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"In the cold assessment of history, Barack Obama will be remembered more for his massive transfers of national wealth to the finance capitalist class, than as the first Black president of the United States." Mostly under his administration, $12.8 trillion dollars has been committed to prop up the Wall Street oligarchy. Yet the five banks that are the biggest recipients of federal largess continue to hold $195 trillion in fatally toxic derivatives - a notional value more than three times the planetary domestic product! "There is nothing rational to do but to wipe the obligations, and their holders, off the face of the Earth, in order to save the real economy."
U.S. Economy: The Cancer is Still There
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“Obama will be remembered more for his massive transfers of national wealth to the finance capitalist class, than as the first Black president of the United States.”
How does one restore the Lords of Capital to their former positions as dictators of the U.S. and global economies, while keeping their seats warm as de facto political rulers of the American state? Saving the finance capital oligarchy has emerged as President Obama’s central mission – the guiding focus of his young administration. Obama has found new and myriad ways to go where no American president has ever gone before, in funneling somewhere around $13 trillion of national treasure to the parasitical class that goes by the shorthand, Wall Street.
By March of this year, the federal government and the Federal Reserve had “spent, lent or committed” $12.8 trillion to the banksters, according to the Bloomberg financial news service. That amounts to 90 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the entire United States economy for last year. Let us put it another way: Mostly under the auspices of Barack Obama’s administration, the value of nearly every good and service produced in the United States in 2008 has been, in one way or another, put at the disposal of a tiny financial oligarchy. This is the kind of overarching reality that defines, not just presidencies, but eras. In the cold assessment of history, Barack Obama will be remembered more for his massive transfers of national wealth to the finance capitalist class, than as the first Black president of the United States.
President Obama has chosen to use the limited resources of the current and future United States – $13 trillion so far – to prop up a criminal class.
The primary beneficiaries of this history-shaking generosity are the same banksters that brought about the economic meltdown through their monstrous invention, the derivative. This fictitious capital – derivatives – created to facilitate gambling on a scale that far exceeds the productive capacity of the entire planet Earth, is a cancer that Barack Obama has chosen to feed, rather than cut out. As F. William Engdahl points out in a recent article , five U.S. banks are the biggest repositories of toxic derivatives: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo-Wachovia Bank. Together, these five Banksters of the Apocalypse hold derivatives with the notional value of $193 trillion. That is more than three times the value of the real economy of the whole world – which is about $60 trillion. These deadly derivatives continue to sit there, immovable, in these five fatally stricken institutions. There are not enough trillions existent in the national or world economies to absorb these fatal instruments. There is nothing rational to do but to wipe the obligations, and their holders, off the face of the Earth, in order to save the real economy. Instead of feeding the cancer, a rational government would use the people’s wealth to create public institutions to dispense credit and guide economic development. The bankster gamblers would be consigned to the dustbin of history – and good riddance. But President Obama has chosen to use the limited resources of the current and future United States – $13 trillion so far – to prop up a criminal class. All the manufactured hoopla about stock market rallies and phony stress tests is intended to mask the central truth of our time: the derivatives cancer will eat away at the real economy until the class that spawned it is cut away, and flushed out of existence.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire, an international electronic press service.
Mary Hooks is National Field Secretary with the Movement 4 Black Lives based in Atlanta.
Brooke Floyd is co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly at the People's Advocacy Institute.
