How To Deal With Pirates (American, not Somalian)

[JohnyCanuck]

by Rob Kall

The Wall Street Journal offered an article yesterday on How to Fight pirates. It reported how, in the late 18th century and early 19th Century, Moroccan pirates-- Barbary pirates-- were attacking American ships and kidnapping their crews, holding the crews and the goods on board for ransom. In 1785, the Pasha of Morocco demanded a million bucks, ten percent of the fledgling USA's national budget, for protection. Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson had no alternative. For at least a decade, for lack of a navy and support from other nations to fight back, the US paid those ransoms.

The Wall street journal article goes on to talk about the current Somalian pirate affliction off the coast of Somalia.

But what about the pirates in the USA? I'm talking about the finance company and hedge fund execs who have hijacked our economy and run off with billions in booty, at the cost of tens of millions of citizens' homes and life savings.

These criminals are destroying lives at a much larger scale. And the American people have no champion to rescue them. Bush appointed Hank Paulson, the equivalent of Blackbeard, to suggest the "bailout" which looks more and more like a massive keelhauling of the economy. And Obama has appointed another fellow pirate-- Geithner-- to take the treasury and swing the citizenry by the yardarm.

The fact is, the financial system throughout the world has been taken over by pirates-- rip-off artists who have invented new ways to finagle billions out of the hands of the people and into the hands of the few.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/How-To-Deal-With-Pirates--by-Rob-Kall-081123-323.html

[SpiralHawk]

1. "Avast, ye noisy proles. Shut up and sit down. Smirk." - Commander AWOL & Republicon Krewe

[underpants]

2. That is a very good point

rec'd

[Democrats_win]

3. Article says we need to destroy "their tools of destruction" (FED, WTO and other globalism tools)

"destruction of their tools of destruction-- and that, my friends, includes the Federal Reserve Banks, the WTO and most of the other current globalism tools that have been used to lay waste to democratically established democracies."

[kickysnana]

4. kick n/t

[JohnyCanuck]

5. More scary pirate tales to keep you awake at night.

Paulson's Cascade of Lies

By MICHAEL HUDSON

SNIP

Everything seems to have been unexpected to Mr. Paulson – as if ignorance is a defense. “When I came to Washington in 2006,” he reminisced, “markets were benign.” We were still in Alan Greenspan’s idea that inflating asset prices on credit constitutes “wealth creation.” At that time I myself was only one of many who warned that the real estate market had come to rest on a foundation of junk mortgage lending. Every banker with whom I spoke at the time knew this. But most were still seeking to make hay while the making was good, and it was still quite good – for the banks, that is. Matters were not benign for the increasingly debt-ridden U.S. economy, but at least they were rosy for Wall Street. Bank executives were paying themselves enormous salaries and even larger stock options. Meanwhile, the smarter money managers were beginning to shift their funds out of the U.S. economy in a wave of capital flight of a magnitude not seen since Russia in the mid-1990s.

Acting as if all this could not have been foreseen, Mr. Paulson assured his mistake-friendly audience, “There was no playbook for responding to a once or twice in a hundred year event.” A kind of random historical earthquake seems to have been at work, a financial San Andreas fault. Mr. Paulson then trivialized this, however, with the euphemism “housing correction.”

The key is, what is to be corrected? Is it not the financial market itself?

Mr. Paulson then set about dissembling the character of the U.S. and global financial system. “Our financial system,” he claimed, “is built on the hard work of our citizens; it is built on the savings of our citizens.”

This is where he seeks to spread the disinformation about the explosion of debt that now burdens the U.S. economy, which is the result of autonomous credit-creation by the commercial banking system and has nothing to do with the savings habits of “our citizens”. The basic financial principle of modern banking is that “loans create deposits.” The bank loan comes first – then the deposit or “saving.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson11212008.html