Nomi Prins and Paul Craig Roberts

Sleepwalking to Armageddon?

By Mike Krauss

Bucks County Courier Times

In a just published book that too few Americans will read, All the Presidents’ Bankers, Nomi Prins lifts the cover from a century long cooperation and coordination between Wall Street and the White House, stretching back to Teddy Roosevelt in the years just before creation of the Federal Reserve.

As Wall Street veteran Pam Martens explains in a review of the book on her web site, Wall Street on Parade, “Wall Street can collapse, get bailed out by the taxpayers, cause a Great Recession and still call the shots in Washington.”

Every American can now see that on account of Wall Street and with the collaboration of successive administrations, the prosperity of millions of Americans has been shattered, perhaps never to be recovered.

Massive unemployment is lied away by not counting the millions who have given up looking for work. Foreclosures roll on. Home sales are plummeting. A generation of young Americans now graduates college with massive debt and no jobs. Or they take the jobs at Wal-Mart that used to be filled by the less educated.

Who go where? Onto welfare, food stamps and unemployment, which many in Congress want to cut. Where does this lead? For the answer, look no further than Wal-Mart’s most recent annual report.

It notes: “Our business operations are subject to numerous risks, factors and uncertainties, domestically and internationally, which are outside our control … These factors include … changes in the amount of payments made under the Supplement[al] Nutrition Assistance Plan and other public assistance plans, changes in the eligibility requirements of public assistance plans …”

Wal-Mart’s major market is low-income shoppers. The company is acknowledging that public assistance programs are a significant factor in its revenue and profits. Increasingly, Wal-Mart’s customers are too poor to shop at Wal-Mart.

The message in Prins’ book is that the economic trends, Wall Street practices and federal government collusion of today are in so many ways and so very frighteningly like the years before the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.

Are we sleepwalking into an economic Armageddon?

It is not the only looming catastrophe. The other is a confrontation with Russia.

Forget the story line from Washington parroted by the national media. The crisis over Ukraine has nothing to do with democracy and freedom. It is about an almost messianic assertion of American “exceptionalism,” used as cover by Wall Street for more looting, in this case Ukraine.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former, high security clearance assistant secretary of the Treasury to Ronald Reagan, former editor of the Wall Street Journal and an acknowledged expert on Eastern European and Russian affairs. He is also not widely enough read. But you want to read his most recent blog.

“The drive to war is blatantly obvious. The lies are obvious, and the entire West is participating, both media and governments… Everywhere in the West the message is the same. ‘Putin invaded and annexed Crimea, Putin is determined to rebuild the Soviet Empire, Putin must be stopped’… The extraordinary transparent lie that Russia sent an army into Ukraine and annexed Crimea is now accepted as fact everywhere in the West…”

What actually happened is that the elected government of Ukraine backed out of a U.S. deal to join the EU, when many of its citizens understood that was a set-up for “austerity” and the looting of their pensions and assets by Wall Street.

The U.S. organized a coup and now calls the government it installed freedom loving heroes. Nuts. They are Washington puppets — and Nazi thugs into the bargain — and they are Wall Street patsies. That government immediately signed off on the Wall Street “aide” package: high interest loans to be paid for by the extraction of the wealth and prosperity of every Ukrainian.

Well, not every. Those parts of Ukraine that were historically a part of Russia went running right back to Russia, in a thoroughly democratic referendum, the kind of self-determination Washington says it supports — except where Wall Street profits are concerned.

To get Wall Street its way Washington is playing a juvenile game of “Chicken” with Russia, an energy rich, nuclear power, ratcheting up the threat of military action.

Roberts concludes that this entire chain of events looks like the manipulation, cupidity and stupidity that led Europe and the U.S. into World War I and warns of the horrific consequences of another war in Europe — a nuclear war.

For your own security and safety and that of your family and neighbors, give Fox, CNN and all the rest a rest. Read Prins, Roberts and Martens. Decide for yourself if the nation is sleepwalking to Armageddon.