[Reader-list] Will Wall Street's Meltdown Turn America Into a Police State?

[Jeebesh]

Dear All, appended below is a very well written blog post on the  
present financial turbulence. warmly jeebesh

quotes from the blog:

"Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" recently juxtaposed Bush's address on  
the financial cataclysm with his pre-invasion speech in 2003 and found  
-- surprise! -- they were exactly the same."

Will Wall Street's Meltdown Turn America Into a Police State?

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted September 30, 2008.


"Raw capitalism is dead." -- Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary

"Can't we just all go out and say things are OK?" -- President Bush,  
to congressional leaders during bailout negotiations

I'm not much of an Army Times reader, but after reading that a brigade  
was shipping from Iraq in October to serve as "an on-call federal  
response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters,  
including terrorist attacks" in the homeland right before the  
election, my antennae perked up. Same as they did when I read that an  
electoral college doomsday scenario exists in which Dick Cheney casts  
the deciding vote that gives McCain-Palin the White House.

That is, if Cheney and Bush don't take it for themselves. That may  
sound like fantasy, but don't kill the messenger. They are all strands  
of the Gordian knot the Bush administration has tied around the neck  
of the American people for the last two presidential terms, best  
represented today by the failed bailout of banks, brokers and other  
complicit parties that have since jacked the American people out of  
trillions. And while the Army Times revelation or election doomsday  
may turn out to be paranoia rather than prescience, the evidence just  
isn't there.

Like I said: antennae.

They've come in handy as bullshit detectors since Bush stole the  
election from a flat-footed Al Gore and set about engineering the  
greatest transfer of public wealth into private hands in American  
history. If you factor in Monday's failed takeover, as well as the $5  
trillion the American people now owe thanks to the "bailout" of Fannie  
Mae and Freddie Mac, not to mention the continuing hyper-expensive  
occupation of Iraq and so on, our citizenry is now so far in the hole  
that it's pointless griping about numbers. If you want one, use the  
figure put forth by Dennis Kucinich: half a quadrillion dollars. We  
have evolved past the point of economic or geopolitical reality and  
entered a phase of pure concept.

And all vectors of that phase point toward the conclusion that the  
proverbial shit has totally hit the fan -- head on, and all over again.

Meet the New Rome, Same as the Old Rome

"Franklin Roosevelt had to save capitalism from itself," Los Angeles  
Times business editor Tom Petruno told me as Washington Mutual and  
Wachovia became the latest banking dominoes to fall. "Is history  
repeating?"

Indeed, it is, as one could tell from the repetitive usage of loaded  
terms and phrases like "Great Depression," "meltdown," "apocalypse,"  
"Armageddon" and more to describe the just-on-time cratering of the  
American economy. After the strange bedfellows in both parties  
torpedoed Bush, Bernanke and Paulson's so-called bailout, more than $1  
trillion of market value in American equities disappeared in a single  
day. The Dow Jones average set a record for quickest suicide dive in a  
single day. Other indexes sunk to multiyear lows, wiping out years of  
value, and stocks across the board went negative like Ann Coulter. In  
fact, the only major stock that actually advanced on Monday was  
Campbell Soup.

Can there be a more fitting metaphor for the American economy stuck  
beneath the Bush administration's thumb?

But the reruns, and their loaded terminology, are merging: Bush  
himself is just another iteration of the infamous "New World Order"  
instituted by his father while trying to, what else, convince the  
American public that it needed to go to war against Saddam Hussein.  
The revisionism is transparent, befitting a government that cares  
nothing of what its people actually think. Jon Stewart of "The Daily  
Show" recently juxtaposed Bush's address on the financial cataclysm  
with his pre-invasion speech in 2003 and found -- surprise! -- they  
were exactly the same.

This is a long way of saying that this particularly frightening crux  
of historical geopolitics, fascism and environmental calamity has been  
a long time coming. Failing banks? Deregulation. Endless war? Homeland  
security. Total information awareness? Transparent government.  
Bankrupt economy? The fundamentals are strong.

"Here's my question," Petruno adds. "If this is remembered as Black  
September, will that end up being too gentle a reference to what  
actually happened to the American financial system this month? It is  
beyond comprehension for people who have been on Wall Street their  
entire lives. I can only imagine how absolutely stunned the American  
public must be. Stunned, and very afraid."

It should be. From a military brigade armed for action in the homeland  
in blatant transgression of Posse Comitatus to what ex-hedge funder  
and financial personality Jim Cramer recently called "financial  
terrorism," the United States is pushing forward back.

To start with, the bailout was obvious theft, but our situation is  
more precarious than you think. The hyperreal credit default swap  
market, which few understand although it is estimated to involve tens  
if not hundreds of global trillions, is faltering under the weight of  
its own Ponzi origins. The scenario significantly worsens once you  
factor in the given that countries like China and others who have  
denominated their loans in dollars are shouldering our exploding debt,  
along with oil-soaked sovereign wealth funds from nations whose civil  
liberties records suck ass. As I wrote last year on this clusterfuck,  
if the Chinese call in our debts and oil-producing countries decide to  
peg their petrodollars to the euro, you can more or less kiss the  
dollar goodbye. Which means the last thing you'll need to worry about  
is your stocks, retirement or credit cards. You will instead worry  
whether or not the cash you have on hand will be worth anything at  
all. That is the loaded gun that bankers, brokers and the White House  
is holding to the public's head, as I write. That trillion erased on  
Monday, as well as the trillions that have been lost and will be lost  
in the coming months, was nothing more than a hostage situation  
engineered by the Bush administration, the Federal Reserve and their  
partners in crime in finance, insurance and real estate business.

They don't call that sector FIRE for nothing. Fire destroys everything  
and leaves little in its catastrophic wake. Which raises the question:  
What's left to burn?

"I think our economic situation can get much worse," argues Danny  
Schechter, the veteran producer and author whose 2006 indie  
documentary "In Debt We Trust" covered this volatile territory long  
before CNN would. "Jobless claims are already at a seven-year high,  
but the government is worried about the reaction from Asia. We are  
living on other countries' money, and when that spigot gets cut off,  
we will be in deeper doo-doo. Part of the reason for the scale of the  
bailout is to show Asia and sovereign wealth funds that we will  
protect their interests."

But for how long? The Bush administration and Congress' disdain for  
the American people has been painfully obvious, so it's hard to  
believe they will call from sky-high Dubai to see how we are doing  
after making off with almost all of our money.

"It's a high-stakes gamble, which is why Paulson tried to do it  
quickly in a climate of shock and crisis," Shechter says. "He knew  
that the longer it takes, the more opposition it will attract. This  
plan, if eventually passed, will pre-empt the next president from  
doing anything about it, because there will be no money. They are  
wrecking the government by wrecking the economy first."

That shock doctrine, as Naomi Klein explained in her brilliant book of  
the same name, has foisted this same kind of disaster capitalism on  
country after country over the last century. Klein's book is littered  
with democracies that slept their way through coups and takeovers,  
entranced by one simulation or another. The United States was plugged  
into a matrix that onetime White House press secretary Ari Fleischer  
described as "an American way of life," adding without deceit that "it  
should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of  
life."

By destroying it? Mission accomplished.

"This is the September of surprise," Schechter concluded, "not a war  
on Iran but on America."

Civil War, the Rerun?

So, what's the next step for the shoe yet to drop? Perhaps the Army  
Times has the clues:

(The brigade) may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd  
control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive  
poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological,  
radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack. ...  
The 1st BCT's soldiers also will learn how to use "the first ever  
nonlethal package that the Army has fielded," 1st BCT commander Col.  
Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment  
and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous  
individuals without killing them.

Like every move the Bush administration has ever made, from the  
Patriot Act to the occupation of Iraq and down to bankrupting the  
American economy, this maneuver is a solution in search of a problem  
that it seems destined to create. Look around you. Housing is over.  
Stocks are nosediving. The banks are gone. War is ceaseless. Civil  
liberties are disappearing. Nerds at the Federal Reserve and the  
Treasury are taking hostages. It is madness.

And mad people have a tendency to infect everyone around them. The  
difference is that when you go mad ... well, that's the question mark:  
What will happen?

Ask the late Iman Morales, who went crazy in Brooklyn on a ledge 10  
feet above ground and was illegally tasered by New York police  
officers, eventually falling to his death, immobilized. A perfect  
metaphor for our economy, sure, but it's also the type of literal  
shock we might be awaiting, as the November election creeps nearer and  
shit begins to hit the fan with ferocity. Many of us so-called  
alternative journos are not conspiracy nuts, but realists. We look at  
galvanizing leaders like Barack Obama, America's next president, and  
compare his impact to that of Lincoln, Kennedy or King -- without  
forgetting that all three were eventually assassinated. We are the  
type of realists who live through two Bush presidents, both of whom  
configured a New World Order, with and without the approval of the  
American people and the world at large. The type of realists that  
notice that after 9/11, we couldn't fly to Vegas, but Osama bin  
Laden's family was flown out of the country on government charter.

And here is what we see today: Crowds protesting in the streets, the  
people's money wiped out thanks to the Bush administration's latest  
economic shock and awe. An army brigade matter-of-factly betraying  
Posse Comitatus for the purpose of crowd control. The public trust and  
wealth almost robbed cleanly with congressional approval.

In other words, we see another unfolding coup, which is to say, a  
rerun. And there is no telling what the future may hold, or whether or  
not we are connecting vectors that should remain solitary. But our  
math has worked just fine in the past -- better than Ben Bernanke and  
Henry Paulson's math, that's for sure.

And we'd love to be wrong about what's coming. But unfortunately that  
isn't up to us, and it never has been: It's up to the Bush  
administration. And it has never failed to let us down.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/100689/will_wall_street's_meltdown_turn_america_into_a_police_state/?page=1