Libertarians practicing Klein's "Shock Doctrine"

Want to know how much we can trust the Wall Street Banks who are screaming that new regulations will hurt their profits?? Here's what they did after Republican Senator Phil Gramm got the bill passed to eliminate the Glass-Steagall Act and remove most regulations from American banking.

During a little-noticed hearing this week in Sacramento, Calif., a firm hired by Wall Street to analyze mortgages given to borrowers with poor credit, which were then packaged and sold to investors during the boom years, revealed that as much as 28 percent of those loans failed to meet basic underwriting standards -- and Wall Street knew all along.

Worse, when the firm flagged those loans for potential issues, Wall Street banks ignored its recommendation nearly half the time and likely purchased those loans anyway -- selling them to unwitting investors who were never told that the biggest home loan due diligence firm in the country had found potential defects in these mortgages.

[Source Shanien Nasiripour, Business Reporter at the Huffington Post]

The free market politicians like Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul claim that the solution to the current Great Recession is to remove the regulations from businesses - including Wall Street banks. But the current Great recession is the direct result of Wall Street Bank chicanery which was permitted by the SEC, the Federal Reserve under the Libertarian Alan Greenspan and the free market proponents who passed the bills requiring deregulation.

Current Libertarian politicians are funded in large part by the billionaire Libertarian Koch brothers Charles and David. They send a lot of their money to the tea baggers like Sharron Angle (Nevada) and Jim Miller (Alaska) who won the nomination in Alaska because of a last minute sudden contribution of $600,000 of tea party money. The money is often distributed by the libertarian politician Dick Armey through his organization Freedom Works.

The current attacks on American government by the libertarian movement are an effort to concentrate power in America within a few very wealthy families. The Koch brothers are spending a great deal of money this election cycle to obtain that control. The most obvious example of this is the insurgent tea party movements, a supposed grass-roots movement carefully left leaderless so that the money provided by the libertarian billionaires can influence the movement and the media which credulously reports on their antics.

FOX News, owned by the billionaire Rupert Murdoch (the beneficiary of another inherited fortune), is part this effort. Ask who funded the many busses that were used to ship tea party individuals to Glenn Beck's Washington Monument August 28th rally.

There really is a lot going on in this election. The big pressure is the unemployment rate which remains stubbornly just below 10%. It is the direct result of earlier Libertarian free market policies that let Wall Street run wild and sell financial garbage, causing first the housing bubble and then the Great Recession. But now voters feel only the pain of the recession and don't see the government helping them. That it's the banks and private industry that caused the problem and who are not helping seems to escape the attention of the voters, probably because the voters can't vote on wealthy libertarians or on the Wall Street banks.

The result is that the Libertarians who have created the current economic and political mess are attempting to practice what Naomi Klein called Shock Doctrine. Make things bad for everyone and when they are at their worst, some group attempts to take control of the government and change the rules of the economy to favor themselves.

Will it work this election?

A month from now we'll have a better idea.