"Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelope them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be too late."
– ‘Conceal Your Intentions’, Law 3 of the 48 Laws of Power
The government, under the aegis of a fake “Conservative” Executive administration, is seriously considering the nationalization of the United States’ banking industry, which is a destructive Socialist move if ever there was one and would surely signal the strong possibility of the End of Days for the United States.
But as with all anti-Constitutional, anti-capitalism moves made by insane-with-power politicians in the United States, there has to be an artificial enemy, a needed image of a “harm” actual or imagined (in these circumstances, always imagined), for them to set the new precedent for saving us from ourselves.
Economists the world over have long been frustrated by the fact that the wealthy of a given society are routinely on the pointy end of a pointing, blame-giving finger, as it is natural for humans to hate the rich unless they, themselves, are rich (this is known as “envy”). Politicians the world over have long been equally as gleeful about the delusion. It gives them all sorts of openings to take more power for themselves…and mostly without any meaningful protest or opposition.
This is an expression of the never-ending conspiracy that seeks to destroy the self-hood of every member of society.
The latest and greatest artificial enemy is, as it typically is, a problem that was mostly caused by the government in the first place. (But you’ve probably never noticed that the government never makes a mistake; it’s just that, here and there, an individual politician engages in an indiscretion.)
This is the Subprime mortgage industry meltdown.
It was government, happily heeding the lobbying of special interest groups like those that are headed up by racist black “ministers” Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and more official civil rights groups like the Public Interest Research Group, that began putting high pressure on private lenders to create new, innovative subprime mortgage products together to end discrimination against…well, against people who were unlikely to be able to pay back the money they borrowed.
It should come as no surprise that Wall Street (literal and figurative) sought to leverage the power of these new products to its advantage, especially since the government wanted bushels of money thrown into this new social initiative and, especially under President Slick Willy, created regulations and disclosures to punish private lenders who did not think this was such a good idea for them or for borrowers. But the traders on Wall Street who weren’t deeply on the inside had been duped, and a fatally flawed boom industry was invented.
The Federal Reserve delivered the coup de grace to the private lending industry when it first told lenders that, proportionate to the amount of “bad paper” that it had outstanding (and was forced to write), it had to refrain from investing money for profits. As if that weren’t enough, the Fed then created guidelines for issuing mortgage-backed securities that mixed good paper with bad paper, spreading the bad debt like a disease to investors…including foreign investors, who now feel a general revulsion toward U.S. mortgage-backed securities, U.S. hedge funds, U.S. credit and, worst of all, buying or holding the U.S. Dollar.
And suddenly, the U.S. Treasury Department wants to create a federal Mortgage Origination Commission run by a six-person board which would, of course, include representatives of the Federal Reserve—which is not federal and has no reserves and which greatly helped along this problem to begin with.
And of course big mortgage industry lobbyists including The Mortgage Bankers Association, the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, and the U.S. Chamber’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness (an oxymoron if there ever was one) trade groups are shouting out their approval.