Shock doctrine in action
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The improvisational nature of their effort has turned President Bush and Congressional Democrats into virtual bystanders, sometimes uncertain about what comes next and left to wonder about the new power dynamics in the capital. Seemingly every time lawmakers tried to get a handle on what was happening and what role they might play with elections around the corner, Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke would show up again on Capitol Hill for another evening meeting with another surprise development.
"Seemingly"? Really. Does anyone believe this is a coincidence?
I don't. As in any crime, the question to ask is cui bono... And it's not me or anyone I know.
This is how shock doctrine policies get imposed: A constant series of crises, driven by financial actors, that keeps all the other players off balance, and that ends in what finance wants, finance gets. As in $800 billion to play with, no social programs, unfettered power, and so on and so forth.
UPDATE Via Crooks & Liars:
"They let things go to shit so they and their friends can come in and make money on it."
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Comments
sho'nuf
Call me an ignorant skeptic or a tinfoil hat wearer (or maybe I just read Cannonfire too late at night), but there is always something about the super duper trifectas that happen under the Bush/Cheney watch somehow managing to transfer staggering sums out of the U.S. Treasury, that cause me to go...sho'nuf.
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Klein let Sulliven get away with blaming homeowners
for the current crisis. He's claiming that people who borrowed more than they could afford are the problem and that the bail out is the government socializing things. Neither holds up, and she didn't call him on it.
The problem is not so much that people are defaulting on mortgages, but that the mortgage debt was used creatively and repackaged and leveraged and now instead of some people defaulting we have big companies holding lots of bad debt that they don't even know the value of.
And the bail out isn't taking over the companies that are in trouble, just their bad debt. So how is that socializing them?
Two solutions
Short term and medium term.