Bailout for Who!

While the Obama's stimulus package has been passed by congress the question remains, Who is the bail out for? Former Wall Street Economist Michael Hudson puts things in perspective: The first question to ask about the Recovery Program is, “recovery for whom?”
The answer is, for the people who design the Recovery Program and their constituency, the bank lobby. The second question is, what is it they want to recover? The answer is, another Bubble economy, having seen the Greenspan Bubble make them so rich with his particular kind of “wealth creation”: wealth in the form of indebtedness of the “real” economy at large to the banking system, and unprecedented capital gains to be made by riding the wave of asset-price inflation.

While the Obama administration’s financial planners wring their hands in public and say “We feel your pain” to debtors at large, they also recognize that the past ten years have been a golden age for the banking system and Wall Street. The wealthiest 1 per cent of the population has raised its share of the returns to wealth – dividends, interest, rent and capital gains – from 37 per cent of the total ten years ago to 57 per cent five years ago, and an estimated 70 per cent today. Over two-thirds of the returns to wealth now go to the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population. This is the highest on record. We are approaching Russian kleptocratic levels.

I see a change is definitely coming and its not the one Sam Cooke sung about.