Sticking the Public With the Bill for the Bankers' Crisis - Naomi Klein/The Nation

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

Who are the real criminals? The protesters who broke a few windows or the bosses who ripped off a generation of poor people?

http://www.thenation.com/article/36771/sticking-public-bill-bankers-crisis

My city feels like a crime scene and the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I'm not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop cars on Saturday.

I'm talking about the heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession. Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world's wealthiest and most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most vulnerable people in their countries with the bill.

How else can we interpret the G20's final communiqué, which includes not even a measly tax on banks or financial transactions, yet instructs governments to slash their deficits in half by 2013? This is a huge and shocking cut, and we should be very clear who will pay the price: students who will see their public educations further deteriorate as their fees go up; pensioners who will lose hard-earned benefits; public sector workers whose jobs will be eliminated. And the list goes on. These types of cuts have already begun in many G20 countries including Canada, and they are about to get a lot worse. For instance, reducing the projected 2010 deficit in the United States by half, in the absence of a sizeable tax increase, would mean a whopping $780-billion cut.

They are happening for a simple reason. When the G20 met in the London in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, the leaders failed to band together to regulate the financial sector so that this type of crisis would never happen again. All we got was empty rhetoric, and an agreement to put trillions of dollars in public monies on the table to shore up the banks around the world. Meanwhile the US government did little to keep people in their homes and jobs, so in addition to hemorrhaging public money to save the banks, it allowed the tax base to collapse, creating an entirely predictable debt-and-deficit crisis.

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Naomi Klein....an incredilbe person..coruageous, intelligent and coherent.

[DJ13]

2. K& tried to R

What kind of person would unrec this?

[leftstreet]

3. K&R

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. kick

[asdjrocky]

5. Theft on the grandest scale ever.

[closeupready]

6. She's brilliant.

K&R

[Catherina]

7. transfer of wealth

what we have is a transfer of wealth, actually. It’s a continuation of a transfer of wealth. This whole government has become nothing more than a big machine that transfers the wealth upwards with our tax policies, our energy policies, with this fiscal policies, with the war. All the wealth of the country goes from the pockets of the people into the hands of a few. This is a very dangerous moment. You know, it’s the biggest amount of injection of capital by the government in a single time since the New Deal. And frankly, there is no trickle down here.

Dennis Kucinich on the $700 billion emergency bailout plan for the financial industry

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/29/is_this_the_united_states_congress



Excellent article. Rec'd

[yorgatron]

9. K&R

[Greyhound]

8. And the looting continues unabated.

Where are all those that claim so much concern for big sheets of glass, when these parasites enforce participation in a completely rigged game of no-rules-monopoly, where only they are allowed to win and we are the only ones that have to pay?
:kick: & R

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

10. Sheets of glass cost $$$. Starving people cost only "concern" and crocodile tears.

[Lilith Velkor]

12. Yyyup.

WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE WINDOWS!!1

[Greyhound]

13. LOL!

:rofl:

Lucky for us we do have some of those caring, compassionate friends of laminates right here to help...
:rofl:

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

11. deleted - dupe