Obama: Inside Man for the Greatest Heist in History
Written by Glen Ford, Executive Editor, Black Agenda Report
Glen Ford delivered the following remarks to a panel discussion of the Left Forum, at Pace University, New York City, on March 20. The discussion was titled, "Race and Recession: Will a Rising Tide Lift All Boats?The times we are now living through will be remembered as the period when finance capital definitively captured and totally subordinated the American state, so that it could be systematically looted. By the end of July, 2009, the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve had made available to Wall Street $23.7 trillion, according to the Inspector General of the TARP program. That figure approaches the value of two years of the total economic output of the United States, whose gross domestic product is about $14.2 trillion. When the U.S. government makes available to Wall Street $23.7 trillion, it has essentially transferred the full faith and credit of the American State to the financial sector. That is the swallowing of the American state. The public treasure that actually went to Wall Street is credibly put at $14 trillion, which is approximately one year's worth of the total economic output of the nation. And virtually all of this happened on Barack Obama's Watch. His executive branch and the Federal Reserve are the agents of this world-shaking event – this Crack in Time.
It is in this context that we must examine Obama's statement that "A rising tide lifts all boats." In effect, he is saying that a rising tide – a tsunami of tens of trillions of dollars of public money for the banks and the speculators – will eventually Lift All Boats. It is also only in this context that we can understand why he has bet his political fortunes on a health care scheme whose main effect will be to transfer another trillion or so public dollars over the next ten years to private insurance corporations – who are an integral element of the Wall Street Casino. The Casino virtually owns the state and is looting it, with the Obama administration as the facilitator. Wall Street is looting the country, because that is the only way it can survive. It's not just about greed. We now live under the absolute rule of finance capital, a class that produces nothing.
Yet they must somehow create ever increasing rates of profit. In their mad search for profits, they began laying bets and making deals that were many times larger than the economy of the entire Planet Earth, beginning in the Nineties. The banksters created a kind of Monopoly Money of their own, called derivatives, that nobody could own or understand but themselves. By the summer before the Crash of 2008, these derivatives were valued at at least six hundred trillion dollars, and possibly 1000 trillion dollars. The economy of the whole world is only about $50 trillion. When Wall Street's house of derivative cards collapsed, the entire world economy – the real economy of work and goods and services that the world depends on – went into a spiral. And in Black America, our little boats went straight to the bottom.
Who came to the banksters' rescue? Obama and the Democrats, even more loyally the Republicans. Obama gave them the full faith and credit of the United States, and $14 trillion in real money to patch things up. And what have they done with it? The value of derivatives is now back up to $600 trillion, again, because they must pump their profits up again, and to do so they must use phony money, and loot the real economy of real money through the mechanisms of the state. If they don't continue to do that, they will die – as they should have in October of 2008. But if we allow them to continue, then the real economy will die – and us with it. It's them or us – and Obama works for them. So, what do we do about it? More specifically, what do Black people do about it, in our shaky little boat?
http://mltoday.com/en/obama-inside-man-for-the-greatest-heist-in-history-816-2.html
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