by Peter A. Belmont / 2012-02-23
© 2012 Peter Belmont

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I never read a better explanation of the how-what-when-where-why of what TOO BIG TO FAIL really means than this:
Plan B – How to loot nations and their banks legally.

An excerpt follows, but the full article is well worth a read., and the “blog” in which it reposes is worth a vist every so often:

First let’s be clear about Plan A. That plan is to enforce an era of long-term austerity cuts to public services, in part to cut public expenditure so as to free up money for spending on the banks, but perhaps more importantly to further atrophy public services so that private providers can take over. A privatization of services which will bring great profits and cash flow to the private sector and to the banks who finance them, and a further general victory for those who feel that private debts rather than public taxes should be what underpins our national life and social contract.

Plan A therefore requires that governments convince their populace that private debts should be taken on to the public purse and that once taken on, the contracts signed by governments on behalf of the tax payers/citizens, are then sacrosanct and above any democratic change of mind. If governments can hold their peoples to this,then the banks are ‘saved’ with the added bonus that democracy and the ‘Rights’ it once guaranteed will all have been redefined as subordinate to finance and its contracts, and our citizenship will have become second to one’s contractual place in a web of private debts. Debts to the private lenders will become more important than taxes to the public exchequer. And as they do the State will wither away, leaving free-market believers and extreme libertarians exactly where they have always wanted to be – in charge – by dint of being rich. It is, in my view, a bleak future which I once described as A Toxic Debt Wasteland.

Reuters explains: “Bailed-out insurer American International Group reported a profit of $19.8 billion for the fourth quarter, after an accounting determination that it is likely to post future profits let it release the value of some tax benefits. The move essentially means AIG will not pay tax on tens of billions of dollars of income in the coming years, thanks to benefits that stem from its financial crisis-era losses.” In other words, the company that is still primarily held by the Treasury, i.e., America’s taxpayers, has just repaid its generous bailout provider by halting all tax payments on future profits, courtesy of some bespectacled tax accountant in some dark room agreeing that AIG can now use its NOL carryforward in perpetuity, as the firm is now “viable.”

And that is how corporate cronyism thrives in what what is without a doubt the world’s most laughable banana republic (after Bavaria Sachs of course).

But if I am not wrong, then the banks have created a financial Armageddon looting machine. Their Plan B is a mechanism to loot not just the more vulnerable banks in weaker nations, but those nations themselves. And the looting will not take months not even days. It could happen in hours if not minutes. Our leaders would have only a few hours to decide who they would side with: the banks or us. The past four years give me no faith they would chose us.

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