When the Banks Trump Governments

I hope I am wrong but my reading of the European Union debt crisis is that the banks are more powerful than governments. Not just individual governments of smaller nations like Iceland, Ireland and Greece, but the big guys - Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

How did these private institutions achieve supremacy over the governments whose purpose is to govern their societies? I am not sure. I suspect that the bank recapitalizations that occurred in 2008 and the failure to reform seriously flawed institutions were only the final phase of a long-term evolution into world-wide plutocracy. If the new world order resulted in economic and political stability, one might grudgingly accept it; however governments, flawed though they all are, are required to offer some degree of accountability to the governed. The corporations and private institutions now wielding the power do not share that burden - just ask the stockholders of News Corp, recently rebuffed in their attempts to hold the Murdock Family accountable.

The United States is not insulated from this phenomenon. When/if the EU collapses, our system will not be far behind. Why? Because our banks too are heavily leveraged in the EU crisis. Our economy is much weaker than Germany's.

For the immediate now, the international financial institutions are urging, no demanding, that the EU countries protect the banks from the bad debt of EU member nations. This protection can only be purchased by pouring trillions (yes, that is what I meant) into the black hole of an already debased system. The inevitable result will not be a resolution of the EU crisis. It will be the dragging down of the strong economies into the abyss in which the weak ones already reside.

The recipe being urged on the EU is a recipe for long-term disaster. That disaster will NOT stop at the Atlantic Ocean's eastern boundaries.

Thanks alot Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Nicholas Sarkozy, Tim Geitner, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Christopher Dodd, Dick Cheney, Alan Greenspan, Chief Justice John Roberts, Tony Blair, Dominque Strauss-Kahn for working so VERY closely with the new masters of the universe.