VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: It was first believed according to reports by the London Museum of Natural History, a world center of the entomological science, that a possible new species of insect had been found on its own grounds.
Not in the deep and mysterious recesses of Amazonia.
But following research, it is now suspected the bug is probably merely a new subspecies of a European insect, arocatus roeselii which has adapted to a new food source, adding the fruit of the plane tree to its former diet, that of the linden.
How like the US financial sector. Reeling in disarray, crippled by its own greed and by the corruption which it has engendered within the US polity this organism now cannot survive without being allowed to feed on the Federal Treasury.
The Federal Reserve has now effectively taken control of private investment banks and the whole of the mortgage packaging and refinancing sectors of the financial industry. This is added to its traditional, officially mandated control over publicly chartered thrift institutions.
What this means is that there is now corporate/state control over most sources of investment in the USA. Here is the real socialism of the twenty-first century: The privatization of profit, the socialization of risk.
The capstone on this new policy is the Federal seizure (disguised as loan guarantees) of the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae mortgage operations. These had been privatized years ago, to the vast profit of their insiders and the politicians on their dole, but at the expense of the public. And so, now yet another financial chicken has come home to roost.
We are seeing drowning in a sea of debt the whole neo-liberal experiment here in the USA. Personal finances, the Federal debt, the foreign exchange and trade imbalances, the collapse of the dollar -- We face a perfect storm of disaster.
But like the discovery of the insect in the museum's garden our misleaders were so focused on their little capers abroad -- their armed robbery of Iraq, or their embezzlement of Mexico, for instance -- that they let these matters fester long after their catastrophic dimensions were apparent to those without the system.
Using real statistics -- another problem here is the corruption of all official statistics, starting with the refusal in recent years to even publish M1 numbers -- we suspect that somewhere between one sixth and one fifth of all US citizens are now living below a poverty level last adjusted in the 1960's. We know the public debt is at least twice its pretended, published levels. Inflation and unemployment were probably at least 12% each, before the recent oil spikes, rather than the modest published percentages.
US economists, like the British entomologists, are just now waking to the presence of "new" bugs right in their own garden.
Their reactions are unfortunately entirely predictable. Already, Standard and Poors have stated their intent, after the coming elections, to de-rate US securities unless the Social Security Trust Funds are finally dismantled, officially turned into yet another regressive tax resource. This will be the prime task of the new Congress, to be empanelled after next January.
So rather than efforts to strengthen ordinary households, the basis of any nation, we can expect only further looting of the remains of the public commons for the benefit of the few.
Expect, after all the dust settles to find a decline of the whole US economy fully comparable to that of the Soviet Union after 1989: Recall, it was once thought to be second in the world.
From the imperial capital,
Chris Herz
cdherz44@yahoo.com
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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