It Spreads
When the people of Greece saw Papandreou ousted, most were unaware of the bigger picture of what was happening all around them.
Similarly, most of us in the United States were equally ignorant when, in 2008, despite the switchboards at the US Capitol crashing under the volume of phone calls from constituents urging a “no” vote, our elected representatives voted yes at the behest of Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, and jammed through the biggest bailout of Wall Street in our nation’s history.
Steadily—and stealthily—Goldman Sachs and other banking elite were carrying out a global coup d’état.
There’s one tie that binds Lucas Papademos (the man who replaced Papandreou in Greece in 2011), Henry Paulson in the United States, and other prominent technocrats in important financial posts around the world, and that’s Goldman Sachs. All were former bankers and executives at the Wall Street giant, all assumed prominent positions of power, and all played a hand after the global financial meltdown of 2007–08, thus making sure Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street ilk weathered the storm and made significant profits in the process.
The British newspaper The Independent reported in early 2012 that conservative technocrats who are currently steering or who have steered postcrisis fiscal policy in Greece, Germany, Italy, Belgium, France, and now the United Kingdom all hail from Goldman Sachs. In fact, the head of the European Central Bank itself, Mario Draghi, was the former managing director of Goldman Sachs International.
And here in the United States, after Treasury Secretary and former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson did his job in 2008 securing Goldman’s multibillion-dollar bailout, he was replaced in the new Obama administration by Tim Geithner, who worked very closely with Goldman Sachs as head of the New York Fed and made sure Goldman received more than $14 billion from the bailout of failed insurance giant AIG.132
As the Daily Kos summed it up in November 2012, “The normal scenario usually involves helping a nation hide a problem and sell its debt until the problem blows up into a bubble that bursts in a spectacular way… Goldman Sachs then puts their ‘man’ into a position of power to direct the bailouts so that Goldman gets all its money back and more, while the nation’s economy gets gutted.”
We no longer have an economy that’s geared to benefit working people around the world; we have an economy that’s geared to exploit them for Wall Street profits.
Trader Alessio Rastani told the BBC133 in September, before Goldman’s Lucas Papademos was installed as Greece’s prime minister, “We don’t really care about having a fixed economy, having a fixed situation, our job is to make money from it… Personally, I’ve been dreaming of this moment for three years. I go to bed every night and I dream of another recession.”
Rastani continued, “When the market crashes… if you know what to do, if you have the right plan set up, you can make a lot of money from this.”
And as we’ve seen over the last decade, the bankers know exactly what to do. They’ve had the right plan set up, and it’s nothing short of a global coup d’état.
As Rastani bluntly told the BBC, “This is not a time right now for wishful thinking that governments are going to sort things out. The governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world.”
Little Dictators
The people of Michigan know very well what the people of Greece are going through.
What’s disguised as technocracy in Europe is a shadow corporate government in the United States (described in chapter 8), steadily working to undermine our current democratic government. And, just like in Europe, making sure that whatever wealth is left postcrisis gets sucked up by the Royalists.
I was speaking to Reverend David Bullock, the president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in Highland Park, Michigan, about what life is like under Governor Rick Snyder’s new “Emergency Financial Managers” law.
The law—which has technically been on the books since the late 1980s, but was broadly expanded in 2011 when Republican Rick Snyder took over as governor—allows the governor of Michigan to appoint “financial managers” to take over cities that are struggling in the wake of the financial crisis.
These financial managers selected by Michigan’s governor are typically paid six-figure salaries and have enormous power. They can fire local elected officials, stripping entire populations in places such as Highland Park of their voice, and their vote, to determine the best policies for their own community.
They can break contracts, especially union contracts with local police, firefighters, and teachers. They can sell off the city’s assets—the commons—to corporate interests at a fire-sale price, such as what happened in the city of Benton Harbor. There, under the control of a “financial manager,” a ninety-acre Lake Michigan waterfront park (a part of the commons that’s enjoyed by mostly low-income kids in a minority neighborhood) was sold off to real estate developers, who wanted to build a golf course resort for the affluent white neighborhood across the river. And worse, Governor Snyder’s managers can completely redo local budgets without any input from local elected officials.
In other words, they can do on a local level all the things austerity-obsessed technocrats can do in Europe.
“This is a state takeover,” Reverend Bullock told me. “The vote does not count—it’s null and void. We’ve got Michigan, the new Mississippi, where liberty is being lynched.”134
Snyder’s “financial managers” had been installed to replace democratically elected officials in the cities of Flint, Ecorse, Benton Harbor, Pontiac, and Reverend Bullock’s Highland Park.
“What’s it like to live under tyranny? What’s it like to live under dictatorship?” Reverend Bullock asked rhetorically. “How about no police officers? How about limited firefighters? How about taking streetlights out of cities so that people are in the dark from five p.m. to roughly eight a.m.? How about living with low morale and despair?
“This is about dismantling democracy,” Reverend Bullock concluded.135
In November 2012, organized people of Michigan gathered enough signatures to put Governor Snyder’s little-dictators law on the ballot for repeal. And voters did indeed repeal the law in that election.
But at the beginning of 2013, the Republicans in the Michigan state legislature passed a carbon copy of the law, Snyder signed it, and it was again back on the books, against the people’s will. Within months, Snyder announced he deemed the entire city of Detroit to be in a “financial emergency” and appointed one of his little dictators to oversee the city’s deconstruction.
One-half of the entire black population in Michigan is now shut out of democracy and under the control of these “financial managers.”
Reporter Andy Kroll at Mother Jones magazine traces the origins of this law to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, noting, “the free-market-loving center published four recommendations, including granting emergency managers the power to override elected officials (such as a mayor or school board member) and toss out union contracts. All four ended up in Snyder’s legislation.”136