In the Land of the Bubble Dwellers

“We need to recover the language of class warfare.” Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, author and revolutionary.

The mainstream media in this country is owned and operated by corporate America for corporate America, so it’s no surprise that the airwaves are loaded with misinformation, propaganda and flat out lies. On CBS Sunday Morning last week there was a segment about Ben Bernanke, who headed up the Federal Reserve from 2006 until 2014, that was so misleading it practically rocketed off the bullshit meter.

According to Bernanke’s telling, the Wall Street bailout of 2008 was absolutely necessary to save the US and world economy from total disaster, and the virtue of the decision by the Bush Administration, and after that Tim Geithner and the Obama people, to bail out the banks has led to the recovery we find ourselves enjoying in 2015.

I don’t suppose Bernanke ever bothered to read Neil Barofsky’s book Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, because if he had he wouldn’t be trying to re-write history and the role he and the Fed played in it. Bernanke made the ludicrous, not to mention false, statement that no one in Washington saw the mortgage crisis coming. I suppose one had to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve to be that blind and stupid. Look, Ben, you lying pinhead, plenty of people outside the DC bubble knew what was going on in the housing business, and as it turns out, your predecessor, Alan Greenspan, was also very well aware that the fundamentals of the housing market were totally fucked up.

Let’s be very clear about the bailout – it didn’t have anything to do with helping ordinary people who had lost or were in the process of losing their homes. Here’s what Barofsky, who was appointed to the post of Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, had to say:

“…to what I saw as a hijacking of both the bailouts and the government itself by a handful of Wall Street financial institutions and their executives. I saw how they were able to exert their power and influence to protect and reinforce a dangerous status quo that worked brilliantly for them but has left the rest of the country behind.”

The “recovery” has been lovely for corporate America, assorted oligarchs and the wealthy, and a sham for people who work for a living, and Ben Bernanke knows it, even if he’s not willing to stare into his bathroom mirror and admit it. When asked why income inequality has increased since the bailouts, Bernanke doubled down on his mendacity and said it was because too many working people lack the skills to compete in the globalized economy.

That’s one of the prized tropes of the bubble class, pinning the blame for circumstances on the victims of 40 years of official government monetary, tax, trade, and labor policy. I guess Bernanke has forgotten the millions and millions of American jobs that have been exported to China, Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, Jordan, Bangladesh and Honduras, just to name a few places where labor is dirt cheap and labor and environmental regulations are lax or completely non-existent.

Capitalism depends on exploitation, amorality and greed; it has no governor on its rapacious appetites, and it always contains the seed of its own destruction, even without the complicity of the central government.  Unless it was filled with complete imbeciles, the Federal Reserve knew that American banks were gambling heavy on home mortgages and that those bets would come due with disastrous consequences. The fact is that the Fed, which exists to serve its member banks, turned a blind eye.

And the fact is that Ben Bernanke was Chairman of the Fed when the bubble burst. Now the fucker is spinning a story to protect his reputation, and of course, CBS helps sell his lies.