Guest Post by Jesse
“The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.
If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.”
Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup
As economist Simon Johnson put it so aptly, there was a ‘financial coup d’etat’ in the States. It was a longer term and well-funded effort.
People forget all too quickly what has happened, even things that happened less than twenty years ago. Perhaps it is easily forgotten because there are so few counterexamples of honesty and decency these days in government and business. The UK and Canada are following in lockstep, as well as the central government for Europe in Brussels.
The Clintons, along with a large group of Republican Congressmen and compliant Democrats, put a ‘for sale’ sign not only on the Lincoln bedroom as you may recall, but on the rest of the White House and the Capitol, and indeed, the well being of the people of the United States.
They certainly did not do it alone, as it was a bipartisan effort to overturn the protections established in the darker days of the Great Depression. But the money was good, and it was there for the taking, as well as enormous power to threaten or reward those around them.