their wisdom. The American people have had enough of their lies.
Simon Johnson in his article The Quiet Coup describes the raping of America by the ruling elitist bankers who now call the shots in Washington DC:
"Elite business interests "financiers, in the case of the U.S. "played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector's profits "such as Brooksley Born's now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998 "were ignored or swept aside.
The American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital "a belief system. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America's position in the world.
Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn't.
By now, the princes of the financial world have of course been stripped naked as leaders and strategists "at least in the eyes of most Americans. But as the months have rolled by, financial elites have continued to assume that their position as the economy's favored children is safe, despite the wreckage they have caused. -- Simon Johnson
"Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection. --Henry A. Wallace
The government response to the financial crisis guarantees that part two will be far worse than part one. The propping up of bankrupt banks, Keynesian stimulus measures, toothless regulatory legislation, new massive healthcare plans, and unprecedented levels of government debt will not solve a problem caused by excessive leverage in 10 Too Big To Fail financial firms and thirty years of debt financed spending splurge by mindless consumers. Simon Johnson clearly lays out how these actions will play a large role in this Crisis:
"Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can't seem to get into gear.
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