RANT: WANTED: Financial Terrorists

This post has been boiling inside me like a volcano for literally months now. You'll soon see why...

Let me say it here, loud and strong: This ongoing global financial crisis has nothing to do with "governments overspending" (the accusations hurled at Greece) or "governments being irresponsible with their debt" (again, the wretched Greece - and ditto at Spain, Portugal and Italy) or "public finances that are too generous and over-exploited by undeserving recipients" (the type of rhetoric coming out of the now-Tory UK) or any other such deceptive doublespeak.

These are just political fluff balls and psychological teargas used by (useless, bought out, corrupt, stupid - take your pick) politicians and economists on a confused and bewildered public. Because folks, the only reason nearly every economy now in 'crisis' with its public finances is in the depths of despair and now swallowing the 'austerity pill' en masse is because PUBLIC MONEY WAS SPENT TO BAIL OUT PRIVATELY OWNED BANKS AND FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS!!!

Starting with the United States last year, and ever since, country after country has been bailing out banks and financial institutions with literally trillions of dollars in PUBLIC MONEY in the demented hope that by giving all this money to these banks and financial terrorists they would somehow start re-lending money to people and get economies circulating money again and recovering.

The very banks and financial institutions that are privately held, unelected and not accountable to the very public whose money has been given over to these corporate swine on a silver platter. Their only concern are their top management and executives making a killing, along with a few rogue traders and other despicable insiders, and perhaps their shareholders - a crowd of people in this context I dub the 'Three Monkeys Crowd' (you know - the monkeys that saw nothing, say nothing and hear nothing).

The very banks and financials institutions that GOT US INTO THIS WHOLE BLOODY MESS WITH THEIR RECKLESS LENDING, BREATHTAKINGLY RECKLESS RISK-TAKING & ASTOUNDING RATES OF LEVERAGED DEBT!!!

And then people wonder why the hell people like me are so bloody angry!!!

And what's happened with all that bail-out money handed over to these undeserving financial terrorists?
Did they open the taps and lend money to the public? NO.
Did they inject new life into economies with all their new money, i.e. public money paid to them for their own reckless and economically suicidal decisions? NO. 
Did nearly all of them still go out and pay their top executives bonuses at the end of 2009 and already this year, even though they were technically insolvent and were using public money to pay these gigantic bonuses to the very financial bosses who got us all into this mess in the first place? YES, BUT OF COURSE - HOW DARE YOU ASK!

These financial bastards must be laughing themselves sick at how they pulled off what is probably the biggest financial con job of the modern era.

So, now governments like Greece, Spain, the UK and many others are scrambling around with all this public debt due to these ginormous payouts to banks. All because they chose to 'save' these reckless financial terrorist organizations masquerading as 'bona fide' going concerns, rather than telling them that the party is OVER, allowing most of these banks to collapse - kaput. After all, doesn't classical capitalism tell us that when a business is no longer viable it should not be allowed to survive?

But, of course, most of these banks and financial institutions have become 'too big to fail'. Again, how the hell is that stupendous logic reconciled with true free market capitalism?

Adam Smith is rolling in his grave.

This is not free, open market capitalism. This is globalized casino capitalism, whereby reckless and frankly dangerous banks and financial institutions now have the power to bring entire economies to their knees because of their own outrageous risk-taking and market manipulating.

 Or, at the very least, they should have chopped up these financial behemoths into smaller, less reckless and HEAVILY REGULATED banks - oh, and fired every bloody conniving or useless financial terrorist (aka senior executives and top brass) in every one of these failed enterprises. And named and shamed every one of them for the financial terrorists that they have been.

They subvert national economies. They wreck national stock markets and currencies. They destabilize the entire planet. These are financial terrorists.

Yet they continue to thrive, like the devious well-heeled cockroaches that they are. Swanning around in their huge limousines, guzzling down haute cuisine and swilling expensive drink at chichi restaurants, living in their swanky (multiple) homes and even having the gall to appear in the media as 'financial pundits' or 'gurus'.

Uh huh.

What makes these men and women in the financial world who have accepted public money for their own reckless, dangerous acts and threaten to destroy countries' economies any less terrorists than the likes of al-Qaeda? Is it because they wear designer suits and expensive watches? Is it because they obtained their MBAs at prestigious universities? Is it because they look 'more like us' than those crazies brandishing AK-47s and suicide bomb vests?

They're not like the rest of us - at all. They live in a stratosphere of disgusting wealth acquisition and inordinate economic power. They are dangerous. They are a threat. They too are the enemy.

And countries are left broke and unable (or unwilling?) to properly control this plague of arrogant, financial terrorists in our midst. Economies shrink, people lose work and homes and dignity, and these entities that 'simply could not fail' continue to fail all of us again and again and again.

My anger - like so many others in Greece and Spain and Romania and Iceland and countless other countries - knows no bounds.

Do you get my point?

RANT: Athens is Burning

Athens is burning. Protesters are going out into the streets of the capital in their thousands to demontsrate their outright anger at the proposed austerity cuts by the Greek government. Petrol bombs have gone off in the Greek capital and three people have died when a petrol bom was thrown inside a bank in the downtown area. How totally tragic.

The Greek people are showing just how much anger they have at the news that these austerity measures are going to include massive cuts to public worker pay, cuts in health and education spending, and many other public spending cuts. I was stunned yesterday to learn that Greek public school teachers have been told that their monthly salaries will be slashed to just 540 Euros - yes, a month. 540 Euros a month?! Who the hell can live on that in a modern European country?

And who do we to thank for all of this? Three little (ghastly) letters - IMF.

The International Mafia Fund has insisted that the multi-billion euro loan it is giving Greece is absolutely contingent on massive public spending cuts by the Greek government. No surprises there at all - this has been the modus operandi sine qua non for this legal Mafiosi financial cartel run out of Washington D.C. for years now. It's blandly referred to as 'structural adjustment' of a national economy. Typical unthreatening econospeak. It's nothing less than the rape, pillage and eventual evisceration of a nation's social welfare systems, social protections and public spending.

Goodbye public health, public education, the protection of workers' and labour rights. Hello privatization, slashed public spending and the whoring of your economy to the sharks that are international investors and banking. That's what you get when you allow the predator, the financial vampire that is the IMF into your country's finances.

Guatemala has been there. Argentina has been there. Countless other countries, nearly all in the developing world, have been there in one way or another since the 1970s. Now it's the turn of Greece.

The poor Greeks. This is what they get for having the corrupt governments they've had for nearly 30 years now. This is what they get for believing in the EU. This is what they get for becoming a member of the eurozone. This is what they get done to their hard-fought social welfare system and labour protections.

Greece has been sold right down the line. By its own governments, by the EU, by the European Central
Bank, by that greatest villain of all, the IMF. And the Greek people know it. Oh boy, do they know it.

There are reports from some Greek citizens that the riots are being 'overblown' by the media and that the protests are largely 'peaceful'. That may have been the case until today and, who knows, may yet be mainly the case...but I do have my doubts. The images on TV, as 'over-manipulated' as they might be by international news stations are nevertheless very disturbing when one remembers that this is a capital city in the EU that one is seeing before one's eyes. And it looks bad enough.

Can anyone really blame ordinary Greek citizens for their outraged anger and need to vent in the streets of their ancient capital?

And so parts of Athens burn. At least for now. I find it tragic to watch on TV. And it makes me so angry.

Just how much worse this crisis will become for Greece only time will tell. Sometimes time does not heal - sometimes time can be downright frightening.

Do you get my point?