The Big Takeover - The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power.

Source: Rolling Stone Magazine

The Big Takeover
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
MATT TAIBBIPosted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

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It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."


Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/1

We end up being run by people who lisp so to speak. No pun. A country and company must be run by talent and trying to keep it in the family does not work. Bush is proof of that if you do not like to read history. High income does not mean you have brains or talent if your getting it by hand me downs or being in the family.Look at what leaving the land to the oldest son did to England. Even the people saw it did not work after a while. A Lord may have had money and great power and did for a few hundred years but it almost took the country down. You can not run a great country with 10,000 people sitting on all the goods of a nation. To keep the country going they had to get rid of that stuff just as we must. These no-talent people running things just is not working.

make a point without slamming one group or another anymore?

The joke was they were all turning to nuts that looked odd, see Goya's painting, and they could not talk any more. I am not fighting lisping but the results of inter-breeding not gifted people who end up with power, money and them making the rules for the rest of us. Reading history can be fun.

quit while you were ahead.

{jk Well, a little)

Next time, try "interbred mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers" Just a thought.

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Please explain!

would make some practical, constructive suggestions instead, just for once. But the media is too damn lazy, so they go for the easy, cheap, emotion-stirring.

Mrs. So and so, "How did you feel when you saw the video of your son being brutally beaten to death?"

Duh.

And, unfortunately, it works for them.

They give you people to vote for to run these companies and they just seem to be the same old people. They get some money to turn up for a yearly meeting but just to give the go ahead to who ever is running the company. Their used to a a women that went to all those meeting and really got some information out to the stock holders. I wonder what happened to her? When you read or I used to read those yearly reports it seemed that it was sort of in-breeding with the same guys always sitting on boards of these companies. Well paid yes men I guessed. Just look at the number of companies these men sit on. You have to know they do not know about all these things but as stock holders it is the only people we can vote for. How can a corp. be run well with just yes men? Some one must have a thought in their head. Maybe we would be still buying US cars if the big people in these companies had some one not just saying yes.

It takes a lot of skill, time, and generosity to find young people of talent, brains, and motivation to excel, who will play the game the way you want it played. The failures are easier to control.

instead" of exposing the causes/actions/people behind current events?

We have an overabundance of pundits (those who make commentary) and a dearth of real journalists (those who root out and expose wrongdoing).

Why would you want more of the same?

story (no pun intended). This article IS more of the same It is probably the 400th after the fact outrage article. The real journalism at this juncture WOULD be coming up with some solutions.

And btw, my dichotomy was between the 400th after the fact outrage article and constructive suggestions, not between investigative journalism and commentary. This article IS nothing but commentary. And not many constructive suggestions come from pundits.

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.


National City Bank was sold out in just such a maneuver. They were declined any bailout funds. The money was given instead to PNC which used it to buy NCB. The money was handed out by a former PNC executive.

Choosing winners and losers? For sure.

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/03/18/the-nasty-thrill-of-gossip-girl-on-the-set-of-tvs-hottest-show-in-rolling-stone/


My point/question is simple: Is the magazine really credible?

Thanks for posting this kpete - it is the logical step for a malevolent, super-wealthy, power entrenched body of fascist globalists to take: The creation of an oligarchy that is determined to wipe democracy from the face of the planet.

This pretty much sums it up: "As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below."

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." FDR

to Republicans. They point to the Constitution. But I wonder what they ever did to William Shakespeare?