The Big Takeover
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How
Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
MATT TAIBBI
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."
full: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
