Taxpayer Bailouts Transferred Wealth to the Too-big-to-fail Banks and Transnational Corporations; Greece is a Dress Rehearsal for the Rest of the World; the Economy is being Set Back to Debt Peonage, Creating a New Feudal-type Elite

All of the TARP money given to banks did absolutely nothing to help the ordinary consumer. All it did was positively adjust the balance sheets of the "too-big-to-fail" institutions. Most banks are sitting on cash and simply not lending unless they are in an extremely favorable position. This sounds ironic because it was their unhampered lending that created the mess in the first place. Contrary to the thinking of the government economists, banks are not going to lend money, even if it rightfully belongs to the taxpayer, simply to increase the number of nonperforming loans on their balance sheets. Why aggravate the situation? Anyhow, does anyone really think that the bailouts were aimed at helping the consumer? - Fred Buzzeo, The Allure of Real Estate, Ludwig von Mises Institute, January 12, 2011

For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together. - 50 Statistics About the U.S. Economy That Are Almost Too Crazy to Believe, End of the American Dream, June 2, 2010

Around the world, the International Monetary Fund is demanding that governments slash spending and impose the burden of debt incurred in bailing out Wall Street on the working class. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, millions of persons around the world are experiencing unprecedented levels of economic deprivation, resulting in record numbers of home foreclosures, repossessions, and sharply escalating levels of homelessness and hunger. Huge monetary bailouts for high-flying corporate institutions have become commonplace, while draconian cutbacks are targeted at ordinary citizens. Government deficits will be reduced at the expense of workers and the poor by increasing taxes on essentials, slashing social spending, and cutting jobs, wages, benefits and pensions.

The Big Banks Are Waging Warfare Against the People of the World

July 11, 2011

Washington's Blog - Michael Hudson is a highly-regarded economist. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. He is a former Wall Street economist at Chase Manhattan Bank who also helped establish the world’s first sovereign debt fund.

Hudson says:

• The European debt crisis is really financial warfare by the banks

• Indeed, the banks are in warfare against the rest of society
  

In a separate interview, Hudson says:

• What's going on in Greece is exactly what's going to happen in America in a couple of weeks.
  

• The big banks are forcing their bad debts on government

• They are also forcing governments to sell off national assets so the banks can install a "neo-feudalism":
  

As I documented last month in a post entitled "America Is Being Raped ... Just Like Greece and Other Countries", America is in fact being subjected to the same type of plundering as Greece and Ireland.

Professor Hudson explained in 2008:

You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite.

I reported last year:

Foreign Policy magazine ran an article entitled "The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism", arguing that the power of nations is declining, and being replaced by corporations, wealthy individuals, the sovereign wealth funds of monarchs, and city-regions.

As I noted in 2009, a leading progressive economist that the true purpose of the bank rescue plans is "a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives".

As the wholly non-partisan Australian economist Steve Keen notes:

• "This is the biggest transfer of wealth in history", as the giant banks have handed their toxic debts from fraudulent activities to the countries and their people
  

• The big banks blew bubbles - using fraud - because that's the only way they could make obscene profits (see this for for details)
  

Indeed, this isn't the "Great Recession", it's the Great Bank Robbery. The big banks have pillaged and looted the rest of the world.

And it is not only Greece which is losing its sovereignty ... the big banks have turned America into a banana republic as well. Remember, the trillions in bailouts went to banks, not Main Street ... and a large percentage of the bailouts went to foreign banks (and see this). And so did most of money from the second round of quantitative easing.

Indeed, the warfare by the big banks is global.

Postscript: If this sounds like breathless class warfare against the financial sector, remember:

• Inequality largely caused the Great Depression and the current economic crisis

• The father of modern economics - Adam Smith - didn't believe that inequality should be a taboo subject
  

• Warren Buffet, one of America's most successful capitalists and defenders of capitalism, points out:

There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war ....

• Conservatives - as well as liberals - are against rampant inequality. But all Americans underestimate the amount of inequality in our country