A usura e o hábito dos blocos centrais, nova forma de ditadura

Depois de Agosto o regresso à realidade.
Excerto de artigo de William Greider, do The Nation
The nation, meanwhile, is flirting with historic catastrophe. Nobody yet knows how bad it is, but the peril is vastly larger than previous episodes, like the savings and loan bailout of the late 1980s. The dangers are compounded by the fact that the United States is now utterly dependent on foreign creditors--Japan and China lead the list--who have been propping us up with their lending.

Thanks to growing trade deficits and debt, foreign portfolio holdings of US long-term debt securities have more than doubled since 1994, from 7.9 percent to 18.8 percent as of June 2007. If these countries get fed up with their losses and pull the plug, the US economy will be a long, long time coming back.
The gravest danger is that the national economy will weaken further and spiral downward into a negative cycle that feeds on itself: as conditions darken, people hunker down and wait for the storm to pass--consumers stop buying, banks stop lending, producing companies cut their workforces. That feeds more defaulted loan losses back into the banking system's balance sheets.

This vicious cycle is essentially what led to the Great Depression after the stock market crash of 1929.

I offer not a prediction but a warning.

The comparison may sound farfetched now, but US policy-makers and politicians are putting us at risk of historic deflationary forces that, once they take hold, are very difficult to reverse.
A more aggressive response from Washington would address the real economy's troubles as seriously as it does Wall Street's. Financial firms have lost capital on a huge scale--more of them will fail or be bought by foreign investors.

But Wall Street cannot get well this time if the economy remains stuck in the ditch. Washington needs to revive the "animal spirits" of the nation at large. The $152 billion stimulus package enacted so far is piddling and ought to be three or four times larger.

Instead of sending the money to Iraq, we should be spending it here on getting people back to work, building and repairing our tattered infrastructure, investing in worthwhile projects that can help stimulate the economy in rough weather.
An agenda of deeper reforms can boost public confidence even as it undoes a lot of the damage caused by the financiers and bankers.

Some suggestions:
§ Nationalize Fannie Mae and other government-supported enterprises instead of coddling them. Restore them to their original status as nonprofit federal agencies that provide a valuable service to housing and other markets. Make the investors eat their losses. Buy the shares at 2 cents on the dollar. Without a federal guarantee, these firms are doomed anyway.

§ Resolve the democratic contradiction of "too big to fail" bailouts by dismantling the firms that are too big to fail--especially the newly created banking conglomerates that have done so much harm. Restore the boundaries between commercial banking and investment banking. In any case, market pressures are likely to shrink those behemoths as banks sell off their parts to survive. For the remaining big boys, revive antitrust enforcement. Set stern new conditions for emergency lending from government--supervised receivership, stricter lending rules to prevent recidivism and severe penalties for greed-crazed shareholders and executives.

§ Assign the Federal Reserve's regulatory role to a new public agency that is visible and politically accountable. Make the Fed a subsidiary agency of the Treasury Department and reform its decision-making on money and credit to restore an equitable balance between competing goals and interests--seeking full employment but also stable money and moderate inflation.

§ Begin the hard task of re-creating a regulated financial system Americans can trust, one that recognizes its obligations to the broad national interest. This requires regulatory reforms to cover moneypots like private-equity funds and to clear away the blatant conflicts of interest and double-dealing on Wall Street, and also to give responsible shareholders, workers and other interests a greater voice in corporate management and greater protection against rip-offs of personal savings.

§ Re-enact the federal law against usury. The details are difficult and can follow later, but this would be a meaningful first step toward restoring moral obligations in the financial sector. People would understand it, and so would a lot of the money guys. Maybe in the deepening crisis, Washington will begin to grasp that money is also a moral issue.

A usura é de facto um crime.
Por cá os bancos depois dos lucros fabulosos são protegidos pelo Banco Central que deveria regular a sua actividade.
Nos Estados Unidos como cá e por essa Europa fora, os furacões não são apenas fenómenos da meteorologia, são provocados pela própria usura e quem acaba por pagar é sempre o contribuinte.
Se um banco estava falido deveria falir, os bancos e os banqueiros, é claro que não são tratados da mesma maneira que as famílias a quem eles arrastam para a falência, depois de os sugar até ao último cêntimo.
O Banco de Portugal e o BCE não existem, servem de pano de fundo, de camuflagem.
A usura agora é feita de forma a cativar os pobres e estes desgraçados são passarinhos inocentes a cair na arapuca montada.
Os novos clientes são aqueles que os bancos sabem que não podem pagar o que lhes vão emprestar, esta é a nova manobra usada pelos donos do dinheiro e pelos senhores da usura.
Foi assim no crédito hipotecário de alto risco e continua assim nos empréstimos para pagar empréstimos, bancos e sociedades financeiras, organizações de usurários protegidos por lei e pelos que as fazem Afinal os políticos são seus empregados, antes e depois de passarem pelo poder, enquanto lá estão fazem com os patrões sexo oral.
Em Espanha discute-se actualmente uma coisa que o bloco central como cá e nos Estados Unidos que são o acordo nestas questões e nas questões em que por exemplo os agentes de aplicação da lei, os juízes se não devem intrometer na política e aceitar cargos políticos.
A mulher de César tem de ser séria e parecer.
Não pode haver promiscuidade por mais branca que seja a túnica.
A democracia é um embuste.
As mentiras propagadas pelos cachorros de trela da comunicação social, a nova censura, muito mais sofisticada, o faz de conta dos órgãos de soberania, todos sem excepção, e as novas polícias políticas fazem do regime do Doutor Salazar, um regime de excepção e de seriedade, por muito que custe a todos aqueles que se organizaram nas quadrilhas que tomaram conta do estado, coisa que nunca aconteceu no tempo daquele, daí os manter à distância.
Os capitalistas tinham baias e a usura era crime.
Estou-me completamente nas tintas para aquilo que os democratas desta choldra pensam disto. Afinal o regime não tem cura, é como Angola mesmo com os observadores todos a quem puseram de cócoras.
Fiquem como quiserem.