In a just published book that too few Americans will read, All the Presidents' Bankers, Nomi Prins lifts the cover from a century long cooperation and coordination between Wall Street and the White House, stretching back to Teddy Roosevelt in the years just before creation of the Federal Reserve.
As Wall Street veteran
Pam Martens explains in a review of the book on her blog, Wall Street on
Parade, "Wall Street can collapse, get bailed out by the taxpayers, cause a
Great Recession and still call the shots in Washington."
Every American can now
see that on account of Wall Street and with the collaboration of successive
administrations, the prosperity of millions of Americans has been shattered,
perhaps never to be recovered.
Massive unemployment is
lied away by not counting the millions who have given up looking for work.
Foreclosures roll on. Home sales are plummeting. A generation of young
Americans now graduates college with massive debt and no jobs. Or they take the
jobs at Wal-Mart that used to be filled by the less educated.
Who go where? Onto
welfare, food stamps and unemployment, which many in Congress want to cut.
Where does this lead? For the answer, look no further than Wal-Mart's most
recent annual report.
It notes: "Our business
operations are subject to numerous risks, factors and uncertainties,
domestically and internationally, which are outside our control " These factors
include " changes in the amount of payments made under the Supplement[al]
Nutrition Assistance Plan and other public assistance plans, changes in the
eligibility requirements of public assistance plans --
Wal-Mart's major market
is low-income shoppers. The company is acknowledging that public assistance
programs are a significant factor in its revenue and profits. Increasingly,
Wal-Mart's customers are too poor to shop at Wal-Mart.
The message in Prins'
book is that the economic trends, Wall Street practices and federal government
collusion of today are in so many ways and so very frighteningly like the years
before the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.
Are we sleepwalking into
an economic Armageddon?
It is not the only
looming catastrophe. The other is a confrontation with Russia.
Forget the story line
from Washington parroted by the national media. The crisis over Ukraine has
nothing to do with democracy and freedom. It is about an almost messianic
assertion of American "exceptionalism," used as cover by Wall Street for more
looting, in this case Ukraine.
Paul Craig Roberts is a
former, high security clearance assistant secretary of the Treasury to Ronald
Reagan, former editor of the Wall Street Journal and an acknowledged expert on
Eastern European and Russian affairs. He is also not widely read. But you want
to read his most recent blog.
"The drive to war is
blatantly obvious. The lies are obvious, and the entire West is participating,
both media and governments" Everywhere in the West the message is the same.
'Putin invaded and annexed Crimea, Putin is determined to rebuild the Soviet
Empire, Putin must be stopped'" The extraordinary transparent lie that Russia
sent an army into Ukraine and annexed Crimea is now accepted as fact everywhere
in the West--
What actually happened
is that the elected government of Ukraine backed out of a U.S. deal to join the
EU, when many of its citizens understood that was a set-up for "austerity" and
the looting of their pensions and assets by Wall Street.
The U.S. organized a
coup and now calls the government it installed freedom loving heroes. Nuts.
They are Washington puppets -- and Nazi thugs into the bargain -- and they are
Wall Street patsies. That government immediately signed off on the Wall Street
"aide" package: high interest loans to be paid for by the extraction of the
wealth and prosperity of every Ukrainian.
Well, not every. Those
parts of Ukraine that were historically a part of Russia went running right
back to Russia, in a thoroughly democratic referendum, the kind of
self-determination Washington says it supports -- except where Wall Street
profits are concerned.
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