“When there’s blood in the streets, buy property.” So says Jodie Foster to Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s heist thriller “Inside Man.”
Now that there’s blood in the streets of America –– metaphoric, perhaps, in most cases, but ugly nonetheless –– the buyers are hitting the bricks. There’s money to be made out of the suffering of others and this is a great time for it.
Ran into a friend in United Market this afternoon, a Marin County realtor who’s seeing the carnage up close. “Everybody’s trying to hang on,” she said, “but there are sharks in the water.”
Have you noticed that’s how it always works? The guys with the assets, or with ready access to yours, wait for the bottom. Often, they’ve had a hand in creating the mess to begin with, e.g. the federal reserve bank and its owners, but that’s a detail. The important thing is that they can capitalize on the misery or loss of others; that, let’s face it, is the main engine of capitalism.
Along with the inherent nature of wealth and privilege –– that it multiplies itself –– is the ability to cash in on cycles of boom-and-bust. And although some among us wish not to know it, that is one of the main ingredients in monetary cycles in the first place.
For example, the stock market. The cover story is that the market reflects success and failure in commercial enterprises, that one ‘invests’ in this –– bets on the winners and losers –– and hopes thereby to grow one’s own wealth. Certainly, those with inside knowledge, I’m talking real inside knowledge, not the kind they made an ‘example’ of with Martha but the kind where you have the information because you manipulated it in the first place, those guys win. When you buy stocks, you’re hoping you can ride a trend better than the average schmuck. Maybe you can. But most investors are average schmucks, and they will surely lose when the gang at the top decides to rock the market.
The federal reserve bank, which is NOT, repeat not a governmental body, and which is in fact far more powerful than the government when it comes to money and the economy, helped engineer the greatest theft in world history over the past year, and nobody is going to prison. They are going to resorts in limos on the inflated ‘retention bonuses’ they paid to themselves and using the trillions extorted from the people to ‘consolidate’, i.e. buy up weaker enterprises.
And so Bank of America, Citigroup, and Chase are taking over Wachovia and Washington Mutual, and other lesser players with the money delivered to them without serious national debate by a Congress at once corrupt and stupid. It was an ‘emergency’, we were told by everyone, from Bush to Obama, and that the trillions would be used to loosen-up credit and get the economy moving. Only the money isn’t being used that way and there’s nothing the suckers can do about it now.
What we are witnessing, not to mention being run over by, is a calamity artificially-induced for the purposes of monopoly.
Don’t believe me? Try answering a few questions.
Why would the Congress pass the bailout legislation without actually reading it? As with the ‘Patriot Act’, it ran to thousands of pages and was not available to members of Congress, let alone the media, until within an hour of the vote.
Why is everything a bait-and-switch situation? As with the invasion of Iraq (and the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan), the ‘explanation’, the rationale, changed wildly after the fact.
Why is no one accountable? As with the criminal wiretapping of millions of telephones, the interception of e-mails (both of which are ongoing under Barack Obama), and the illegal detention and torture of innocent people, we are told to ‘turn the page’ on the prosecution of perpetrators.
These are not great riddles, elusive of understanding. They are merely dangerous questions. We can solve them ourselves –– substantial information and documentation is available online; check out sites such as thirdworldtraveler.com or brasschecktv –– or continue to ignore them. We have such a choice. But either way we cannot be easy of heart and mind.
To pursue the deeper truths of America and how it is governed, and by whom, is to rattle our own crockery. Yet, to go the other way is to condemn ourselves to a nightmare become real, an Orwellian world in which everything we believe is palpably false. Such is our circumstance, the inevitable result of a citizenry which has forgotten ‘eternal vigilance’.
