Keep the WASHINGTON POST or the NEW YORK TIMES for when you can no longer afford toilet rolls.

VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: I well remember the news broadcasting in the Washington area on 9/11. The event was such a shocker that corporate media for many hours actually did its job -- there had not been time to set by publishers and editorial boards on the instructions of their corporate boards the bounds of permissible reporting. We even heard from a Pennsylvania state trooper, via a local radio station there, his eyewitness testimony of seeing the aircraft that crashed there descending on fire. A story utterly inconsistent with the official accounts of the crash being caused by a fight in the cockpit for control of the aircraft.

Only hours later did it become clear that full control of the airwaves by the authorities had been re-established. The above story immediately disappeared.

So it is with this banking crisis. Last week it burst upon the public in almost as surprising a time-frame as had the aerial highjackings of seven years back. But now the media have their instructions: Support the give-away at all costs. The opponents are to be relentlessly depicted as either evil reactionary Republicans or extreme left-wing Democrats. Fringers all. Real mainstream Americans are to support their president, their congressional leaders, and their friendly neighborhood investment banker.

The sheeple are to be scared into another thoughtless stampede in the direction their fleecers wish them to run. Just as they were in the run-up to the Iraq War. We are hearing stories of all sorts of how if we do not turn the public treasury over to Wall Street we are doomed to another Great Depression.

Well, we may well be facing another depression, certainly, no matter what a serious and prolonged recession.

But not for reason of some lack of funds within the world banking community. There are more dollars in circulation now than can ever be redeemed. The real problem is that the banking and other corporate deregulation and tax relief of the last thirty years has accomplished three things:

First the books are so thoroughly cooked it is quite possible that even internally bankers cannot figure out their own balances. Certainly outsiders in the governments, in the public, and in this case most importantly other bankers cannot do so. The LIBOR rates certainly bear out this analysis.

Second the tax policies of recent decades in all the G-8 plus Russia have been skewed towards soaking the poor and bloating the rich. Demand for goods and services has been crippled by the astounding debt loads carried by ordinary households. The bloated incomes of the international elites, unabsorbed by taxation, has inflated the prices of all capital assets without increase in their actual value.

Third the outsourcing of industrial production to low-wage centers in what is still a neo-mercantilist international system, has exacerbated the fall of household incomes, has created immense balance of payments difficulties and is now leading in all the G-8 to a game of competitive devaluations. All the stuff that occurred before both the world wars.

These were among the causes of the crash of 1929 and they are the causes of the pending crash of 2008. Left unchecked they can be the causes of still worse things to come.

Left with hardly a mention in the thug-media are things such as the revolt of mainstream academic economists who are quite well aware of the lessons of the past. Hundreds of such persons have addressed, along with millions in the general public their congress-critters in opposition to any bailout of the investment banks. We believe that state resources, if needed at all should be applied directly to the needs of productive enterprises.

We understand that the additional public funding when granted (not if granted) -- the bailout is a done deal, I believe.

Much of it already done with no legislative approval at all and is, and will, be used by the investment/commercial banks to further inflate their cooked books by the consolidation of more regional, household banking in even fewer hands. It will be used to purchase hard currencies from abroad, etc. It will be used to further spread the failed neo-liberal corruption abroad. It will not go towards the manufacture of necessary goods and services. For there is among our general population little means left to buy them.

No matter what, we are all in for a hard time.

But the measure of the crookedness and corruption that rules us is that rather than to steady and undergird the public for the difficult struggles ahead, authority seek to once again another stampede: To enable rule by fear and terror.

• The ultimate measure of the kind of government we now have is that regular troops are being withdrawn from Ramadi in Iraq to back up the already numerous and heavily armed police at home.

Only in the guerrilla press can you read the straight skivvy. Support VHeadline and our colleagues elsewhere on the net. Keep the WASHINGTON POST or the NEW YORK TIMES for when you can no longer afford toilet rolls.

From the imperial capital

Chris Herz
cdherz44@yahoo.com

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Venezuela is facing the most difficult period of its history with honest reporters crippled by sectarianism on top of rampant corruption within the administration and beyond, aided and abetted by criminal forces in the US and Spanish governments which cannot accept the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people to decide over their own future.

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