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hinking about the Dem's TV ad which does its best to shoot down Mitt Romney as an inconsistent flip flopping idiot with his defense of TARP brings me to this observation about the entire enterprise of the hideously corrupt Capitalism we now see before us. So yes, if you happen to be an executive at Goldman Sachs you are, in the words of Ayn Rand, your goddess of wisdom, a corrupt mediocrity. My first thought is that in order for this bloated form of Capitalism to go at all, huge amounts of money must be given by Congress to the largest corporations. What Mother Jones calls the Hog Trough. And these constant infusions of cash must be increasingly larger and more frequent. So the last time it was $700-800 billion, not counting the 7.77 Trillion which the Federal Reserve gave out under the table. Whatever outcry of Tea Partiers there was at $700 billion --- now imagine the pissing and moaning at the news that the total sum was unimaginably bigger. So now those institutions have more or less repaid the loans, but what about the next crisis. And be not fooled.
- There will be another crisis.
- Immanently.
- Much bigger and more terrible than the last one.
What capitalists need to do is actually read Karl Marx and see how Marx called the shots. How he predicted with every little twist and turn of Capitalism. And Marx was writing back in the mid-19th Century. His predictions are almost eery in their accuracy. Capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries will inevitably fail and fail with increasing frequency. And Marx was not even talking about the effects of the overweening greed of capitalists, which now we can see so plainly. Banks which once offered cheap dinner plates and watches if you would just please open an account with them have now changed their tune to
"GIVE ME YOUR MONEY! PUNK!"
And they are now in the business of real estate and have made it their business to evict each and every person from their home and they don't seem to care whether they do this legally or ill. In fact it seems that several attorneys general will be taking several banks to court now.
But they can't stop what the banks have done with their appalling policies of fraudulent foreclosures. The problem is that the banks understand --- as the American public does not--- that money is about to have considerably less buying power than it does now, which is a way of saying that it will soon be worthless as the Deutshmark was in the 30s in Germany.
Lotte Lenya told the story of how she was once paid one million marks for her performance. She said she wanted to keep the check as a reminder of how she was worth so much.
So given that the dollar is about to collapse through the floor, banksters are trading worthless dollars for houses. Houses are always going to be worth something. So what if the real estate bubble has burst sinking prices and value below the horizon, so that many homes are now, as is said, underwater. The banks simply warehouse the properties until the prices of real estate come back and then they sell them for the inflated value.
Just doing business.
heh heh...
It would be nice to think that this corruption is limited to capitalism. But it isn't. The fault is in the human beings who work it. Any and all systems are inherently good in the beginning and bad toward the end. Until, like capitalism, it has become so intolerably corrupt that it either collapses of its own weight or something like the 99% Occupy Movement arises. Socialism and Communism are as vulnerable to mediocrity and Oligarchical class-ism as capitalism.
As I recall that was the favorite explanation of the Mafia whenever they whacked somebody. Nothin' personal youse understand. Just doin' business. Meanwhile your favorite uncle lies at the bottom of the Hudson River wearing cement shoes.
So the banks are the new Mafia.
Just doing business.
As Gautama Buddha said, the key is moderation in all things. Given the current condition of human kind, and the fact that greed and gluttony really are deadly sins, no system is going to come along and solve all our problems. So the answer to it all, as far as I can tell, is a matter, finally, of human decency.■
