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Paul B. Farrell
July 6, 2010, 12:01 a.m. EDT · Recommend (8) · Post:
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By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Financial reform is D.O.A. Window dressing. What's next? An implosion? Yes, a depression. Dead ahead.
Scott Adams warned of this trend in "Dilbert & the Way of the Weasel." Forget competition. No, capitalism breeds monopolies, it's a "financial system designed to transfer money from lesser weasels to greater weasels. Someday, if everything goes according to plan, one supreme weasel will have all the money and everyone else will be his or her domestic servant."
Phil Izzo & Paul Vigna analyze today's jobs report and what it says about the state of the economic recovery. Plus, Naftali Bendavid on why today's unemployment numbers are a problem for Democrats.
Until then, 99% of America's wealth remains concentrated in Wall Street's "Conspiracy of Weasels." They know only one thing, blindly "follow the money. If you took the same amount of money" traded daily on the NYSE, "sealed it in drums and dropped it in the ocean, 4 billion weasels would drown just trying to be near it."
When Obama signs the so-called reform bill, blow a goodbye kiss to our last great hope for true reform: Obama failed. True reform will never happen. Wall Street gains more power fighting every new reform bill, making massive investments in lobbyists. Witness their rapid return to power since near-bankruptcy in 2008.
No, the Weasel Conspiracy members didn't drown, they rule America. They killed democracy, destroyed capitalism and are consolidating vast new wealth and power in the hands of this conspiracy of Wall Street, Corporate CEOs, the Forbes 400 and Washington's pay-to-play power-players. Result: Less than one million co-conspirators control a nation of 310 million citizens.
Here are 12 more warnings exposing the Weasel Conspiracy's phony financial reforms:
Kuttner's opening paragraph in his new book, "Presidency in Peril" is brutal: "In the spring of his second year, Barack Obama is at risk of being a failed president ... a great stagnation ... prolonged suffering for ordinary people ... the lost promise of an era of reform." Obama's failure would leave 2008-2012 as merely a brief interregnum in a long Republican era, with the far right more dominate and more extreme with each election cycle."
Yes, we "averted a second Great Depression," but to benefit few: "Wall Street has recovered and its executives are once again collecting tens of billions in bonuses, but Main Street is not sharing in the prosperity." Why? Obama continued "Bush's failed policies ... a president elected as a change agent opted for so much continuity" that he merely institutionalized "the enduring and bipartisan influence of the financial industry."
Economist Peter Morici warns: "Outlook darkens for Obama" with "a terrible performance" the year after "a deep recession ... The economy must add 13 million private-sector jobs by the end of 2013 to bring unemployment down to 6%, and Obama's policies are not creating conditions for businesses to hire."
Then, in "Double Dip or Off the Cliff" Morici sounds a dark alarm: "Without a radical change in policy, the nation is at risk of a terrible calamity ... If the economy goes down a second time ... deficits can't be much increased ... the Fed can't further cut interest rates." So the economy "likely goes down for good. Unemployment would rise into the teens, and the economy would sink into a depression -- a deep and painful slump from which it cannot soon recover."
"We are now ... in the early stages of a third depression" and "the cost -- to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs -- will nonetheless be immense ... primarily a failure of policy ... governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending. ... And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years and some of whom will never work again."
"Borrowing has been the answer to all economic troubles in the past 25 years. Now debt itself has become the problem," says Philip Coggan in the Economist. "A society built on consumption will have to pay more attention to saving. The idea that using borrowed money to buy assets" is over, "the debt-financed model has reached its limit. Most of the options for dealing with the debt overhang are unpalatable. ... The battle between borrowers and creditors may be the defining struggle of the next generation."
Struggle? An underestimation: It will accelerate rapidly into a revolution after November.
"The same Washington spinsters who have driven our country into the ground" are now claiming a "policy victory" the "the most sweeping change of our financial regulatory since the Great Depression." Wrong ... "The real sweeping change of our financial system took place over the past 20 years." The "repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999. The Commodities and Futures Modernization Act of 2000 ... legalized the most destructive financial instruments of all, derivatives," writes MSNBC's Ratigan in HuffPost. "What does it mean ... that the same people who brought you these horrible changes" have now "institutionalized the policies that will keep the causes of these problems firmly in place."
Paul Farrell writes the column on behavioral economics. He's the author of nine books on personal finance, economics and psychology, including "The Millionaire Code," "The Winning Portfolio," "The Lazy Person's Guide to Investing." Farrell was an investment banker with Morgan Stanley; executive vice president of the Financial News Network; executive vice president of Mercury Entertainment Corp; and associate editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He has a Juris Doctor and a Doctorate in Psychology.
Apple Inc. seems to be growing its presence in show business, as it just handed late-night comedians a fresh batch of new material.
1:05 p.m. July 2, 2010 | Comments: 90
- Castor-PolluxM35 | 11:48 p.m. July 5, 2010
"Conspiracy of Weasels is killing real reform http://on.mktw.net/9lbCWM" 11:49 p.m. EDT, July 5, 2010 from MKTWFarrell
"Don't sit like a monk! Beat stress like a jock http://on.mktw.net/9xIjY7" 11:45 p.m. EDT, June 28, 2010 from MKTWFarrell
"An Invisible Gorilla is killing America's soul http://on.mktw.net/dgoRdz" 11:27 p.m. EDT, June 21, 2010 from MKTWFarrell
"Doomsday Capitalism virus is spreading http://on.mktw.net/d8AeFm" 12:30 a.m. EDT, June 15, 2010 from MKTWFarrell
"GDP growth fetish is bad for your money http://on.mktw.net/c0aXYt" 11:17 p.m. EDT, June 7, 2010 from MKTWFarrell
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