Watching the hopeless performance of the US Senate Banking Committee the day before yesterday, in their hearing on the massive bailout legislation being proposed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, I was overcome by a feeling of waking up in a fantasy world, a place in which the nightmarish hallucinations of some demonic wizard from another dimension play 24/7 on every TV in the nation.
On the witness stand, sat two career operatives of high finance, who, having spent decades building the greatest speculative financial bubble in world history, now have the brass neck to lecture the US Senate about what needs to be done to clean up the mess that they themselves have created.
The cause of the immediate problem can more or less be summarised in three simple words: (C)redit (D)efault (S)waps. The collapse of AIG signifies that the CDS market has now exploded in spectacular fashion, blowing up the entire global financial system. So, when Mr Paulson bandies around arbitrary figures like 700 billion USD (itself no small amount of money) being made available for "asset" purchases at any one time, it is clearly a complete fraud, and anyone that has a brain larger than a frozen pea must know what the intent is. What with mega speculator Warren Buffet buying up a slice of the "free money for high rollers" bailout pie with his $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs, this is about as transparent as it gets.
The bill now before Congress contains explicit enabling language, immunising the Secretary of the Treasury from any and all legal challenges to his unconstitutional, dictatorial actions. It does rather suggest that those making the proposition know full well that what they are doing is illegal, and unconstitutional, and likely to come under immediate challenge by the Federal courts all the way up to the US Supreme Court.
For the avoidance of doubt, while the intense political theater that is underway is focused on the US Congress, this is not a crisis that is confined to America. A potential run of the US dollar is an existential crisis for civilisation, and no part of this planet would escape extremely dire consequences if such a run were to accelerate into an outright collapse.
And so, watching members of the US Senate behaving like frightened fairies, pouting, huffing and pirouetting around the gigantic steaming pile of elephant manure spewing from the lying, thieving, wizardly demons on the witness bench, when they must know that the fate of the United States of America and the entire world order hangs in the balance, could only lead to one conclusion: DELIBERATE CONSPIRACY.
And then, something amazing happened overnight. Senators and Congressmen began to hear whispers of disquiet. Hints of lynchings filtered through the ether to their pea sized brains, as their staff began to report the spontaneous combustion of Congressional switchboards. The President was forced to address the nation to beg for support. Except it isn't coming. The American people seem to have reached that line which they will not cross.
Not to be defeated, police state measures are moving into high gear, with reports of US army units being deployed on home soil for "crowd control" and "civil contingencies." Perhaps BushCo is preparing to exploit this chaotic, desperate situation, staging another major terrorist incident, by means of which they can complete their transformation of the United States into a dictatorship under permanent emergency rule - just as informed people have been warning ever since that monkey-brained buffoon and his gang of neocon terrorists marched triumphantly into office.
The US is the front line in the battle against global fascism. If the people hold out, then there's hope for us all.