The Big Takeover

[RBM]

That's the title of Matt Taibbi's (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.) article in The Rolling Stone.

As a layman of economics with a predisposition toward practicality I have a deep appreciation for a concise factual presentation such as this.

There are many blogs that are doing some serious reflection on this financial boondoggle. I agree with the characterization that this is a 'coup de tat' in the form of a wealth transfer.

There is so little public good in wealth concentration of this sort that it is insignificant to the public therefore it is NOT GOOD.

[qwerty123]

That's a great article. It made me want to stockpile food and buy a few guns. Most are oblivious to the workings of our world. I suppose ignorance is bliss.

[RBM]

That's a great article. It made me want to stockpile food and buy a few guns. Most are oblivious to the workings of our world. I suppose ignorance is bliss.

I saw on another thread you are 24. One mitigating strategy to the likely future consequences is being involved in a community. One is then less liable to require guns.

[Sequoia]

I also found this article to be a really nice summary of everything that happened. While I was fairly aware of what was going on already, including where it was headed, this article fills in a lot of the details of exactly how this happened.

I hope a grass roots movement develops to undo some of the damages by reversing laws enacted to benefit the bad guys and reinstall genuine oversite to prevent this from happening again. If we leave it to the people in charge now, we face a bleak future.

[pocohauntus]

Most are oblivious to the workings of our world. I suppose ignorance is bliss.
No, it isn't.

The two paragraphs below state EXACTLY what is WRONG with the whole thing (especially that which is bolded):
While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.
And:
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.