Bernanke's Plan to Bail out the Rich and Make the Middle Class Pay from Open Left - Front Page

 by Ian Welsh http://www.openleft.com/diary/16307/bernankes-plan-to-bail-out-the-rich-and-make-the-middle-class-pay

Apparently he is pushing for cuts in social spending, and opposing increasing taxes on the rich.

So far Bernanke has been succesful at making sure that the rich weren't wiped out by their failures and retained their power.

Trillions were spent bailing out the rich, and no taxes were levied on them to pay for it.  Now what will happen is that in order to balance the budget, money which primarily helps the middle and working classes will be cut, while those same middle and working classes will be forced to bail out the insurance and health industries.

At the same time, military spending is up slightly under 100% in real terms from what it was in 2000 (267.2 billion in 2000 dollars in 2000, 490 billion today).  The US economy has militarized and financialized.  Virtually everything that isn't attached to one of those two streams (and remmber, the housing bubble was ultimately about financialization) is withering on the vine.

The decision to escalate in Afghanistan won't cost 30 billion dollars a year, it will cost that money plus all the money which could have been saved by withdrawing from Afghanistan and cutting military expenditures significantly.

Coming and going, baby.  Coming and going.  First they used your money and credit to bail out the rich, now they are going to make you pay back all the rich's losses.  Meanwhile banks aren't lending, jobs aren't returning and you are due for the 20 worst economic years of your lives.

This is a bipartisan project.  Obama is as on board with it as Bush was.  It's not an accident that he wants to keep Bernanke or that he hired Geithner, the man who was supposed to watch Wall Street, as his Treasury secretary.

The world's financial elites blew up the world's economy.  Now you, personally, are going to pay for it.