Submitted by Ain't No Fortunate Son
On Quantitative Easing, American Foreign Policy, and Who REALLY Wins the Upcoming War in Syria
Quantitative Easing, or QE, has as it’s raison d’etre the monetization of US Treasury debt or, put more simply, financial alchemy. Without an ever increasing calendar of Treasury debt issuance Ben Bernanke can't keep printing new money and handing it over to the jumbo insolvent (but still unindicted) Wall Street banks in order to bail out their (still) broken balance sheets. Think of the entire process as a sophisticated 3 card monte scheme (with a little money laundering thrown in for good measure) between the Treasury, the Primary Dealers (those unindicted Wall Street banks) and the Fed, whereby Treasury debt is miraculously transformed into cash (there’s the alchemy, turning water into wine and debt into Benjamins) and delivered into the hands of the bankers. This is money, by the way, that never finds it's way into productive economic use (about $4 Trillion and counting), but is simply earmarked to enrich Wall Street’s elite via the four- year liquidity-induced ramp in world financial asset prices (there’s the money laundering – dirty cash in on the BID, clean cash out on the ASK). Churn a billions dollars a day of freshly printed new money hundreds of times a day via algorithmic-driven trading and it’s highly unlikely that the best forensic accounting experts in the world will ever be able to track you, even if they were tasked to, which of course they’ll never be.
But then again, that was always the real purpose behind QE anyway, which a tragically naïve new president never understood when the bankers ran the table on him on March 27, 2009 by threatening him with that tried and true – and very transparent - cold war inspired “Mutual Assured Destruction” ruse. One can actually imagine JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon arrogantly lecturing Barack Obama at that White House meeting a mere two months after the inauguration: “If WE go down Mr. President, then the American People go down too.” And both of Obama’s top financial guys who were in the room that day - Summers and Geithner – backed Bernanke and the bankers as well. And so it was that for the first time the wheels started falling off the carefully constructed media hype machine that had heretofore portrayed this quixotic president as the savior of the disenfranchised common man, and Obama fell for the bankers’ con hook, line, and sinker. The hip, cool, street savvy charmer turned out to be a rube, and the Fed’s been printing 24/7 ever since while the American economy is still mired in an excruciating, heart breaking recession – some would say depression - unless you’re a Wall Street banker that is.
Incidentally, until his fall from grace as a result of increasing attention on an ever-increasing number of financial scandals and investigations by the DoJ, SEC, and other so-called “US and international law enforcement, regulatory and enforcement agencies” Jamie Dimon was logged into the White House visitor records at least eighteen times since Obama’s inauguration, and he had at least one solo private meeting with Obama in the Oval Office. One wonders what they could possibly have found to talk about all those times… presidential jewelry trends?
Current US Treasury issuance is relatively low due to sequestration and (at least temporarily) less US warmongering in the Middle East. That's about to change, of course, now that the US is getting ready to launch a Cruise missile attack on Syria (we’re already been arming and financing the opposition rebels, including groups directly linked to al-Qaeda for several years now). Bernanke and the Fed doves would like nothing better than another “controlled” war in the Mideast, because with war comes massive debt issuance, and with massive debt issuance comes the transmission mechanism (QE) for monetizing that debt and mainlining it onto the Wall Street banks' broken balance sheets. And yes, they’re still broken, and Ben is still bailing them out at the expense of the American middle class. Make no mistake, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, and every other complicit banker on the Street has no problem with this, or any other, war, regardless of whether such a conflict would destabilize the entire region and would almost assuredly pull Russia and China into the fray. The more the merrier, just keep letting that free QE monopoly money roll in from the 4X weekly Federal Reserve Permanent Open Market Operations (POMO’s).
And with the significant financing needs for a large war effort in the Middle East, say good-bye to “Taper.”
With John Kerry’s press conference the ten days ago so begins another in a virtual conga line of "patriotic" wars stretching back fifty years, this one sparked by another in America's long history of false flag attacks (think Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin incident and Bush/Cheney/Powell’s WMD allegations to justify the Iraq War and Occupation).
A new Mideast war would also produce another major benefit for the Obama administration - it would serve to divert the American public's increasingly embarrassing attention away from the massive, unconstitutional spy activities of the NSA and Homeland Security. In fact, it would serve as perfect cover and justification for increasing the NSA's around-the-clock civilian surveillance activities. One can just hear the captive corporate sock puppet media now: "We're at war, you have to be some kind of traitor if you don’t believe the US government! It's people like you that force us to initiate these safety precautions in the first place - it's for your own good!" And make no mistake about it, our captive corporate media puppets will hammer us with variations on that lie until most Americans believe it’s the truth – simple Brainwashing 101 - and America and democracy and the greatest and most noble political experiment in the history of mankind will take one more giant step into the dustbin of history.
One fears that Obama must be truly delusional to be seriously considering an invasion of Syria, because Russia is still plenty angry with the US for that entire Snowden farce, especially the incredibly ill-advised, hypocritical and infantile letter that AG Holder insulted them with. The last thing the United States needs right now is to go head to head with Russia in some totally unnecessary peeing contest with a REAL tough guy. Obama won’t be beating up on a 2nd rate buffoon like Gaddafi, or dropping bombs from drones on defenseless women and children in Pakistan, or staging a “Wag the Dog” PR campaign around the death of bin-Laden, who was kept alive by two presidents for nearly a dozen years for one reason – because a live, fire breathing monster is a hell of a lot more terrifying to the American people than a dead one. They know that a terrified population is a malleable population – and one doubts whether the NSA could have seized such control over American citizens’ privacy if bin-Laden had been taken out when US Special Forces had him in their sights in a cave in Tora Bora in 2001. He was the best thing that ever happened to the domestic spy program. His menacing visage still haunts the dreams of many millions of Americans twelve years after 9/11. That aside, Obama will now be dealing with a genuine tough guy – Vladimir Putin. Good luck with that Barack, really, good luck.
Of course, if you’re part of the D.C. and Wall Street elite, the upcoming death of thousands of innocent Syrian civilians is perfectly acceptable – it’s simply known in the parlance as collateral damage. What that does to America’s rapidly deteriorating world image is a different story, but for the powers that be what's good for the Beltway is doubly good for Wall Street.
There's significant evidence that the chemical attacks a few weeks ago, and those a few months ago, weren’t initiated by Assad, regardless of what Obama, Kerry, and a very disingenuous CIA (which has actually been supporting the rebels, including al-Qaeda related groups) want us to believe. In fact, would someone care to explain why anybody in his right mind, including Assad, would want to kill more than a thousand innocents in a chemical attack that’s staged to occur just a few days before the UN teams arrive to investigate the prior attack, for which he’s also been accused? Only a brain-dead idiot would do that, and whereas Assad is many things, he’s definitely not an idiot. So the jury’s still out on who last week’s real perpetrator was. What say ye, CIA? What say ye John Kerry? What say ye Qatar, which has spent $3 Billion assisting the CIA- and al-Qaeda-backed rebel forces in this civil war because a takedown of the Assad government would open the door allowing it to construct a natural gas pipeline directly through Syria to Europe?
So here's who wins a war in Syria: Bernanke and the Fed doves. NSA/Homeland Security. Russia – oh yes, most assuredly Russia, which may perversely come out looking like the voice of reason in the court of world opinion. The flag wavers from both political crime syndicates in Congress. K Street. The sock puppet media. The arms merchants. The energy traders. Qatar. Saudi Arabia. But the BIG WINNER IS: a couple of dozen jumbo insolvent (CRIMINAL but still unindicted) Wall Street and European banks that are about to get their hands on hundreds of billions more in monetized Treasury debt which YOU dear reader will, as always, be on the hook for.
And who loses? Why YOU of course. The United States Constitution as we enter into another undeclared war. The real US economy (not that fairy tale one that the Federal Reserve, the Labor Dept, the Commerce Dept, and a couple dozen other bureaucratic civilian and government dream weavers fabricate every month for the benefit of the sock puppet media). And, of course, the perhaps millions of innocents who are caught in the crossfire. Oh, and there’s one more big loser– Barack Obama - for he has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt where his true loyalties lie, and history, if mankind is to have one much longer - will most assuredly not be kind to him for that.