A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford
Goldman Sachs, the most successful parasite in corporate finance and on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, “has been unmasked as one of the dirtiest players in the giant Casino that we know as Wall Street.” The villain isn't simple greed, but a system that “operates in opposition to the human economy.”
Wall Street: Phony Money and Earth-Shaking Crimes
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“The casino players are back and more deadly than ever.”
The permanent government called Goldman Sachs, the banking empire that was best friend of the Clinton and Bush administrations and, now, the Obama White House, has been unmasked as one of the dirtiest players in the giant Casino that we know as Wall Street. For a fee of $17 million, Goldman Sachs put together a toxic securities package that was engineered to fail, so that one hedge fund player could beat other clients of Goldman Sachs out of a billion dollars. The Securities and Exchange Commission is charging fraud, but nobody at Goldman Sachs will go to jail for perpetrating a billion dollar robbery. You could safely bet your house that – unless, of course, like millions of Americans, your house isn’t worth the mortgage you’re paying on it. Or if, like a majority of African Americans, you don’t own a house.
In fact, nobody but the superrich and their corporations can join the giant casino that global finance capitalism has become. Their game is played with instruments of mass economic destruction called derivatives, that are now valued at $600 trillion – a figure that sounds out of this world because it has no connection to the real world economy. $600 trillion is twelve times the value of the real economy of the entire planet. The very existence of a kind of phony money worth many times the actual value of every good and service produced in a year by every human being on Earth, is proof that global corporate capitalism operates in opposition to the human economy. The Lords of Capital, playing with derivatives in their casinos, create nothing of real value, but use their phony instruments to dominate and prey upon the rest of human society. It is only a scandal when, as with the Goldman Sachs fraud, the guys that get burned are other corporations and billionaires, whose intentions are just as larcenous as Goldman Sachs and its co-conspirators.
“The Lords of Capital, playing with derivatives in their casinos, create nothing of real value.”
The $600 trillion global derivatives figure is just an estimate. No one knows the exact value. But it is now commonly accepted that derivatives were the dynamite that blew the world economy apart in 2008. Back then, before the crash, derivatives were also valued at about $600 trillion. Seven former heads of European governments and five former finance ministers warned, in an open letter, that finance capital and its derivative devices were leading the world into a disaster. Their letter was titled, “Mad Finance Must Not Rule Us.” But Mad Finance stayed on the throne, and catastrophe struck, four months later. Now, thanks to worldwide bank bailouts, the casino players are back and more deadly than ever, betting against the financial survival of entire nations, and against the European currency, itself. What else is there to do, for a finance capitalist class that creates nothing, but seeks to own everything, and destroys all that is of real value to human beings, in the process.
The Democrats on Capitol Hill and their boss in the White House pretend they want to reign in Mad Finance capital and its derivatives. But the Democrats' pitiful play-acting at regulation amounts to little more than asking Wall Street to use better table manners as they eat the rest of us alive.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
This week’s featured author is Sami Schalk. Schalk is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Her book is Black Disability Politics.
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