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January 17, 2010
There is a clash of ideas between an angry public on Main Street angry over the fallout from the global financial crisis and the unrepentant bankers on Wall Street who have returned to business-as-usual with their runaway profits and bonuses that the bankers are achieving thanks to the support of a debt-laden taxpayer.
The contrasts deepen when the disaster and suffering in Haiti is bought into the picture:
Martin Rowson
But hey, this is capitalism and financial capital is very powerful. Stuff happens, according to the bankers. Capitalism has its booms and busts every six to seven years.The destruction is a way to clean out the weak. Its a way that the world works. The global financial crisis was like a hurricane that nobody could have predicted.
So there is no need for greater regulation of financial capital because the global financial crisis in order to prevent the pileup of up ever more debt, both by pushing loans on the public and by taking on ever-higher leverage within the financial industry.
As Paul Krugman says in The Guardian we need to remind ourselves what has happened so far:
the US economy is still grappling with the consequences of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; trillions of dollars of potential income have been lost; the lives of millions have been damaged, in some cases irreparably, by mass unemployment; millions more have seen their savings wiped out; hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, will lose essential healthcare because of the combination of job losses and draconian cutbacks by cash-strapped state governments....And this disaster was entirely self-inflicted...This time we're in trouble entirely thanks to the dysfunctional nature of our own financial system. Everyone understands this; everyone, it seems, except the financiers themselves.
That is an effective refutation of finance capital's understanding of how the global financial system works.
Do the top executives actually believe their rhetoric about a global financial crisis being akin to a hurricane? Or are they just trying it on in front of Congress?
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What's there to say?
The rowson cartoon says it all.
Unless you want to add Rush Scumbaugh's corollary to Pat Robertson; to not give aid to
Haiti in case Obama "steals it".