Our debt time bomb is ready to go ka-boom Paul B. Farrell – MarketWatch

Our debt time bomb is ready to go ka-boom Paul B. Farrell – MarketWatch.

This is truly stunning, coming from such an establishment financial source.  The author, Paul Farrell, who I don’t really know anything about, lays out a truly unsettling list of interconnected “bombs” that will be detonating over the next few years.

Yes, 20. And yes, any one can destroy your retirement because all 20 are inexorably linked, a house-of-cards, a circular firing squad destined to self-destruct, triggering the third great Wall Street meltdown of the 21st century, igniting the Great Depression II that George W. Bush, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and now President Obama have simply delayed with their endless knee-jerk, debt-laden wars, stimulus bonanzas and bailouts.

Many of these bombs are connected to government and private debt loads that are reaching historical tipping points, others are related to resource use and population.  If you read the article you will recognize these bombs from other sources of information.  I don’t need to list them here.  However, the last 5 bombs that he lists speak loudly (you can almost imagine the man screaming and turning red in the face as he wrote this) of the unholy corporate/government alliance that will stymie all efforts to deal rationally with the economic/environmental/population bombs that are included in the list.  These are the bombs that that we can defuse, if only we will take back our representative democracy.

16. Fed/Treasury Bailout Bombs. Tax credits, loans, cash and purchase of toxic assets from Wall Street banks estimated at $23.7 trillion as new debt was shifted from too-big-to-fail Fat-Cat banks to taxpayers.

17. Insatiable Washington Lobbyists Bombs. Paulson, Goldman, Geithner, Morgan and Wall Street banks, through their lobbyists and former employees working inside now have absolute power over government spending. Democracy and voters are now irrelevant in America’s new corporate-socialism.

18. Shadow Banking: The Derivatives Bomb. Wall Street wants no regulation of this $670 trillion, high-risk, out-of-control casino that’s highly leveraged versus the $50 trillion total GDP of all nations. We forget that derivatives almost destroyed global economies in 2008-09, finally will by 2012.

19. Dysfunctional Two-Party Political Bomb. Polarized partisanship increasing: Every day both parties show zero interest in cooperating for the public good. Instead they fight viciously, resisting everything and anything proposed by opponents. Only goal: Score political points, make the other side look bad.

20. The Coming Populous Rebellion Bombs. Nobody trusts anyone in authority. For good reason. So immediate gratification, short-term betting and a lack of long-term perspective wins for individual investors, consumers and taxpayers as well as Washington, Wall Street and Corporate America CEOs. Today: “Doing what’s right for the common good and country” is just empty political rhetoric.

There you have it.  And this is why we have to tell these greedy soulless Powers that Be that we will not allow them to fiddle (with each other) while the rest of us burn.  We must withdraw our consent and remove their illusion of legitimacy, NOW.

RadicalNOTA

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