By Bernard Jenkins
Over the past four decades, like some invisible, odorless, tasteless, poison gas the vultures of corporate capitalism and el-Qaeda of Wall Street have created a massive global criminal enterprise that has grown and metastasized into a gigantic malignant tumor smack in the heart of the world.
With the willing and eager support of venal and greedy politicians, and a crazed cheering section of stupid, fat, ill-informed, frightened, selfish useful idiots, this gang of thieves have plundered, trickerated, lied, cheated, war mongered, profiteered and murdered their way to the top of the heap. Long self-caricatured as "The Masters of the Universe", they make the Mafia seem quaint by comparison.
Since World War II, we were sold the bill of goods that the Red Menace, the" Evil Empire" was out to rule the world. As if. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, that bogeyman was finally exposed as the rotted, busted out, fourth-world thugocracy and failed enterprise that it always was.
Under cover of the euphoria of that event, what had begun some years earlier as a Shock Doctrine test run with the military overthrow of the elected government of Chile (at the time a prosperous, democratic South American country) and the subsequent looting and pillaging of the country's assets by the corporate likes of ITT supported by the cloak-and-dagger arm of the Nixon administration and the seductive song of Milton Friedman/Univ. of Chicago Boys economic alchemy, the gravy train of the greedy really gathered steam.
Maggie Thatcher, the iron maiden of vulture capitalism had already begun to privatize and sell off whatever she could of Britain's government assets (practically selling British Rail tracks by the foot to different private companies). The wealth of Argentina and South Africa was devoured by these corporate hyenas. Even the corpse of the Soviet Union was sold off bit by bit for chump change to KGB cronies, Red Square knock-off blue jean salesmen and pimps, who suddenly became billionaires and bought up the south of France. Even in Egypt, a country so poor it seemed to have nothing to steal, the friends and relatives of the pharaoh Mubarak practically gave away the state owned banks (for much "baksheesh") to the European bankers, who proceeded to rob them blind, while the same clique of Egyptian political fraudsters took possession of most of the Egyptian state industries (such as they were) and grew richer than rich while the poor Egyptian people grew poorer than poor.
During the mid-to-late 1990's with no obvious global villain to frighten the population into submission, the Wall Street-infiltrated Clinton Administration urged on by the GOP vampires in Congress pushed through a series of bank robber liberation bills that essentially took the cops off the Wall Street beat, thus enabling the big bankers to rob their own banks and everyone else with impunity.
After the 9/11 sneak attack, with the world now scared witless by the West's "War on Terror" and its incessant bleating that "The wolf is coming!! The wolf is coming!!" the stage was set for the grand finale. Bringing down America's democracy and stealing ALL the money.
But first the dress rehearsal: the Bush/Cheney gang's mendacious and obscene Iraq Shock and Awe robbery, masquerading as a war against terrorism and WMDs, that left that oil-rich but hapless country totally broken and ripe for plundering and war profiteering. Billions (going on trillions) of our tax dollars simply vanished into thin air or Cayman Islands and Dubai bank accounts of no-bid corporate contractors, over paid for work they never did, and their well "baksheeshed" local Iraqi fixers and crooks. The entire busted country was declared "privatized". Mission accomplished!
Then on Friday September 19, 2008 (a date that should live in infamy as 9/19) Treasury Secretary (and ex-Goldman Sachs capo) Hank Paulson, waving 3 pages of scribbling, ran down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol screaming "The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!! I need $750 billion by yesterday or the world as we know it will come to an end!!" The Final Solution to democracy in America was under way.
It seems the Wall Street alchemists and Rumplestilskins for almost a decade had been spinning straw into fool's gold. Concocting $750 trillion-worth of worthless toxic securities, these voracious bankers and their bellowing bond trader and hedge fund cohorts proceeded to hustle this poison 'round the world to the greedy, the gullible and the foolish alike and those who should have known better but didn't. El-Qaeda of Wall Street thought they had invented the perpetual motion money machine worth 10 times more than all the money in the world combined and still counting. Until the bubble burst.
As the rigged wheel that is the stock market crashed, the inflated housing market sunk like a rock in a well and investors and real people were being financially wiped out overnight, the biggest bankster gangsters, their pockets bulging with ill-gotten bonuses, began crying the blues, while calling in all the IOUs of the politicians they had purchased during the fat years.
That chump change to politicians bought cheap proved well spent.
The Bush-Obama pantomime horse came galloping to the rescue. Before you could say "This is a stickup!! Show me the money!!" $17 trillion tax payer dollars were scooped out of the US Treasury and rewarded to the villains who broke their own banks and crashed the world in the first place.
Today, two years along, this corporate/Wall Street cabal is in full cannibal mode. The country is being eaten alive. The 5 corporate Stooges on the Supreme Court have gone rogue. The Constitution is being shredded. The middle class is being pauperized. The out of work class already is. And Goebbels-sized lies bombard our senses 24/7 from cabal-owned media and propaganda delivery devices.
Public schools and their teachers are being branded public enemies. Millionaires, billionaires and gazillionaires, who don't pay a penny in taxes, are still being rewarded by their government enablers and flunkies with free money from the average Americans who pay theirs. Health insurance and Medicare are being deformed not reformed. Social Security and pensions are being seriously threatened if not gutted and stolen outright by the cabal and its cronies. Public services like libraries and parks are being closed. Fire fighters, cops, hospital helpers, bus drivers and even garbage collectors and street sweepers are being sacked and/or deprived of their labor rights and benefits. Even municipal parking meters are being sold off to corporate crooks and liars and their street lights going dark at night because of all the money being stolen out of community treasuries by the same corporate cannibals who drove them into debt.
The GOP/Tea Bagger governors of states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Florida, Nevada and Texas have gone totally outlaw, lying, bullying and conniving with their offstage puppet masters to twist and bend and break the laws to achieve all their dreams of avarice and privatization before the American people know what hit them.
This is a radical full-bore 360-degree assault on America never experienced before on such a scale. If it is successful, the greedy, crooked, immoral few, who have ALL the money will completely defeat, impoverish, control and even enslave the rest of the people, who have all the votes. That will be the kiss of death for America's democracy.
Which side are you on?
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