Liberty Maven

On March 2nd, 2009, Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky published “America’s Fiscal Collapse”.

While the title may seem almost banal in today’s landscape of “alarmist” articles about the United States’ and the world’s economic crisis, I can assure you that Chossudovsky’s piece is quite different.  Not only does he pull straight from White House Budget documents and other “straight from the horse’s mouth” source material, such as those of  The Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the FHA, but he quite simply and lucidly exposes the very direct yet quite shadowy method in which the recent, current, and pending bailouts do so much more than bankrupt the United States and lead her to financial ruin: indeed, the bailouts contribute to financing the restructuring of the banking system leading to a massive concentration of wealth and centralization of banking power.

The stated objective of the bank bailout programs is to alleviate the banks’ burden of bad debts and non-performing loans. In actuality what is happening is that these massive amounts of money are being used by a handful of institutions to consolidate their position in global banking.

Chossudovsky does a fantastic job of explaining all of the facts, starting at the beginning.  He goes into specifics regarding not only the bailouts, but also the entire Fiscal Year 2010 Budget and how they go far beyond merely accelerating the current deficits and the overall national debt, and how the costs of the bailouts will force the current Administration to completely abandon the infrastructure of the United States:

…all the revenue accruing from individual federal income taxes ($1.061 trillion), (FY 2010) namely all the money households across America pay in the form of federal taxes, will not suffice to finance the handouts to the banks, which officially are of the order of 1.45 trillion…

Public spending will be slashed with a view to curtailing a spiralling budget deficit. Health and education programs will not only remain heavily underfunded, they will be slashed, revamped and privatized. The likely outcome is the outright privatization of public services and the sale of State assets including public infrastructure, urban services, highways, national parks, etc. Fiscal collapse leads to the privatization of the State…

The fiscal  crisis is further exacerbated by the compression of tax revenues resulting from decline of the real economy. Unemployed workers do not pay taxes nor do bankrupt firms. The process is cumulative. The solution to the fiscal crisis becomes the cause of further collapse…  The proposed solution becomes the cause of the crisis.

…Who will be buying State assets at rock bottom prices? The financial elites, which are also the recipients of the bank bailout.