IMF Director Christine Lagarde did indeed insult Greek people in her interview to the Guardian on Friday, and most of us waited for her to retract her comments, which she of course never did. She attempted to pass the notion that Greek people do not deserve sympathy for everything they are suffering from today, and rather endorse the idea that we more or less deserved it. That is why she made it clear in her interview that the IMF “has no intention of softening the terms of the country’s austerity package”.
Greek parents, she said, have to take responsibility if their children are being affected by spending cuts. “Parents have to pay their tax,” she concludes: it’s payback time, the fun’s over, now stop complaining."
We see this as insulting... as did many other foreign media sites such as the Slog. In fact in one article today the author pretending to be Lagarde writes:
"Especially when the banks that stand to go under for their criminally targeted stupidity are French, just like me. Especially given how deep in debt France is thanks to tax evasion and wasteful municipal spending there….and all the money I blew while Finance Minister. Especially because my France wants the money it hard-sold you for all those munitions. And finally, because I’ve only just joined the IMF – and I’m not having you greasy, lazy bastards spoiling my cv."
Indeed... sociopaths know no remorse – nor does this disease restrict its movement according to nationality, ethnicity or gender.
According to the Wall Street Journal, last Tuesday the Obama white House began formal steps to stick taxpayers into the position as final paymaster for the upcoming Wall Street derivatives Tsunami. And be in no doubt: this doesn’t mean behind banks that might make mistakes in derivatives markets, but behind the trading itself.A new US law makes clear that a clearinghouse receiving assistance was not required to “be or become a bank or bank holding company.” To get help, they only needed to be deemed “systemically important” by the new Financial Stability Oversight Council chaired by the Treasury Secretary.
Oh my oh my…now it all makes sense. Or rather, nonsense.
Last year regulators finalized the ‘rules’ ho-ho for how they would use this new power. On Tuesday, the Financial Stability Oversight Council secretly voted to proceed toward inducting several derivatives clearinghouses into the too-big-to-fail club. After further review, regulators will make final designations, probably later this year, and will announce publicly the names of institutions deemed systemically important.
Even the Journal thinks the idea is cynically nuts. It headlined the piece ‘A Mess the 45th President Will Inherit’.
Can you even begin to imagine the austerity there would have to be in order to pick up this tab? No, I can’t either. I know – let’s give it to Hardline Chrissie, she of the Fit Hissy. She’ll get the sum wrong and then everything will be fine.
Are you a man that at one listened to 1970s radicals wittering on about the Military-Industrial Complex, and waved a forefinger at your head, and walked away smiling at the paranoia of it all? Well then be informed that the jerks who came up with all that crap (most of whom are now dyed-in-the-wool capitalists around the world) must take their share of the blame for every Grizzly Geithner, Diabolical Draghi, Depraved Diamond and Beastly Blankfein plotting the poverty of the 93%.
You see, had it not been for all those crying wolf forty years ago, the slithering reptiles of 2012 wouldn’t be getting away with it quite so easily today. (Although to be fair, Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Blair and Brown are all well and truly implicated.)
Are they really sociopaths, or just stupid?
The Slog sees it as a mixture of both and we tend to agree. It notes that by definition sociopaths are stupid, because they imagine themselves to be both inviolate and unstoppable, but they usually aren’t. Not even these obscenely privileged folk will escape alive: the Eurocrats,
Camerlot, Newscorp, the Met Police, Pasok’s leaders, Goldman Sachs….all will die by the sword they have wielded with impunity those last twenty years, because the demand-free Hell they are pushing us all towards is simply unsustainable.
The only ones we should really worry about are the hidden hobgoblins in their silos: the ISPs, the GCHQs, and the other assorted information gatherers online. These people do not need the limelight. They’re not megalomaniacs, but rather the true Underground. Now they really could succeed in running all our lives in the end.
TheSlog