Tuesday, March 24, 2009

AIG - what is really going on



A shocking 10 minute primer on AIG. The basic point is "forget about the bonuses, watch where big money goes".

Bet you glad you aren't an American taxpayer? It is not as if the UK government is bailing out the rich at the expense of everyone else.

10 comments:

  1. I wish we had Glenn Beck in the UK: he would bust the socialist's asses: this is a Naomi Klein-made depression. It is all a result of government meddling and bad policy. By a socialist Labour government! It makes me sick!

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  2. What I'm sick of is the term 'socialism' being tossed around as a synonym for lawlessness and corruption. Banksters and their stooges in politics were never socialists, and Naomi Klein was never part of any government. Beck's analysis of the political shenanigans surrounding AIG and Freddie & Fannie was spot on, but the correct term for breaking contracts willy nilly is lawlessness, not socialism.

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  3. Anon 11:08

    I agree with you. Socialism is bad, but our problems are not due to socialism. As you rightly say, this is lawlessness.

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  4. Socialism enables corruption by justifying state control of larger and larger portions of the nation: the bigger the state, the more corruption will sneak in to those parts of the state that the public are not paying attention to.

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  5. The very heart of capitalism - the City, Wall Street - did not *need* to ratchet up its leverage over the years using risk-hiding vehicles such as CDOs. You could call this "innovative lies". The final result was a financial catastrophe of epic proportions.

    The government may have given birth to the bubble, like many governments have done so in the past (no one has the balls to put a stop to a bubble for being blamed for its ultimate collapse) - but its the financial institutions that gave this one such a toxic *unregulated* payload.

    To paint this as a "socialist" problem is a gross misrepresentation of what has being going on in financial houses across the globe.

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  6. The British Labour Party is a socialist party. It is a member of the Socialist International, it issues bright red socialist manifestors during elections (Naomi Klein could have typed the stuff it is soooo Naomi), and everyone knows their minions in the fingers of the state are socialists. It is a socialist enterprise and it has blown up in their faces.

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  7. Labour aren't socialist anymore. They were up until Blair took over, then they got rid of Clause 4 in their constitution, which was the clause that basically said "We are a socialist party" (I paraphrase). Seriously, you think a government that wants to part-privatize the Royal Mail is socialist? That's ridiulous.

    And Alice, using Glenn Beck to jusitify your views is stupid. Glenn Beck is about as far right a talking head can be without actually breaking the law. He holds some pretty extreme views. As one small example among many stupid views he holds, he thinks the current US administration is "communist". Okayyyyy....

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  8. What is 'socialist'? Well, copper-bottom pensions and jobs for the public sector. Check. Pouring tons of borrowed money into the public sector. Check. Actively destroying the private sector and helping the high street to become bankrupt, Check. Issuing a bright red manifesto that looked just like Mao's little red book. Check. Being a member of the Socialist International and giving trillions in grants to their various NGOs etc. Check. Connect the dots. It seems that socialists think they have it all sussed after reading No Logo and the Shock Doctrine, yet they never have the intellectual nous to investigate the giant global octopus that is global socialism. That thing is bigger than capitalism.

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