America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's 'Griftopia'

[marmar]

from Rolling Stone:



In the summer of 2009 I got a call from an acquaintance who worked in the Middle East. He was a young American who worked for something called a sovereign wealth fund, a giant state-owned pile of money that swims around the world in search of things to buy.

Sovereign wealth funds, or SWFs, are huge in the Middle East. Most of the bigger oil-producing states have massive SWFs that act as cash repositories (with holdings often kept in dollars) for the revenues generated by, for instance, state-owned oil companies. Unlike the central banks of most Western countries, whose main function is to accumulate reserves in an attempt to stabilize the domestic currency, most SWFs have a mission to invest aggressively and generate huge long-term returns. Imagine the biggest and most aggressive hedge fund on Wall Street, then imagine that that same fund is fifty or sixty times bigger and outside the reach of the SEC or any other major regulatory authority, and you've got a pretty good idea of what an SWF is.

....(snip)....

As it turns out, the Pennsylvania Turnpike deal almost went through, only to be killed by the state legislature, but there were others just like it that did go through, most notably the sale of all the parking meters in Chicago to a consortium that included the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, from the United Arab Emirates.

There were others: A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.

America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia's SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/222206

[Starry Messenger]

1. k & r

[tridim]

2. How many different economies do we have now?

Not including the fake one they set up for normal people to use.

[Junkdrawer]

3. The bloodsuckers descended on the former USSR when it collapsed....

Does America think it's immune?

[EFerrari]

4. K&R

[ThomCat]

5. Really good article.

It reinforces stuff that has been said in other places, but says it louder, and in a place that is likely to get a lot more attention.

Our nation is being sold off to foreign investors, for chump change. We are being sold to the highest bidders. Our metered roads and highways, tourist attractions, parks, and anything else in the US that generates money on a routine basis is being sold to foreign investors, and it is all being sold for the lowest possible price with the promise that they can then drive up the prices to make a profit off of us, because we're suckers.

Poor people in America is becoming the cash cow for rich people everywhere around the world.

The idea that speculating can be an easy weapon to use against the US Economy by the governments of oil producing governments is scary as hell. We may have the biggest military, but what good does it do? If we have to borrow trillions each year because we are already in a spiral of debt, and if we are selling off our country to pay for this year's bills until we have nothing left to sell, then the countries that control our economy can keep destroying our economy until we become a third world country.

If they have any reason to turn us into a third world country, they will. If it profits them to turn us into a third world country, they will.

After all, We profited from bringing down the economies of a lot of other countries. it would be naive to think it couldn't be true in reverse. There is always a profit to be made from any disaster. Even if that disaster is the fall of an empire like the US. :(

Would the world financial institutions, and global corporations have any interest in preventing this? Would they have the power? Or would they let it happen to join in on the profits to be made? I think we all know that it depends on whether or not they think the fall is inevitable, and on how much profit they think can be made.

[PufPuf23]

6. Alas reality. The USA is at risk.

Planned but hubris of American "leaders" did not percieve the potenial blowback.