It Goes On… and On…
And the conniving and criminality doesn’t stop at the judiciary but has infested pretty much every corner of the government.
A personal recent favorite was Hillary Clinton‘s oh-so-convenient bout of fainting that kept her from testifying about the truly bizarre attack on the Benghazi consulate, thereby skipping the direct damage to her career that would have resulted from having to answer the unanswerable in front of television cameras.
Then there’s the sweetheart deal embedded in the soon-to-be-updated federal regulations related to mortgages. Given all the abuses leading up to the housing crash, John Q. might posit that there will be strong teeth in these new regulations. Sure, there’s a couple – but lookie what else is in the new regs; this from the New York Times…
As regulators complete new mortgage rules, banks are about to get a significant advantage: protection against homeowner lawsuits.
The rules are meant to help bolster the housing market. By shielding banks from potential litigation, policy makers contend that the industry will have a powerful incentive to make higher-quality home loans.
But some banking and housing specialists worry that borrowers are losing a critical safeguard. Industries rarely get broad protection from consumer lawsuits, and banks would seem unlikely candidates given the range of abuses revealed during the housing bust.
Mind-boggling.
Skipping across the pond, we have the truly incredible case of Julian Assange, who is now a prisoner, surrounded by upwards of 100 police officers, in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he’s been seeking asylum.
At one point, a senior British official suggested they were seriously considering throwing hundreds of years of diplomatic precedent out of the window by storming the embassy to get their man.
Yet his purported crime, having consensual sex with two different women without a condom (in one case, he had one, but it apparently broke) would, at most, be treated as a minor offense in pretty much any court, in pretty much every country in the world. Unless, of course, he knew he had AIDS and was deliberately trying to transmit it, which he wasn’t.
Do your own research, and maybe you’ll draw a different conclusion – here’s one fairly thorough story on the charges against Assange – but that the UK government is willing to spend untold sums of money it can’t afford keeping him penned up in the Ecuadorian embassy smacks of collusion and corruption.
What’s really going on, of course, is that Assange’s WikiLeaks organization embarrassed the power elite by doing what the media no longer does – getting to the truth, in this case releasing a stash of embarrassing diplomatic cables.
While Assange is fighting the good fight, it’s a fight against entrenched political interests, and so it’s a losing battle. Aided by the corrupt judiciary or, failing that, the malleable military, it’s just a matter of time before he ends up in a cell next to Bradley Manning whose tortured corpus is now on trial for giving up state secrets that were really not all that secret.
In economic policy, too, the evidence of two different systems is glaring. Look no further than the Fed’s recent decision to light the afterburners on over a trillion in new money creation each year.
Whom does such a policy help? The politicians, of course, by allowing them to claim they “fixed” the economy that they broke in the first place… when all they are really doing is replacing the capital formation and spending of a healthy private sector with the polluted effluence of government disbursements.
Whom does such a policy hurt? The population at large, by eroding the value of everything they own and eviscerating their ability to earn money on their money through a free market in interest rates… all the while fostering yet more malinvestment in the Potemkin villages of an uneconomic solar industry, electric cars, high-speed trains, etc.
Make no mistake, the Fed and the government are keenly aware of the damaging consequences of their actions – but, out of self-interest, take those actions nonetheless.
The enviro-socialists that have bought their way into the corridors of power provide another array of examples, using laughably bad science and arbitrary rulings to disadvantage key sectors of the economy such as energy and mining.
