"The Great Taking": Vast Systemic Risk in the Financial System?

In recent years I have often wondered if the constant drama—often deliberately produced and amplified by corrupt and inept governments—is a means of distracting our attention from the fact that those who work in the financial industry have become astronomically wealthy since the Financial Crisis of 2009, while the middle and working classes have struggled to keep up with the rising cost of living.

Especially suspicious in this regard have been the endless ravings about Racism and Russia that have been broadcast for the last several years.

Talking about Racists and Russians behind every bush was an easy way to distract attention from the fact that the Obama administration didn’t prosecute a single major Wall Street executive for fraud, even as solid evidence of vast Wall Street fraud emerged during the first years of his administration.

The same guys who were chiefly responsible for the financial crisis were then bailed out by the Federal Reserve’s “Quantitative Easing” program. This backdoor bailout was so brazen that the man who was tasked with running the program—Andrew Huszar—ultimately felt compelled to write a mea culpa about it in the Wall Street Journal (see “Confessions of a Quantitative Easer,” Andrew Huszar, WSJ, Nov. 11, 2013.)

At this exact same time, we were relentlessly flogged with “America is Racist” propaganda, conditioning us not to notice that we—the people who work in the real, main street economy—had just been looted. Instead of thinking about institutional banditry, we were trained to loath ourselves for our “institutional racism.”

Few Americans are aware that, in October 2008, a Citibank executive named Michael Froman presented a list of candidates for Obama’s first cabinet—including individuals who were subsequently instrumental in bailing out Citibank—to campaign manager John Podesta.

As David Dayen at the New Republic noted:

It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more.”

For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.”

Geithner ended up as Obama’s treasury secretary, while Summers was a key author of the response to the 2008 recession as director of Obama’s National Economic Council. And these men ensured that Froman’s Citigroup continued to benefit from the largest bailout the federal government gave during the financial crisis.

Froman’s email was published as part of Wikileaks disclosures in the summer and autumn of 2016. Many of the Clinton and Podesta e-mails revealed such shocking corruption that the Democrat Party machine HAD to change the subject.

And so, like a magician doing a misdirection trick, the Party supplied their lackeys at the news agencies with the fabricated story of Trump-Russian Collusion. The totality of circumstances strongly suggests that, because DNC staff Seth Rich knew that the e-mails were leaked by a DNC insider and not hacked by Russians, he could not be allowed to live to tell the tale.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I was, at the time, astonished that so many Americans fell for this trick. Surely, I thought, this was the ultimate expression of the childish gullibility of the American people.

Four years later, the same cohort that fell for the Trump-Russian Collusion Hoax embraced the COVID-19 Vaccine Religion with equal fervor.

That was when my circle of friends pared down to a handful of guys and girls who had somehow retained their critical thinking ab