Sleepwalking To Armageddon?

OpEdNews

 Mike Krauss

In a just published book that too few Americans will read, All the Presidents’ Bankers, Nomi Prins lifts the cover from a century long cooperation and coordination between Wall Street and the White House, stretching back to Teddy Roosevelt in the years just before creation of the Federal Reserve.

As Wall Street veteran Pam Martens explains in a review of the book on her blog, Wall Street on Parade, “Wall Street can collapse, get bailed out by the taxpayers, cause a Great Recession and still call the shots in Washington.” 

Every American can now see that on account of Wall Street and with the collaboration of successive administrations, the prosperity of millions of Americans has been shattered, perhaps never to be recovered. 

Massive unemployment is lied away by not counting the millions who have given up looking for work. Foreclosures roll on. Home sales are plummeting. A generation of young Americans now graduates college with massive debt and no jobs. Or they take the jobs at Wal-Mart that used to be filled by the less educated. 

Who go where? Onto welfare, food stamps and unemployment, which many in Congress want to cut. Where does this lead? For the answer, look no further than Wal-Mart’s most recent annual report. 

It notes: “Our business operations are subject to numerous risks, factors and uncertainties, domestically and internationally, which are outside our control ” These factors include ” changes in the amount of payments made under the Supplement[al] Nutrition Assistance Plan and other public assistance plans, changes in the eligibility requirements of public assistance plans “” 

Wal-Mart’s major market is low-income shoppers. The company is acknowledging that public assistance programs are a significant factor in its revenue and profits. Increasingly, Wal-Mart’s customers are too poor to shop at Wal-Mart. 

The message in Prins’ book is that the economic trends, Wall Street practices and federal government collusion of today are in so many ways and so very frighteningly like the years before the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. 

Are we sleepwalking into an economic Armageddon? 

It is not the only looming catastrophe. The other is a confrontation with Russia. 

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Reposted with permission