9/18

I vividly remember watching the tv all day September 18, 2008. I had it tuned to CNBC, which I usually can't stand because they are lapdogs of Wall Street. Not to mention composed of obnoxious blowhards. But I was watching the financial sector go bankrupt. It was a combination of horror and curiosity, something like I felt on 9/11/01. We were leaving for Spain in a couple days and every night during the trip I was compelled to turn on CNN International to see what was going on.

As Yves Smith explains in enormous detail in Econned and continues to explain on her blog Naked Capitalism, it was "the greatest theft from the public purse in history." This came at the end of more than 30 years of manipulation of the rules of the game for the financiers, including extensive deregulation greased by a simple-minded philosophy. Not only had the banksters accomplished regulatory capture and capture of all the branches of government (including the law), they accomplished cognitive capture of the population, with the help of the economics profession.

The bill that will pass this weak will be a 1300 page watered-down piece of nothing. We better get used to it. As Yves says, "this campaign has been far too consistent and calculated to brand it with the traditional label, "spin."...Only when we the public are able to call the underlying realities by their proper names--extortion, capture, looting, propaganda--can we begin to root them out."

It is what it is. Have a nice week.