The Inside Job

Recently watched the documentary "The Inside Job", a chillingly effective and analytical look at the causes of the Financial Crisis. It is narrated by Matt Damon, who also acts as interviewer to those people of influence who were happy enough (or foolish enough) to want to be interviewed.

"The Inside Job" sets out in clear details the root causes for the Financial Crisis, and lays out in no uncertain terms essentially how amoral, all-powerful and corrupt the financial sector that controls the world's money truly is.
For those who think that to say "the banks and money men run everything" is a statement of a conspiracy-theorist, watching this film will show you how sadly correct much of that paranoia really is based on fact.

The Financial Crisis was not an accident. It was not inevitable.

It happened because thirty years ago the governments of the Anglo-Saxon world (Ronald Reagan in particular), threw away the rules that had protected the banking industry from carrying out the same amoral and reckless behaviour that had caused the Great Depression.
It happened because Ronald Reagan was a willing disciple to the views the the banking sector, who felt they had been constrained for too long by those same rules that had protected the economy from the irresponsibility of the banks.
In 1979, for example, the big banks of the USA (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs etc.) had a modest number of staff, on a modest wage. There was the example of one broker who actually had two jobs in order to make a suitable income for his wife and children. Due to the throwing out of the rules restricted the banks, ten years later that same broker would be a millionaire. Those banks now have a staff many times higher than they had thirty years ago.

But even that deregulation did not mean that banks could not be regulated in other ways. In the financial industry, there are what are called Ratings Agencies: these give values to the assets that banks have when trading. Attempts to regulate the banks in other ways during the Clinton administration fell on deaf ears, and by that point the banks had long had sufficient clout to arm-wrestle the Department of the Treasury to make it effectively a huge lobby for the banking sector.
The Ratings Agencies are a valuable tool to let other banks know how healthy the assets of other banks are. But by the start of the 21st century, banks were already paying bonuses to those employees in the Ratings Agencies who would give those banks the highest ratings. In other words, corruption and bribery.

These "bonuses" would soon come back to haunt the Ratings Agencies. Because by this point the ever expanding economy was being fuelled by speculation and a property bubble creating by those same all-powerful, un-regulated banks. Furthermore, due to the Ratings Agencies and deregulation, those banks could, by 2007, take out loans that were tens of times higher than the entire bank's actual value - in some cases, loans worth up to 30 times the bank's actual assets.

This massive overlending (called "leverage" in banker's jargon) was made possible by offering, for example, mortgages to those who weren't actually able to afford them. Because of the inherent risk of offering loans to such clients, the interest rates were higher. But the banks, blindly ignoring the obvious risks, saw only the high interest rates, so these types of "risky" but highly profitable loans because the norm in many cases.

The final thing to remember, piling risk upon risk, was that the banks were able to divide all these "risky" loans into one big bundle with other, safer, loans. This bundle was then divided into many segments, and each segment swapped with other investment banks for financial gain. The "reasoning" was that dividing up the "risky" loans with the safe loans, it would make it safer for everyone concerned. But if it came to a time when anyone wanted to know who held the "risky" loans, no-one would have any idea where they were. Perfect, eh?

So when the whole house of cards finally came crashing down in the autumn of 2008, all the major banks became effectively bankrupt due to their own recklessness and stupidity, as well as the immorality of the corrupt system of Ratings Agencies.

The goverments balied them out; they had to in order to prevent another Great Depression. The fact that the leading banks of the financial world, who were so all-powerful, could be so financially idiotic as to not understand that they had created a huge confidence trick on each other and the rest of the world, is breathtaking.

So you would think that the governments would see that deregulation doesn't work.

Some governments thought that; fewer of them actually did anything that would remotely prevent it from happening again.

The reason was simple: the leading governments of the world were getting their advice from the leading financial experts of the world. The leading financial experts were trained in the same theories that had created the mess; furthermore, many of them were bring paid by the same banks that had created the mess, to give their "advice" to the governments of the world.

The result is that the leading banks of the world, except for the brief period when they thought they would go bankrupt in September 2008, were not in favour of deregulation. And the problem wasn't just that the governments' advice was coming from academics who were already financially tied to those same banks.

The other problem was that, in the past thirty years since deregulation, the banks had not only become much bigger; they had also become far fewer in number. In other words, the banking sector was a kind of financial oligarchy. In the USA, there were effectively only four major banks in the country; others had either gone bankrupt or been bought out by others since 2008.
That was what created the term "Too Big To Fail". This helped the banks play on governments' fear of causing another, even deeper, crisis, and left the governments' mute in the face of the banks' demands for financial protection.

So what should have been a golden opportunity for goverment to right the wrongs of deregulation thirty years ago, turned into the banks' golden opportunity to cement their financial power over government. The banks did the crime; the government paid for the time. And now all government taxpayers are funding that "bail-out", through cuts to government services and tax rises. A bail-out, indeed: the biggest in history.

And what lesson have the banks learned from this disaster of their own making? That we can do no wrong. We are Gods.

I wonder what Ayn Rand would have thought of this.

The Devil Votes Republican

The popularity of the Republican is a true work of art. It is a political organisation whose continual success and re-invention can only be explained through the kind of cunning that Satan himself would be proud of.

First of all, a brief history.
Created around the time of the Civil War, the first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln (who has been admired by many ever since). Although he was assassinated, the party went on to dominate US politics for the rest of the 19th century, being in power almost continually throughout the Gilded Age, all the way up to the Great Depression (excepting Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland). Its low point was the twenty-year absence from power while FDR and Truman ruled the roost at the White House.
The modern Republican Party came about through the efforts of Ronald Reagan (for Eisenhower and the Nixon-Ford administration ran the country as moderates in the traditional Republican mould). Since the time of Reagan, the GOP has morphed into something else; an altogether more fearsome creature.

What does the Republican Party stand for?
A good question, considering its continual success and re-invention. First of all, who votes for them, and why?

A short answer could be average God-fearing, socially-conservative patriots, who fear the government, want to pay low taxes, have the right to earn their money and defend the "average guy on the street", be fiscally responsible, and to be defended against foreign enemies. In other words, traditional Protestant values that have existed in the American psyche since Washington´s day.

The beauty of the Republican Party is that they have successfully been able to persuade people that the country´s best interests are best served with them, and been able to persuade them that this is still true even when faced with clear facts that show them the opposite.

"The country´s best interests" though, depends on how you define them. Where most people might see "the country´s best interests" as meaning "the people´s best interests", the Republican Party sees this as meaning "the best interests of those who own the most in the country".

Foreign policy is an instrument of trying to expand the commercial interests of its funders. This does not equate to the same thing as the people´s interests, as the companies that fund the GOP simply want to expand abroad; if that means closing a factory in Michigan to relocate abroad, then great, as money knows no borders. In this logic, there is no such thing as the "national interest"; as these companies own or buy influence over the nation´s assets, these companies are the "national interest". Patriotism is nothing more than a

The Republican Party´s Foreign policy is, in fact, it´s only real "policy".
What stands for "Domestic policy" is nothing more than another instrument to make the conditions best for those who control the most; deregulation of banking (as first pushed by Merril Lynch´s Don Regan, who acted as Ronald Reagan´s Treasury Secretary and later Chief of Staff) is essential to this function. As are all forms of deregulation. For the companies with the most can only flourish the most if there are no rules holding them back.

"The government does best when it does the least" - this is the Republican slogan. A beautiful logical absurdity: by definition government exists because there is an absence of something. If government exists only to destroy then government by definition is no real government at all. In its place there is a vacuum; anarchy.
The Republican Party seems to want to create a form of anarchy whereby the American people simply pay taxes to fund the "defence of the nation" (meaning "commercial expansion of the elite´s foreign interests"). Taken to its logical conclusion, domestic policy would no longer exist: the government has outsourced all its domestic operations so that it no longer needs to directly spend money on any of its citizens. The people fend for themselves while the "government" uses its taxes to expand its foreign operations. And as the government´s interests expand abroad, this necessarily leads to a further degradation of the conditions at home.

There is a word for this. It´s called tyranny.

This is the Republican dream. To allow this dream to become a reality, vote Republican. Vote Satan