Forced To Read The Business Section!

I am compelled to give my late mother-in-law her due. I can only do this now and still save face, because it is a posthumous acknowledgement.

During our many protracted debates, I had always attempted to feign a complete knowledge of politics, based upon my two fancy degrees and a daily perusal of the newspaper’s main sections.

She (we will call her Shirley, because that was her name) always claimed that I was an idiot and reminded me (at least 4,357 times, by my last and final count) that any intel which was at all relevant to government, politics, and hence our daily lives, would first appear, if at all, in the business portion of the various news media. It was only after she went to her ultimate reward (Bloomingdales, I am certain) that I began to see that she was right and I was wrong.

As a hypothetical example, if you wanted to get to the heart of, say, why so many people are unemployed, you would first need to read the business section to learn that mega-corporation A, (instead of creating new jobs with the gobs of cash that they got in tax breaks, welfare subsidies, and bail-out money), took all that cash and bought up major corporation B, (merger/acquisition/buyout/hostile takeover) then fired ½ of the workers in the combined company, (restructuring/downsizing/optimizing capital) to inflate the stock value (uh, value of the stock); most of which they had already owned.

In reality, this is a consistently recurring scenario among the movers and shakers of big business and you can read all about it in the business section of your local newspaper. Of this information you may already be aware, if you have recently been restructured, downsized, or optimized.

Once you know about this all-too-common corporate strategy/business practice, then it makes sense why mega-corporation A (say the billionaire Koch Brothers) might give millions to political think-tank or front-group C (say, Americans For Prosperity) that might then bankroll the allegedly grassroots campaigns of certain politicians (say the Tea/GOP) who might then fight like rabid dogs to keep those tax breaks and welfare subsidies for the mega-corporations in place, while fighting with the same viral vigor against a payroll tax cut for the middle class.

After defining and then solving the entire equation, (corporate hegemony + ass-kissing politicians = we get screwed) only then may you fully appreciate why the politicians you elected don’t give a flying fandango about your lousy working conditions with no job security and no pensions and health insurance, or your lost job, or your discontinued unemployment insurance, or your usurious mortgage payments, or your kid that can’t go to college, or the million military vets who have come home after multiple tours of duty but can’t find work.

As intuitive as it seems to simply blame the politicians, it turns out that they are only the pawns, the toadies, the court jesters, or at most, the chorus in this little Greek tragedy. But you can read all about who’s really running the show in the business section!

On the top of page 8B of the business section of today’s Denver Post, there are three related business articles, which really involve political issues, which really answer a lot of questions about why things are so screwed up in this country today:  

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, you can read in the business section that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke (appointed by W. and kept on by Obama) secretly loaned out $1.2 trillion of our tax dollars to 10 major U.S. banks and to banks all over the world.

And that is on top of the bailout money they got and roughly represents the amount of dough that the Tea/GOP wants to cut from government programs for the middle class and working poor and homeless people and old people and young people and sick people and veterans.

Why did Bernanke dole out $1.2 trillion? Well, because, since 2006, City Group and BofA and Morgan Stanley and seven other major American banks had all been raking in hundreds of billions a-piece by making really crappy sub-prime loans that they knew could never be re-paid.

After knowing full well that these loans were never worth the paper they were printed on, these banks bundled up all this crap and lied about the valuelessness to investors and then made more hundreds of billions selling this crap in bulk, but not before they insured the crap against being crappy, and so made more hundreds of billions off of the insurance claims.

Then the world found out when everything when to *%&$, but the big banks kept lying to congress about the scam anyway. Problem was, once everything went to *%&$, if we had allowed all of these  Diamond-Jim-criminal-banks to fail, the other banks would have tumbled too and the whole world would have tumbled into the Greatest Depression ever.

Yes, $1.2 trillion in additional loans to the same banks that we tax-payers had already bailed out; the same banks that are buying up other companies and firing employees all over the world; the same banks that are currently tightening any and all credit on the same Americans who bailed them out (apparently twice), while still enjoying a zero-percent rate on the loans they got from us without our knowledge or consent.

Mitt Romney (who says he is “unemployed,” but is currently bulldozing one of his four, $12 million homes, to make it four-times as large) says that corporations are people too. They may be people but these people get billions in welfare subsidies, pay zero taxes, ship jobs overseas, and then we are forced to give them a $1.2 trillion, interest-free payday loan when they lose at the track. Even the business section doesn’t try to justify our continuing co-dependent relationship with these gambling addicts, but I guess the right or wrong of that depends upon which team you are rooting for.

Also in today’s business news, Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO has just hired a big-league criminal defense law firm because of the “multiple investigations and subpoenas on federal, state and local levels” about his role in the whole make, bundle, lie, sell, insure, lie again to congress, almost destroy the world economy, thingy that I described above.

Lastly, the business section reported today that Deven Sharma, the CEO of credit-rating company Standard & Poor’s has just abruptly resigned. The Standard & Poor’s chief had recently downgraded the U.S. credit rating, but enquiring minds still want to know how he failed to spot the worldwide game of Russian Roulette that his buddies at the major banks had been playing since 2006. As with the CEO of Goldman Sachs, the U.S. Justice Department is currently investigating.

Thanks, Shirley. I finally get it. I am sadder, wiser, and actually wish that you were still with us, so you could say “I told you so” and I could sit there quietly, with a pained smirk on my face and just take it!

J. Brandeis Sperandeo