By Steve Watson:
Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting
in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial
elite at the expense of ordinary Americans. A leading economic
journalist has described the current financial crisis as a "gigantic
fraud", the fallout of a deliberate and preconceived profit agenda to
enslave the middle classes in a debt bubble.

The economics editor of the London Guardian, Larry Elliott, has hit
out at the global financial elite in a refreshing piece that marks a
rare shift away from the establishment hackery we are used to from
the corporate media. In an article titled America was conned - who
will pay? Elliot writes: Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that there
is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud
perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary
Americans. Business, of course, needs consumers to carry on spending
in order to make money, so a way had to be found to persuade
households to do their patriotic duty. The method chosen was simple.
Whip up a colossal housing bubble, convince consumers that it makes
sense to borrow money against the rising value of their homes to
supplement their meagre real wage growth and watch the profits roll
in.

As they did - for a while. Now it's payback time and the mood could
get very ugly. Americans, to put it bluntly, have been conned. They
have been duped by a bunch of serpent-tongued hucksters who packed up
the wagon and made it across the county line before a lynch mob could
be formed. Elliot also states that the debate is now not about
whether the US faces a recession, but is about how deep it will be
and how long it will last, comparing the downturn to the South Sea
Bubble crisis in 1720, and declaring that the "Ponzi securitisation
scam has been exposed." A Ponzi scheme, named after Charles Ponzi, is
one that offers abnormally high short-term returns in order to entice
new investors. The high returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and
pays require an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order
to keep the scheme going, meaning it is inevitable that it will
eventually collapse.

Elliot, like former chief economist of the World Bank turned
whistleblower, Joseph Stiglitz, points a finger of blame squarely at
former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, stating: "In the longer term,
lessons must be learnt from the turmoil. One is that you don't solve
the problems of a collapsing bubble by blowing up another, which is
what Alan Greenspan did after the dotcom fiasco in 2001 - the most
irresponsible behaviour of any central banker in living memory." Last
week we highlighted the fact that Greenspan, instead of trying to act
to reverse the damage he has done to the US economy, is actively
encouraging its further demise by urging foreign states to abandon
their dollar peg. Another cogent point Larry Elliot makes is the
following: "If this is, heaven help us, The Big One, one of the only
consolations will be that the repugnance at the orgy of speculation
that has sapped the strength of the US economy will put a new New
Deal on the political agenda."

Last week we highlighted the fact that Greenspan, instead of trying
to act to reverse the damage he has done to the US economy, is
actively encouraging its further demise by urging foreign states to
abandon their dollar peg. It should be added that, given that this
crisis has been engineered by a financial elite Ponzi scheme, we
should be extremely wary of any "new deal" that is brokered by the
financial and political elite posing as our saviors. There are
already talks of a "new world order" emerging from the fallout of the
current economic meltdown. A consolidation among the big financial
institutions does not spell good news for ordinary Americans and
people across the world who have been effectively herded into this
current crisis by the financial elite. We, along with others such as
Stiglitz, have repeatedly warned of the quickening of an agenda of
economic catastrophe allied to the "solution" of predatory globalism.

Nevertheless, while CNN and other mainstream outlets continue to
parade economic "experts" who ludicrously suggest that the
destruction of the dollar and the economic downturn is "not
necessarily a bad thing" for America, it is a refreshing change to
read a mainstream report that actually hints at the reality of the
situation the US and the rest of the world now faces at the hands of
the elite.