This interview is one of the true benchmarks of the current economic collapse of America. William K. Black pulls no punches. He names names and institutions, gives dates and outlines the buildup to the collapse. Black tells us who exactly was responsible--- even as the Republican Party is now trying to smoothe things over and re-set the trap to lure the foolish back to their disastrous ideas.
Black is one of those highly intelligent watchers of the economic scene who cannot help telling everybody what is actually going on, rather than helping with the coverup. Politicians and bankers hate him. Charles Keating, for example, remember him? The main man of the Keating Five, the chief perpetrators of the Savings and Loan debacle, hates Black so bad he sent out a now famous memo demanding that somebody Kill Him!
What many are now calling the Greatest Depression was caused by the intentional super-fraudulent-scams on the part of the biggest banks, all of whom are simply waiting out public anger. Citibank, Bank of America, as well as AIG, to name a few. Your local banker may not be the very guy who shafted you, but he belongs to a banking system which had a swell time hosting meetings at some overpriced resorts while you lost your retirement and/or your home and the college fund for your children and grandchildren, evaporated. If you are smart you will join the angry Americans marching on the banks to get their money back. The politicians and the banksters know that the average American's political memory is very short, and now that the American tax payer has handed over everything they own, and that their children and grand-children own, the banks will just take some nice expensive holidays at the expensive resorts which are never written about in the travel magazines, while they wait for tempers to cool so they can do it all over again.
These guys need to go to jail. And I use the word NEED, purposely.
So without further ado, have a look at this:
And after you have fully grocked the implications of the above interview, have a gander at this clip, from the movie Network, by Paddy Chayevsky. 1976.
And old Ned Beatty is right on every point. We have now lived through enough economic turmoil and suffering to see clearly that Paddy Chayevsky was a hundred percent prescient. Beatty's speech could have been delivered yesterday or tomorrow.
And how did this treasonous situation come to be? Well, through DE-REGULATION. And for that we can thank Bill Clinton, Phil Gramm and John.
But it is almost not worth the time it takes to figure it out. The Banksters and Corporations have already won. They have bought off all peaceful means of dissent. They own the main stream media, print and electronic, the judges, from the Supreme Court on down, the politicians, and now, most likely, the president and his entire staff.
And if anybody shows up who looks like they might have enough moxie to upset the corporate apple cart, they just buy them off, too.
Karl Marx's take on history, as the exploitation of the weak by the strong; the wealthy or powerful, was a stunning insight. Thinking which strays beyond the fence of acceptable thought will perforce bring one face to face with fresh realities. Realities as rich and compelling as the usual, worn out modes of thought.
Does this mean that the only method of dismantling the dog-eat-dog end-game corporate system of crony capitalism ushered in by the indutrial era and perverted by the boomer generation. So that what the corporations are really doing is attempting to dumb down the public educational system, to produce a world rather like that envisioned by Jules Verne in his The Time Machine where the brutal Morlocks rule a timid and frightened husk of what is left of humanity.
The only way out of that scenario is to storm the corporate gates. But, say we did violently overthrow this system. Isaiah Berlin, the Cambridge scholar and intellectual, in his definition of the two kinds of Freedom, points out that history shows that violent revolution always leads to the same repression and tyranny it sought to destroy.
Either way the house must be burned to the ground and a new one built. And that will take a hundred years.
On the other hand, as Marx pointed out: "Give them enough rope and they will hang themselves." We have now begun to see the truth of that.
See The Trap, a BBC documentery about fifteen years ago. It is available on Google. And also has been made available in annoyingly short ten minute segments on Youtube.
