Bread, Circuses, And Toxic Indifference
Joe Biden Literally Shuts The Door On Legitimate Inquiry While Bailing Out Well Connected Financial Capitalists, Congress Empanels A 2023 Version Of The 12th Century Inquisition To Punish Journalists
If there ever was a defining moment that exemplified the lack of mental acuity, awareness, and empathy that is increasingly characteristic of Democratic party “leadership” under Joe Biden, it has to be his recent press statement on the status of the American economy in the wake of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.
Laboring under the ominous threat of repeating the instability and panic of the Bank bailouts of 2008, Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, thrown under the bus and tasked as spokesperson, shuffled between the various Sunday Talk shows the day before on March 12, where she seemed unwavering in announcing that, this time, unequivocally, there would be no bank bailouts.
The following day, in a massive policy reversal, directly contradicting his own Treasury Secretary and undermining Yellen’s credibility, Biden shuffled to his own podium in a White House briefing room, tense, squinting, swallowing hard, and slurring his words in an obvious rush to finish the prepared statement as quickly as possible. In fact, Biden announced to an incredulous press and public, there WOULD be a bailout, covering both insured and uninsured depositors. In perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed by financial capitalism, this generous response by Biden and The Fed wouldn’t cost the American taxpayer a dime.
Of course, the idea was to studiously avoid using the word “bailout”.
It is, at least to seasoned economists, obvious that depositors are generally working people who do business at banks, and are most certainly taxpayers, so, in fact, it is, ultimately, a taxpayer bailout.
Details were sparse and nothing was made quite clear.
The banking system, Biden claimed, is “safe,” due to “quick action” taken by his administration. The same “quick action” seems like an urgent priority when it comes to helping the rich campaign donors and politically connected investors, and fueling the Ukraine proxy war against Russia, but not so much for the working class and poor who are suffering health issues and continued toxic exposure in East Palestine, Ohio.
“The White House “acted swiftly and decisively to protect the American economy and strengthen public confidence in our banking system,” Newsom said in a statement. What Newsom didn’t mention is that it also protected his own companies if they held over $250,000 in deposits.”
Before abruptly turning and ignoring the corporate press contingent, literally shutting the door behind him as reporters shouted questions in vain, Biden inexplicably ended his statement with an unrelated and exceptionally odd “May God bless you and may God protect our troops.”
Was Biden hinting at a coming hot war that would commit US ground forces, or, as in past gaffe-prone press events, did he simply misspeak? Wasn’t this a matter of economics and not war? It was never made clear, and likely will never be so.
If this was supposed to be a moment of faith and reassurance, as Biden announced blanket forgiveness for SVB and all banks in the name of “safety,” preserving consumer confidence in financial capitalism, he didn’t sell it in any way, shape, or form.
It was a moment that was simultaneously comic and tragic. Biden’s social media and digital propaganda team, as always, only emphasized the narrative they want to project, even if that narrative defies common sense and reality.
From ignoring the toxic poisoning of American citizens in East Palestine, Ohio, to the true reasons for the proxy war in Ukraine, lying about US responsibility for the Nordstream pipeline bombing, and turning his back on COVID, the closed-door, silent treatment has been one of Biden’s go-to weapons in the battle to keep the public misinformed, propagandized, and compliant.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the news is grim: the massive fraud that has been perpetrated by the banking industry, swept under the rug and obscured since at least 2008, is now being exposed, via the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, and the contagion has now spread globally to other banks.
Politicians like Biden, who live to serve their donor’s whims and protect their wealth, just committed the US taxpayer to an unprecedented full bailout beyond the standard FDIC insurance guarantee in place at most “regulated” banks of 250,000 dollars per depositor. Subsequently, we are now discovering that, in fact, powerful political figures like California Governor Gavin Newsom had direct financial interests tied to Silicon Valley Bank.
Biden’s startingly quick reaction to a crisis in capitalism magnified his priorities: “Capitalist Joe,” another mask in the ongoing performative political theater, came to the forefront to “rescue” the hardworking American working class, promising “accountability” when none has existed since the last bank collapse in 2008. If the Trump administration flagrantly showed their bias toward financial capitalists in rolling back bank regulations, Biden and The Democrats were never in a hurry to reverse the damage done, and now, it seems it’s too late. Ultimately, both parties are beholden to the banking sector for their political survival.
I don’t have any pretense of expertise in the complex intricacies of banking, currency, and global stock and bond trades, but after pouring over multiple videos on YouTube, I found a few that explained the dire situation we are approaching in layman’s terms.
To understand banking, one must first embrace a fundamental truth: Thanks to bipartisan regulatory rollbacks over the years, and a policy of fractional reserve banking, no bank in existence is, at any time, financially solvent. To contradict the mantra of Biden and all politicians, there is no “safe bank,” and there never has been.
To put it another way, all banks are, at all times, bankrupt.
Say a depositor opens an account and deposits a thousand dollars. The bank doesn’t make a profit by simply keeping that deposit on hand for withdrawal and, in fact, is only required by law to keep 100 dollars of that 1000-dollar deposit on hand for withdrawal, assuming the implementation of 10 percent fractional reserve banking. (I have heard that amount has been reduced to zero percent since the COVID crisis in 2020 but I can’t verify that).
The bank either invests the remaining 900 dollars in long or short-term government bonds or bundles it into secured loan packages. Thus, money is seeded into the larger economy under the presumption that if the economy is not “fed” it can’t “grow,” and the bank makes a profit on the interest.
Since most people don’t need the entirety of the 1,000 dollars they deposited in a matter of hours, there are usually no issues with the assets a bank has invested in, which don’t pay the bank until they “mature” after the prescribed time period. Theoretically then, no danger of a “bank run.
Perhaps one of the best-known popular examples is from Frank Capra’s classic film “It’s A Wonderful Life”
The problem arises, (in the case of the real-life version of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,) when bonds and other assets are devalued, because of the very policies of quantitative tightening by the Federal Reserve Bank. The idea is to combat soaring inflation, but in terms of SVB investments, and any bank for that matter, the higher the interest rates set by the Fed for banks to borrow money, the lower the value of bank-held assets like long-term bonds, an inverse relationship.
So, because the tech sector, (the primary customer of SVB,) in an increasingly competitive global economy, has been struggling, the demand from those customers for more cash withdrawals exceeded Silicon Valley Banks’ ability to cover the offsets between cash withdrawals and cash deposits. SVB was flush with cash deposits when interest rates were low and money was easy to borrow. Now obviously, not so much.
The bank frantically tried to sell its long-term assets to cover customer cash demand but to no avail. The SVB failure (perhaps triggered initially by the FTX collapse) has started a global cascade of systemic bank insolvency: Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and Credit Suisse.
Astoundingly, the cascading failures are moving so fast that, even as I type this, yet another bank, First Republic, is set to be bailed out.
Clearly, the flood of money being unleashed is like a Band-Aid on an arterial bleeder.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the beginning, not the end of economic calamity.
If you were looking for calm, reason, and reassurance from the US Congress in a time of arguably unprecedented instability, you would be hard-pressed to find it.
As I have written here before, the Democrats, instead of truly showing that they are a moral and viable alternative to the hard-line, anti-social policies of the Republicans, have instead become equally unhinged and deranged in their obsession and years-long messaging that all problems in the world are a result of Vladimir Putin. They have nothing to offer, no practical solutions, only gutted legislation for the “homeland,” and billions for military misadventures abroad, funneled to one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
With their backs to the wall, needing another distraction, the Democrats resorted to the equivalent of a McCarthyite witch hunt by lynching, tarring, and feathering the messenger in the public square.
Journalists Michael Shellenberger, and his better-known colleague Matt Taibbi, were summoned to testify in the “Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on the Twitter Files”.
As Taibbi testified:
”Today, I’m here because of a series of events that began late last year, when I received a note from a source online.
It read: “Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation… was going on at Twitter?”
The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.
What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”
We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.”
Perhaps at any other time, like the mid-70s era Watergate hearings, the government would be held to account. Watergate, and the subsequent hearings and resignation of an incumbent President were the literal example of “no one is above the law,” a phrase Democrats love to use when it comes to pursuing the alleged crimes of their enemies like Donald Trump, and hate when the fingers of illegality point in their direction.
Taibbi and Shellenberger’s efforts to expose the clear overreach and illegality of powerful government agencies to control public opinion by censoring speech and opinion should have been met with gratitude on the part of the Congressional panel.
Instead, Taibbi, like Seymour Hersh, who has a documented career of award-winning journalism for 30 years, was ridiculed by a panel of the ignorant and uninformed. Their misdirected outrage was not focused on REAL enemies of democracy and free speech, but on Taibbi himself. “Shooting the messenger” in real-time.
This extends beyond the circus-like “hearings” where credible journalism is put on trial. The Democrats are literally doubling down on the unhinged, ranting insanity of the “truth” of January 6th, a low IQ riot from years ago.
No one would condone the violence or thuggery, but it’s obvious that as with other Democratic party narratives from Russiagate to January 6th that are either no longer resonating or are prone to legitimate re-examination, the Democrats feel threatened. The truth is that they have worked harder on preserving the narratives, almost to the point of obsession, no matter how factually incorrect or dubious they are.
There is no better recent better example than this House floor speech by Rep Jamie Raskin, which defies even the loosest standards for objectivity. It also is an agenda-driven extension of the smearing of Matt Taibbi.
How is it possible that legislation FOR free speech, standing AGAINST censorship, is characterized as helping the enemies of America, (Russia, and China, duh )and smeared as the “Putin Protection Act?” This is stunning to watch, and it begs the question of Raskin’s agenda and mental stability at the same time.
It’s possible because The Democrats need to keep the American mindset in 2016, a time when Russia, Putin, and Trump joined forces to manipulate America into voting against Hillary Clinton in favor of Donald Trump.
Unfortunately for them, the rest of us live in 2023, where a failing economy on the verge of collapse, global war, high inflation, toxic poisoning of innocent citizens, and rampant homelessness are far more important than sustaining their tired and dubious narratives.
As always we deserve better and should continue to demand it.