A full year into the Obama presidency, this crisis has THE BLOODY THUMB-PRINTS of President Obama and his entire "economics" team - RAHM EMANUEL, Lawrence Summers, TIM GEITHNER, BEN BERNANKE, and the entire Rubinite/Goddamn-Sachs Whitehouse - all over it - an elderly man, being EVICTED into ice and snow covered streets in the dead of winter.
Don't forget: EVERY EVICTION, and EVERY mortgage foreclosure based on MEDICAL BANKRUPTCIES as well, CRUSHES the value of homes in a neighborhood where that foreclosure sale brings down neighboring home values. This relentless downward spiral, not only of home values, but of the SAVINGS that people have invested in their homes (by paying their mortgages over the years), has the TACIT APPROVAL of the "change we can NOT believe in" President Obama.
And here's another dismal record of the Obama White House:
Some 2+ years into the Bush/Obama Recession, according to those on Wall Street PULLING IN RECORD "bonuses,"
(note the New York Times mealy-mouthed headline for a story that has 800+ links in current news headlines, "Wall Street Bonuses SAID to Rise" - the Times, as ever, WHITEWASHING economic royalism, which is to say American financial parasitism) - ...THERE IS NO "eviction and foreclosure crisis" in America - THEY, the Wall Street banksters & fat cats, are doing GREAT!
A closer look at some of those 800+ news stories and headlines reveals more of the grim truth: An NPR story by Jacob Goldstein explains < The Wide Gulf Between Wall Street and Commercial Banks... The number of BANKS In FINANCIAL TROUBLE is at a 17-year high, according to the feds. Lending is way down. But WALL St. FIRMS are DOING GREAT, BONUSES are WAY UP. >
In another NPR story, Frank James mentions JP Morgan-Chase as among the companies handing out huge bonuses this year, despite TAXPAYERS having borne the brunt of the Bear Stearns, and & Lehman Bros. bankruptcies last year; without which "BAILOUTS" Wall Street's vaunted stock-prices and market manipulations would still be in the sewer.
And over at Business-Standard.com they explain that not only did "bonuses" shoot up by 17% for end-of-year 2009, but so too did pay - "compensation" - rise between 27% and 30% at JP Morgan-Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other big banks.
Clearly, given that these "mega-bank" firms would BE IN THE TOILET but for TRILLIONS of dollars of GOVERNMENT SOCIALIZED, TAXPAYER EXTORTED bailouts; and given that the COMMERCIAL (real, household, consumer banking; i.e. "the reality based" portion of banking & finance) banks are IN TROUBLE this year, we can see that the BIG Wall Street firms are BEING REWARDED for DISMANTLING America's economy.
This is ECONOMIC ROYALISM.
Just as English lords, landlords, bankers, and nobles used English armies to FORCIBLY EXPEL millions of English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, and Cornish families from their homes during the "ENCLOSURE" era in the British isles, so landlords could CONCENTRATE WEALTH & POWER at the expense of those English so called "free men" populations; so too today is the U.S. government IN THE POCKET of those ECONOMIC ROYALISTS who CARE NOT if Americans are FORECLOSED on their mortgages; DENIED unemployment insurance; FIRED from their jobs, DENIED medical coverage (so called "health" insurance), and EVICTED FROM THEIR HOMES in the dead of winter.
American schools and textbooks (America's school textbooks now dominated, if not controlled, by Reactionary Right-Wing Texas "conservatives" whose large volume book purchases force textbook publishers to comply with Texas' reactionary ideology ) have long WHITEWASHED the true horrors and impact of the "ENCLOSURE" era of British history.
Most of us are familiar with that era as the "Dickensian" era, where orphans (such as Oliver Twist) or other children (such as Tiny Tim) in Charles Dickens' novels are forced to endure brutal living conditions in squalid English factory cities.
But the real horrors of the British "Enclosures" era are revealed in the Irish "GREAT FAMINE" when the Irish potato crop failed, leading directly to over a MILLION KILLED of famine & famine related diseases, 1845 to 1852 ... AS British lords, landlords, bankers and nobles EXPORTED GRAIN from Ireland's PRODUCTIVE ESTATES, AT THE VERY HEIGHT OF THE FAMINE!
America's intellectual curiousity is so suppressed by the Texas/Deep South ANTI-INTELLECTUAL fervor; our "national narrative" is now so dumbed-down and suppressed by corporate America's "consumerism uber alles" ideology, that few Americans even bother to ask about the Irish famine, "Why was it that the Irish had become SO DEPENDENT ON POTATOES by 1845... a crop that DIDN'T EVEN EXIST in Europe, until Columbus returned from his voyages to 'The New World' in 1492?" that is, a crop upon which Irish and British populations throughout most of their history were never dependent on.
The answer to this question is that Anglo-phile American "conservatives" tend to WHITEWASH Britain's MURDEROUS royalist & imperial tendencies, whether Queen Victoria's army, navy, merchants, and bankers FORCING CHINA TO IMPORT OPIUM during the "Opium wars," or using INDIA SLAVE LABOR to produce that opium, or STARVING MILLIONS of Irish men, women, and children in an attempt to "Ethnically cleanse" Northern Ireland, if not the entire isle, of Catholic Irish.
Even the British occupation horrors of the American revolution tend to be whitewashed by America's Anglo-phile "establishment' bureaucrats & present day autocrats; for example, the British army locking thousands of captured American patriot soldiers and citizens up in DEATH SHIPS, so called "prison hulks" during the American revolution, historians credit the prison hulks anchored in New York on the Hudson River, alone, with killing over 10,000 American victims.
(Future American President Andrew Jackson was a victim and survivor of those British death ships in the Carolinas; he and his two older, captured American Patriot soldier brothers were held in the derelict hulks, until their mother, volunteering as a nurse to the dying prisoners on the hulks, eventually won their parole. On their homeward treck to Western North Carolina, Jackson's mother and two brothers died of typhoid or dysentary or other diseases they had picked up in the disease ridden ships. Jackson would become a true Revolutionary orphan, and virulent, lifelong Anglo-phobe, which explains his relentless determination to crush the vastly superior English armies during the Battle of New Orleans over thirty years later, in 1814.)
Today, these ROYALIST, AUTOCRATIC, "let the peons STARVE" tendencies of America's self-styled financial elites are every bit as ruthless, predatory, and murderous (see Iraq war) as the English lords & bankers during the Enclosures & Great Irish famine (and "Opium war" to WRECK China's economy) eras were.
Over at Huffington Post, former astronaut, and the 2nd man to step on the moon, lunar module commander Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin complains that FORTY YEARS after America's first successful moon landing mission, America is coming up to a period where we will have NO MANNED SPACE PROGRAM in our own country!
Besides America NOT having a HIGH SPEED RAIL line between Washington and New York - a transportation corridor whose air corridor is hazardously overcrowded - can you ask for a better illustration of the PREDATORY, PARASITIC, DESTRUCTIVE, EXTORTIONATE nature of America's Goddamn-Sachs, JP Morgan-Chase, Citi-group, and Morgan-Stanley "bankers" and the hired hand economists (Greenspan, Bernanke, Geithner, etc.) they push Democrats & Republicans alike to place in oversight positions over the financial markets, so as to hand TWENTY+ TRILLION DOLLARS of TAXPAYER EXTORTED "bailouts" loot, to those same ANTI-AMERICAN "multi-national" predatory financier economic royalists?
Well, yes, we do have other classic illustrations of the PREDATORY, PARASITIC, DESTRUCTIVE nature of America's Big Finance royalists & Economic Hit Men predators and their appalling, paid-professinal-liars, whitewashers & hucksters at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Time, Newsweek, Fox 'news" and other American corporate "news' media outlets: the above illustrated EVICTION CRISIS, and the HEALTH CARE CRISIS, both continue to WRECK the economy even for those Americans who are still above water on their home mortgages, or still manage to have health care.
BOTH of the above - FORECLOSURE crisis and HEALTH CARE crisis - which are a result of the SUCCESSFUL efforts of bloodthirsty ANTI-AMERICAN financial PROFITEERS, to CORNER ENTIRE SECTORS of America's economy for their own INSANE GREED and bloothirsty power lust.
Economics & Finance Professor Michael Hudson, Feb. 2010:
The PARASITIC nature of Wall Street finance, "President Obama's _REPUBLICAN_ CLASS-WAR PRESIDENCY" - possibly the most informative hour in American news so far this decade.
(audio - clink link, then "play" button) http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/58336
FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of America's economic crisis and crisis level social issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
