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Edited on Tue Sep-30-08 06:57 PM by mike_c
Who's lying? Well, Bush and his cronies for starters. Their lips are moving so you can be pretty sure they're lying just because that's what they always do. They lie reflexively.
The financial industry is lying to us, starting with the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and proceeding through the Wall street investment banks and, at least to some degree, all the way to your local bank branch, although I suspect the folks there mostly believe the lies.
More to the point, most of our congressmen and congresswomen are lying to us. They're telling us that this financial mess is all about a liquidity crisis and that the credit engines are freezing up, that if we don't buy Wall Street's bad debts we'll descend into another great depression, that if taxpayers don't pony up another $700 billion the sky will fall and tomorrow we'll all begin the slow process of starving to death in unemployment lines.
They're lying to us to keep us afraid.
The truth is that they've been lying to us for the last eight years-- and they've been stealing from us too. By keeping the dollar weak, and on an ever weakening trajectory, they've bled us in slow doses so that we hardly noticed the pain at all, but every day we've gotten a little weaker, a little closer to the edge. Every day they've fed on us a little more, draining a bit more value from our paychecks, our property, and our productivity. One of the most audacious transfers of wealth from working Americans to the "investor class" has taken place right under our eyes, essentially unnoticed.
But no, you say, my wages went up a little bit over the last few years, if you're lucky, and property values skyrocketed. But did they really? If a house was worth $150,000 in 2000 but three times that in 2005, as happened to nearly every home in my neighborhood, without one lick of improvement-- how could its real value have risen that much? Sure, it might have appreciated a little if demand for housing increased, but such a meteoric rise would require a housing crisis with people fighting over any scrap of shelter.
Instead, the dollar was bled down so that it takes more dollars to buy that same house, and THAT, along with all the other real estate market manipulations and mortgage shell games, primed the pump to blow a bubble big enough to raise home prices enormously faster than home values-- until the bubble blew. It was all illusion. Smoke and mirrors to fool the rubes. We've been harvested.
Meanwhile, our real wages declined with every fall in the dollar even when we thought we were treading water or maybe even making a little more. All of this was designed to transfer real wealth from us to the bankers and other financial manipulators, their investors and their pet politicians.
They're still lying to us because they aren't saying that the liquidity crisis will cause the dollar to strengthen, and that as the bubble deflates-- as the wild ride the financial industry has been on as it fed with increasing frenzy on the real worth of wages and productivity comes to an end-- we will gradually become wealthier as our paychecks regain their value. Home prices will fall back into reach of more and more Americans. Gas prices will decline. Food will become less and less expensive.
Don't believe the lies. Tell your congress critters that you're onto them. Tell your neighbors and your friends that they've been hoodwinked and the bastards are trying to pull off the biggest heist in history to keep their run going or to at least end it in style, while you and your children bleed through indentured servitude to their greed for the next generation or more.
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