02.24.11

The Big Takeover

Posted in you've got mail at 12:43 pm by nemo

The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution
The global economic crisis isn’t about money — it’s about power.
March 23, 2009
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.”Liddy
made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick
from being left out in someone else’s financial weather. He conveniently
forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically
scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the
causes of its “pneumonia” was making colossal, world-sinking $500
billion bets with money it didn’t have, in a toxic and completely
unregulated derivatives market.

The rest of this article is at

http://www.alternet.org/economy/132859/the_big_takeover:_how_wall_street_insiders_are_using_the_bailout_to_stage_a_revolution/

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