The Big Takeover
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
MATT TAIBBI Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

It's over — we're officially, royally f'd. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of ****ty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."


Read the rest here-
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover

Is no one going to read this and respond? This article details the fact that the bankers are flat bragging that they are popping the US economically, by design.

Sorry - didn't see this one earlier.

I think I posted something along these lines earlier. It all falls into the line of personal responsibility for your own mistakes. While those at the top may pull the golden parachute move, that effectively ends much of their career. there are cases where they get jobs again, but running a company into the ground is not exactly a stellar mark on your resume. Now, they have the best of both worlds - they can make millions running the company into the ground and on top of that, there are no serious repercussions. The government fell for it all hook,line, and sinker and has shown they will bail them out every time. Or then again, who's to say they weren't in on it all along. I mean, the $100K+ that Dodd has received from AIG had nothing to do with the bonus provision that he put back in "at the administration's request," right?

It's all a sham. This is the result of a perfect storm. The bursting of the housing bubble, the inflation of the credit market by the Fed, and the peak of lobbyist-legislator rel;ations in Washington have all hit at the same time. I have no doubt our economy will survive it, the question is, what condition will it be in and ideology will it represent in the end? Do we return to our roots or move further into socialism?

btw, a good article from rolling stone? how'd that happen?

Taibbi is a good writer and I would say even a blind squirrel can catch a nut or two.

I love it that they play like they didn't know about the provisions for these bonus' when they wrote the friggin thing.

Perhaps ALL legislation should now be written on camera, thats streaming to a youtube channel or to a C-SPAN type of channel.

Perhaps we should empeach all of congress and the senate...

Then perhaps we can put someone in that actually knows what right is.

Or who is supposed to be in charge of this county.