Imagine you are severely behind on your mortgage and your house is about to be foreclosed. Making matters worse, you are underwater because you kept refinancing your home in order to take out the equity and purchase things you can’t afford. A week before your house is about to be repossessed by the bank, you decide to take out a payday loan at exorbitant rates to catch up to your past-due amount. Do you go to sleep that night thinking that you are in the clear?
Of course not, borrowing money in order to service debt is like eating Big Macs and chasing it with milkshakes to lose weight. Not only is your house still at risk of being foreclosed, by overleveraging yourself, you drastically worsened your financial outlook into the future. Sure you saved your house for a few months, but now you have two bills you have to pay that you can’t afford. Most Americans know this to be true, it is utter folly to mortgage your future in order to pay today’s rent.
Yet this is precisely what the US government and the Federal Reserve (they are not the same thing) did in 2008 to save Wall Street. Trillions of dollars were forked over to the same multinational corporations that imploded the global economy while their victims were told to eat cake. Most people know about the $700 billion sweetheart deal that was granted to larcenists like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, but few realize how more than $10,000,000,000,000 was gifted to Wall Street by way of a wealth transference scheme called Quantitative Easing.
People in power always use big words and acronyms to hide their criminal behaviors. Such was the case with Quantitative Easing aka QE. The Federal Reserve artificially inflated the markets for more than 14 years by purchasing securities as banking oligarchs played favorites to mega-corporations, disadvantaged small businesses and impoverished workers. While Wall Street saw record highs year over year, the vast majority of Americans were experiencing stagnant wages, job losses and homelessness rates that have not been witnessed since the Great Depression.
As if the Federal Reserve’s unconstitutional and immoral actions were not enough, they added injury to insult by lowing interest rates to near 0% in order to incentivize equity investments at the cost of savings. Realizing that they could make more money by reinvesting in their own stock instead of hiring more workers, boosting workplace morale and capital expenditures, multinational corporations supersized their greed while eliminating the covenant that they have to their employees and their customers.
The days of “easy money” are coming to an end as the Fed is now forced to increase interest rates in order to combat inflation. Corporate owned pundits and media personalities are doing their best to convince us that the skyrocketing costs of fuel, food and rent have to do with Covid-19 and Russia attacking Ukraine but that is a lie bigger than Texas and Alaska combined. Inflation is spiking because of one primary reasons: market consolidation (monopolies).
Decades of giving preferential treatment to huge corporations like Amazon, General Electric and Walmart while burdening small businesses with onerous regulations have eviscerated countless thousands of mom-and-pop shops. When market access is restricted and competition is minimal, price-fixing becomes normal. Gas as high as $6.00 a gallon and two bags of food from the grocery store that costs more than $100 is a direct result of multinational corporations consolidating market shares and then raising prices once they drive their competitors out of business.
We are potentially months away from a repeat of 2008 except this time there will be little the Federal reserve or the government can do to stop a downturn from morphing into a debilitating economic meltdown that could exceed the horrors of 1929. Interest rates are already near zero and even if the Fed is able to inch it back up to above 2% by next year, they will not be able to drop it by a big enough basis point to have much of an impact in case of a recession. The same is true of the US government; there is zero political will to pass a huge stimulus program. The global markets are walking a tightrope without a safety net to stop the inevitable fall.
While we are distracted by manufactured outrages and letting politicians divide us based on our differences, we could very well be overlooking an incoming storm that will make the “Great Recession” of 2008 look like child’s play by comparison. As much as we are conditioned to believe that the person who looks or thinks different than us is the problem, the truth is that the root cause of injustice is the global oligarchs who are intent on establishing a new world order where freedom becomes secondary to complying to their whims. If you want to know the source of fascism, it’s simple, follow the fiat currency.
I am running for Congress because I know that these two equally corrupt political parties have no interest in raising the issues I raised in this article. It is time for us to stop listening to the propaganda of Wall Street cronies and instead empower the communities where we live. I discussed the very points I raised in this article on the Sabby Sabs podcast which you can listen to in full below. I hope you take the time to find out more about my candidacy by going to the homepage and checking where I stand on the issues.