WELCOME TO THE USA: SHOCK DOCTRINE AND CONFESSIONS OF A HIT MAN

First Iceland, then Ireland, now Greece. Much of Europe is mired in inescapable debt and bankrupt nations, the result of

• crashing banks,

• bank bailouts, and

• soaring unemployment.

The U.S. and U.K. watch from a distance, knowing their turn is next.

Unbeknownst to most Europeans, the public money that financed the bank bailouts created a massive public debt problem, to be solved by massively slashing public programs that benefit workers and the poor. This amounts to a blatant transfer of billions — maybe trillions of dollars — in public wealth, away from the majority of citizens toward a parasitic crust of bankers.

Who is to pay for their colossal spending spree on

• bank giveaways and

• foreign wars
  

Government bonds were printed and purchased by global investors (capitalists).
Now, these investors want to be sure that the heavily indebted governments are able to pay up. And they’re becoming impatient.

Moody’s released their notorious “misery index”. Behind bankrupt Iceland comes the United States

"This is mainly because of the crisis of public finances [bank bailouts plus unemployment] that has beset many rich countries in what Moody's believes will be the final — and disturbingly long-lasting — stage of the crisis.”

Moody’s is demanding that less-rich nations like Greece, Ireland, Spain, etc., take immediate actions to make their rich investors happy. The Washington Post explains Ireland’s situation:

• slash salaries for 400,000 government workers

• reductions in benefits for such groups as widows and single mothers to the blind and disabled children.”

• Unemployment benefits were also slashed by as much as 30%.”

The U.S. and the U.K. must make immediate plans to make major cuts “…this will be the year [2010]

John Chambers of Standard & Poor’s was more blunt:

• draw down fiscal stimulus,

• pare expenditures [make cuts],

• raise revenues [taxes] and probably take a look at

• [cuts] in their entitlement programs" — Social Security, Medicare, Education, etc.

This is not news to President Obama. In a statement to WAPO he pledged to "reform entitlement programs.” (January 16, 2009). This was to be done after the economy had stabilized.

The mainstream media will support our corporate-owned President We will be told that there are “no other options,” when in fact there are.

• Military spending could be reduced by hundreds of billions of dollars.

• Taxes should be raised significantly for the very wealthy.

Barack Obama will soon be pursuing a policy that George Bush Jr. would never dare try.

American unions should look to Europe

• mass demonstrations

• united strike action

• put sufficient pressure on a government enforcing a solidly right-wing corporate agenda.

Somebody must be made to pay for the economic crisis. Corporate-elite is planning to push this burden on to the working class. The working class must push back. Unions and community organizations should begin organizing now to tax the rich and corporations save Social Security, Medicare, and public education.

Naomi Klein And Joseph Stiglitz Discuss The Cause And Effect Of The Financial Crisis

Alan Greenspan's economic legacy is slowly but surely deteriorating from that of one created by a "Maestro", to the deranged hungover flashbacks of the most inept monetarst dilettante and plutocrat puppet in the history of fiat capitalism...the man who took the mundane task of building bubbles and converted it into rocket science so complex that only a few people at Goldman Sachs figured out how to benefit from it.

A statement written by John Grey in the Observer. Geo political shift, the era of USA is over. Free market creed has self destructed, while countries who retained control of markets have been vindicated. As far reaching as the fall of the Soviet Union

Distinction between the rhetoric and the reality. Mkt fundamentalism is dead. Those ideas are flawed.

US as corporatism, corporate welfarism under the guise of free market economics. That mixture was flawed and been shown not to work. Consequences.

Political, the way this admin has mgt this bailout, if I were at the World Bank, no loans to the country, corrupt, bail outs are non transparent, no oversite, or judicial review. We should make sure we dont pour money out to the shareholders.

The neoliberal economic revolution, driven by power, a revolt of the elite, ideology comes in when the bubble is being created. Leveling of Glass Stegall, no regul of direvatives. The ideology is useful and people believe it but then they throw the ideology out the window and want intervention. After creating a bubble they have to nationalize the debt.

Trust each other. what is written on paper does reflect reality.a crisis is a divorce between the paper and the underlying assets.

Bankruptcy. Debtor prisons, no more. Revised our bankruptcy laws. We will have a bunkruptcy law where peopl will suffer a little more.

The same banks are paying the lobbyist to fight the mortgage holders. There is law for the client, but no law for the banks.

The ownership idea is the market will fix the problem, but the mkt doesnt solve everthing'

A financial coup against the peole. the terms of the first document written by GS, why would anybody who would do that. Maybe we are seeing where power lies.

The bailout is a massive redistrubution of wealth to the financial sector. right after the bailout share prices went out. massive transfer of wealth but very little commentary about what this all means.

How did this crisis come about. No one realized how bad this was. by the way, when we gave billions to aig, we are only covering eight percent, the whole amount of paper is 600 trillion, 55 trillion dollars, gdp world wide for the whole year. what causes the panic is that nobody trusts the paper, call it what ecver you want to, your paper no longer reflects what is going on, you lack information.

Ther is a whole bunch of new mkts, which didnt exist in the nineties. 600 trillion circulating in the markets and there is onlty 55 trillion world gdp

Who had the power to create these mkts and how did they extract wealth from it.

Natual eveolutin of a property based system without regulation. two individuals make a bet about what is going to happen to a share. we stop at a dollar that one thing, but make a billion dollar bet, these are gambling mkts. you can gamble on anytghing now and not just horses. in modern america yoy study companies, we bet a trillion on bear sterns going bankrupt. the guys who says its not going bankrupt goes bankrupt and the us government comes in abails him out. No regulation.

Greeenspan created the mkts. what were the key decisions. why arent we regulationg the derivitives. these are deals between pros abnd we should trust them, they are too complex for the government. trust matters in banks, it doesnt. golden parachutes trumps reputation.

We now what a truly de regulated mkt looks like.

The decision makers were ceo's. ther has been a fundamental change in captilism, individual bear the burdens.

Modern cap is not that way, it seperates ownership and control. The guys in control are interested in max their own well being. not anyothr stakeholder, it's not just bad regulation of the banking system, its bad corportate goverance which is pervative,

Stock options encourate reporting earnigns high, you do this by bad accounting, get it off the balance sheet, enron. we tried to change that, rueban opposed it, no one wanted to be a party pooper.

what has already been thrown at the banks is a drop in the bucket, there is no end to it. the bankruptcy of countries, iceland, this is a very urgent moment.

we dont want another wall streeter to be the next treasury sec, we need Stiglitz. it is impossible to figure out where GS ends and the Fed begins, look at the figure of henry paulson he personnly took GS risk from twenty billion in 1999 to 100billion in 2005. he is bailing out his own debt.

where a the politial movements, people shoudl be angry, the government is being privatized, they are contracting out the b ailout. they want say how much the vcontract is for, the business of valuing and buying the debt and the bank itself is a carrier of this debt.

its a good moment to really angry at wall street, they are people who created this.

NO LOGO

In recent years, however, I have found myself doing something I swore I had finished with: re-reading the branding gurus quoted in this book. Guys like Peters ("Brand! Brand!! Brand!!! That's the message…for the late '90s and beyond.") and Scott Bedbury ("a great brand raises the bar -- it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience"). This time, however, it wasn't to try to understand what was happening at the mall but rather at the White House -- first under the presidency of George W. Bush and now under Barack Obama, the first U.S. president who is also a superbrand.

But the administration's most lasting legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the U.S. government what branding-mad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: it hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most essential functions of government, from protecting borders to responding to disasters to collecting intelligence.

This hollowing out was not a side project of the Bush years, it was a central mission, reaching into every field of governance.

One company that took over many of those services was Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor. "Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States," observed a 2004 New York Times expose. "But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it …. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft."

No one approached the task of auctioning off the state with more zeal than Bush's much-maligned defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld was steeped in the corporate culture of branding and outsourcing. He entered the Defense Department not with the posture of a public servant but channeling a celebrity CEO -- the guy with the guts to downsize and offshore and, most of all, rebrand. For Rumsfeld, his department's brand identity was clear: global dominance. The core competency was combat. For everything else, he said, sounding very much like Bill Gates, "we should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively."

Iraq under U.S. occupation. From the start Rumsfeld planned the troop deployment like a Wal-Mart vice president looking to shave a few more hours from the payroll. The generals wanted 500,000 troops, he would give them 200,000, with contractors and reservists filling the gaps as needed -- a just-in-time invasion. In practice, this strategy meant that as Iraq spiraled out of U.S. control, an ever more elaborate privatized war industry took shape to prop up the bare-bones army.

Blackwater, whose original contract was to provide bodyguards for U.S. envoy Paul Bremer, soon took on other functions, including engaging in combat in a battle with the Mahdi Army in 2004. And as the war moved into the jails, with tens of thousands of Iraqis rounded up by U.S. soldiers, private contractors even performed prisoner interrogations, with some facing accusations of torture. The sprawling Green Zone, meanwhile, was run as a corporate citystate, with everything from food to entertainment to pest control handled by Halliburton. Just as companies like Nike and Microsoft had pioneered the hollow corporation, this was, in many ways, a hollow war.

That same kind of can't-do attitude applied even when the financial system imploded in the fall of 2008 and the U.S. Treasury stepped in with a $700-billion bank bailout. Not only did it fail to attach meaningful strings to the money, but it announced that it did not have the capacity to administer the program. It needed to outsource the rescue of the banks to the very banks that created the disaster and were receiving the bailout funds.

The Bush administration's determination to mimic the hollow corporations it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to "rebrand America" for an increasingly hostile world. First came Charlotte Beers, hired as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the seniority of the post, Beers had no previous diplomatic experience. She had, however, held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, where she built brands for everything from dog food to power drills. When Secretary of State Colin Powell came under criticism for the appointment, he shrugged it off: "There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who can rebrand American foreign policy, rebrand diplomacy." Besides, he said, "She got me to buy Uncle Ben's rice."