Fed Bailout the Too Big To Fail's Orgy - Your share of the orgy is a bowl of thin gruel to keep up your debt service so the TBTF's stay afloat
Posted by freedomforall 4 years, 11 months ago to Economics
there is no alternative. We have to bail out the greedy corporations that borrowed billions to buy back their own stocks, the corporations that sold junk debt to finance their bonuses and dividends, the financiers who bought the risky debt, the speculators who front-run the Fed's purchases of assets and on and on in an endless parade of fraud and corruption--because if we don't bail out the speculators and other parasites, the whole financial system will implode and that would be terrible.
Terrible for who? To answer the question, we need to ponder the fundamental nature of the Fed and our financial system, which can be summarized in one line: anything goes, and winners take all.
Anything goes, because money buys political influence and so what was once illegal--buying back your own stock, advertising medications directly to consumers, etc.-- are not just made legal but normalized by constant propaganda in the corporate media that these forms of legalized looting are good for the nation because... well, that doesn't matter, just take our word for it.
When anything goes, the winners take all. This is how we've ended up with a unstable, fragile economy dominated by a handful of corporations in each sector whose sole purpose is to maximize profits by any means available, and it just so happens the most profitable arrangements are monopoly and cartels, and so that's what we have: an economy of high costs, enormous profits, low-quality goods and services for the bottom 95% and an extreme concentration of wealth and income in the hands of the winners.
Terrible for who? To answer the question, we need to ponder the fundamental nature of the Fed and our financial system, which can be summarized in one line: anything goes, and winners take all.
Anything goes, because money buys political influence and so what was once illegal--buying back your own stock, advertising medications directly to consumers, etc.-- are not just made legal but normalized by constant propaganda in the corporate media that these forms of legalized looting are good for the nation because... well, that doesn't matter, just take our word for it.
When anything goes, the winners take all. This is how we've ended up with a unstable, fragile economy dominated by a handful of corporations in each sector whose sole purpose is to maximize profits by any means available, and it just so happens the most profitable arrangements are monopoly and cartels, and so that's what we have: an economy of high costs, enormous profits, low-quality goods and services for the bottom 95% and an extreme concentration of wealth and income in the hands of the winners.
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1. Lincoln was assassinated before he was able to guide the nation through reconstruction/reconciliation. Andrew Johnson - his successor and Vice President - wasn't a Republican but a Northern Democrat chosen as Lincoln's running mate for political purposes. Johnson was thrown out of office for his policies and replaced by Grant - a military general with little experience in politics. In other words, many libertarians blame Lincoln for the federal government during the war but fail to acknowledge that he had no opportunity to actually demonstrate his peacetime policies.
2. Many of the changes to our federal government were actually due to the Progressives such as Woodrow Wilson in the early 1900's. That included the Federal Reserve, the personal income tax, as well as the Seventeenth Amendment which gutted States' representations in the Senate. Those actions took place two generations after Lincoln.
(He also begins his rebuttal by taking on the notion of "King Cotton" and the numbers used in the 1619 Project by pointing out that in reality, cotton was about 5% of the GDP of the nation - not the 50% cited.)
"Anything goes, because money buys political influence and so what was once illegal--buying back your own stock, advertising medications directly to consumers, etc.-- are not just made legal but normalized by constant propaganda in the corporate media that these forms of legalized looting are good for the nation because... well, that doesn't matter, just take our word for it."
Why should a corporation NOT be able to buy back its stock? It issued it in the first place...
Why should a company NOT be able to market its products to generate demand and influence potential customers? What makes this industry different from others that it should be gagged in the first place?
What is the way out for individuals?
What, if anything, should governments do?
I mean not just last century when unbalanced budgets came in and fractional reserve banking and the other Keynesian actions were invented - but now?