Karl Marx predicted that the captains of industry would eventually gain all of the spoils and leave the ordinary citizen exploited. Did you see it happen? Did you miss it? Well, it just happened in America. Bet you didn’t even recognize the moment when our grandchildren’s futures were stolen, when their anticipated tax rates were destined to be close to 70% and sentenced to a lower standard of living than their parents. Oh, I’m sorry. We will have to replay that movie.
The movie starts when multimillionaire Wall Street bankers were hired by the U.S. government to fix Wall Street. After all, if you want to repair the chicken coop, you would naturally hire the fox. The foxes were given a mandate to eliminate bad loans and other troubled financial instruments. But instead, the multimillionaire Wall Street bankers working for the U.S. government began shoveling money to the multimillionaire Wall Street bankers working for the banks as fast as they could shovel. And while our Congress looked on, like deer in the headlights, sucking their collective thumbs, the Wall Street bankers threw open the vault at Ft. Knox and yelled Come on Down---The Price is Right. Right is not the proper word---free would be better.
The newspapers reported that our government had allocated $780 Billion to the banks to fix the problems. But the headlines missed the boat by $12 TRILLION. Yes, the total of the giveaways and the guarantees so far have reached $13 TRILLION. To put this in perspective, from the beginning of time until 2001, the United States had accumulated $5 trillion in debt. By 2008, the debt had doubled to $10 trillion. Now hold you hats! In one year since then, the total debt and bank guarantees have reached $23 TRILLION.
How can a country that is on the verge of bankruptcy go on such a spending spree? Tell me how a company such as Goldman Sachs, which was on the edge of bankruptcy, pay its 28,500 employees AN AVERAGE of $700,000 this year? That’s easy---they paid these obscene salaries with taxpayer money and in so doing, mortgaged our grandchildren’s future! Yes, Goldman Sachs, which was virtually bankrupt and needed tax dollars to barely survive, just delivered the largest paychecks to its employees in its 140-year history. What is seriously wrong with this picture? Want to see that con game again? OK. Look at Morgan Stanley, another bank in need of resuscitation. The Wall Street Journal reports that it is paying its 40,000 employees an average of $343,000.
Picture all of this at a time when 6.5 million Americans have lost their jobs. The royalty celebrate with caviar and champagne while ordinary citizens try to stretch to buy both food and medicine. Karl Marx was right on target.
Listen to Naomi Prins, a former Goldman Sachs director explain the massive takeover in her book, “The Big Bank Bailout Payback Bamboozle.”
Part 1 (9 min 53 sec)
Part 2 (5 min 41 sec)
