Dennis Kucinich announced last week (Kucinich questions $3.6 billion in bonuses to Merrill Lynch executives), http://blog.cleveland.com/... that the bonuses distributed for Merrill Lynch/Bank of America last December--before the change in administrations--were 22 times greater than those of AIG. And on top of that we are told bonuses will soon be paid out for operatives at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae...
My, my, what fools we taxpayers are made to be!
These unbridled giveaways are compounding the bankruptcy of the US Treasury and will cause inflation if not stagflation.
"Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth," said Alan Greenspan.
See Related Diary: http://www.dailykos.com/...
"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. . . . The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth."
--Alan Greenspan, 1966
One wants to ask Greenspan, who was such a devotee of Ayn Rand, what now is the "virtue of selfishness?"
What accumulative effect is the current crisis having on we Americans?
Read and weep:
Wealth gap creating a social time bomb, John Vidal, The Guardian, Thursday October 23, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
Growing inequality in US cities could lead to widespread social unrest and increased mortality, says a new United Nations report on the urban environment.
In a survey of 120 major cities, New York was found to be the ninth most unequal in the world and Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, and Miami had similar inequality levels to those of Nairobi, Kenya Abidjan and Ivory Coast. Many were above an internationally recognised acceptable "alert" line used to warn governments.
"High levels of inequality can lead to negative social, economic and political consequences that have a destabilising effect on societies," said the report. "[They] create social and political fractures that can develop into social unrest and insecurity."
Snip
"In western New York state nearly 40% of the black, Hispanic and mixed-race households earned less than $15,000 compared with 15% of white households. The life expectancy of African-Americans in the US is about the same as that of people living in China and some states of India, despite the fact that the US is far richer than the other two countries," it said.
Disparities of wealth were measured on the "Gini co-efficient",{ Gini co-efficient http://en.wikipedia.org/... } an internationally recognised measure usually only applied to the wealth of countries. The higher the level, the more wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer people.
"It is clear that social tension comes from inequality. The trickle down theory [that wealth starts with the rich] has not delivered. Inequality is not good for anybody," said Anna Tibaijuka, head of UN-Habitat, in London yesterday.