Debtwalkers Strike Back

SUBHEAD: They've been able to stave off the inevitable, but that's only because they have unlimited access to your money. By Ilargi on 2 December 2011 for The Automatic Earth - (http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/12/december-2-2011-debt-walkers-strike.html) Image above: Demonstration from 2008 with zombie bankers. From (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ariston-anderson/zombie-i-bankers-take-ove_b_138163.html). It's very simple, but maybe that's the problem. For all I know it's just too simple for people to see. There's a group of people, and it's tempting to call them the 1%, but they’re not really, since there’s politicians in there too who have no shot at even aspiring to be part of the 1%, and media pundits and economists and what have you, who all together try to save the existing financial system at all cost. A cost that they don't bear: that cost is being paid for by the 99%. Theirs is just one particular view, one particular idea, of what it takes to get out of the crisis we're in. Nothing more, nothing less: just one idea. But one that prevails over any alternatives to such a radical extent that, from an objective point of view, it can't but boggle the mind. "If we don't save the banks and the financial system at large, there'll be Armageddon to pay". That's the endlessly repeated prevailing line. However, if we keep on spending ever more trillions to prevent Armageddon from arriving, surely we must invite it, by the very act of doing exactly that, to at some point come knocking on the back door. After all, you can't spend more and more, and then some, without ever being served with the bill for doing so. So we’ve had all these rescue missions over the past 5 years. Behemoth-sized amounts of taxpayer money and future taxpayer money have been poured into our economies in this alleged attempt to try and save them. Now, take a step back and tell me what you see. I'll tell you what I see: a financial system that is in worse shape than ever before during those 5 years. At least half of Europe is flat broke, most banks have lost 50%-80% of their market value, Bank of America, a major bailout recipient, is fast on its way to becoming a penny stock, China sees shrinkage wherever it looks and Japan is rumored to be awkwardly close to the chopping block. Evidently, something's not working the way it's supposed to. And here is why: it is becoming clearer by the day that saving the banks is not the same as saving the people, upon whom increasing austerity is unleashed to pay for ... saving the banks. We have a choice to make: either we save the banks, or we save our societies. Which are falling apart as we speak on account of the costs of saving an already deeply bankrupt financial system. But we're not even starting to discuss that choice. All choices and decisions are being made -for us- in a one-dimensional vacuum theater by a small group of people who, to a (wo)man, flatly deny that such a choice needs to be made or even exists. Because making that choice doesn't fit their purposes and careers and fortunes and ego's. Merkel, Blankfein, Sarkozy, Jamie Dimon, Obama, David Cameron, Mario Draghi and Timothy Geithner, they are all servants of the existing financial system, of the existing banks, which are broke but try to hide that from us. At our debilitating expense. Yes, they've been able to stave off the inevitable until now. But that has only been possible because they have virtually unlimited access to your money, to the wallets of the 99%. We should grow up and make these decisions ourselves, instead of letting a group of morally severely challenged suits with very vested interests make them for us any longer. They're leading us straight into Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell. And last I heard, that's definitely not a place to raise your kids. .

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