Visualizing Dow 6,000 -- The Road to Perdition -- Mike Whitney

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney07232008.html

The banking system is broke, busted, penniless; and yet the Fed and the G-7 allow this comedy to persist like nothing is wrong. When will the American people wake up?

And, will someone please explain how free markets can exist when speculators are subsidized by the state, or when the risk is removed from risky investing? That's what it means when the Fed opens its auction facilities to the investment banks and brokerage houses. It makes no sense at all. Government "safety nets" are anathema to free market capitalism. "You pays yer money and you takes yer chances". That's finance capitalism; deal with it.

What we are seeing is a hybridized version of capitalism; "Paulson's Scatterbrain Capitalism"; a hodge-podge of taxpayer bailouts, government intervention and free market mumbo jumbo. It's a toxic mix on off-balance sheets operations, over-the-counter "unregulated" derivatives, dark pool trading, opaque hedge funds, dodgy Enron-style accounting, and complex, hard-to-pronounce debt-instruments wrapped up into one, cheesy, unsustainable shell game, managed by Harvard-educated flim flam men and backed by a 100% government guarantee. That's the system we're supporting with our tax dollars and that's the system that is dragging us headlong to ruin.

It ain't capitalism, my friend. It's a crooked system run by corporate carpetbaggers and banking scalawags who've shot the Golden Goose in hopes of keeping the larder at the cottage on the New Jersey coast chock-full of Dom Perignon and halibut fillets. They created this nightmare and they've doomed us all.

As long as we prop up the existing system, the economy will continue to flounder, unemployment will continue to rise, foreclosures will continue to soar, banks will continue to be shuddered, and the wobbly old greenback will continue its inexorable march towards Pesoville. It's time to clean house and we can start by firing Paulson.