By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
Ever wonder why the rich and the super-rich and the banks and corporations they control are never asked to share in the suffering they cause?
Ever wonder why the rich and the super-rich and their banks and corporations continue to grow even wealthier while everyone else rapidly falls behind?
A quick look at Ireland – the so-called Celtic Tiger – may help us to understand.
But first a looke at the wider practices of the corporate capitalist “democracies.”
For the past two years, most countries’ central banks have been lending money to the private-sector banks almost for free. Those same private banks then turn around and lend that same money back to the governments by buying high-yield government bonds.
Take Canada, for example. The Bank of Canada is currently lending money to the country’s private-sector banks at three-fourths of one percent. The private banks, in turn, lend that money back to the Government of Canada by buying long-term benchmark bonds which are currently yielding an average annual return of 3.63%.
On paper, it looks like the private-sector banks are making a 484% profit by buying government bonds.
But the reality is even worse than that. Because those same private-sector banks are actually allowed to “lend” many times as much money as they actually have on deposit, their profit on the government bonds is actually in the thousands of percent.
That’s bad enough if your government has a high credit rating, as does Canada’s.
But what about countries like Ireland, now mired in deep economic depression after being battered by the global economic meltdown caused by the private-sector banks’ greed, incompetence, corruption and criminality?
Rather than prosecuting the econocorporate fraudsters, the “democratic” governments of the industrialized world have been bailing them out time and time again.
This time it’s Ireland’s turn – hot on the heels of Greece and not too far ahead of several other western “democracies” whose private-sector casino/banks are crying for bailout.
Although Ireland’s government is steadfastly and stealthily denying it, it is now in negotiations with the European Union for a $100- billion bailout.
And if Ireland does succumb to Bailout Fever, it will see its credit rating lowered to virtually “junk” status, causing the interest the Government of Ireland pays on long-term bonds to triple to more than nine percent – an interest rate Ireland’s shattered economy could never hope to be able to pay.
And so, as Ireland struggles beneath its enormous economic burden, the rentiers of the socioeconomic elite – the shiftless few who live off rents and interest payments – laughs all the way to the bank.
The reason why the rentiers and the other bandits of corporate capitalism are allowed to obscenely further enrich themselves at the expense of the masses when the criminal actions of the former turn the economy sour is all political.
The simple reality is that almost every advanced industrial “democracy” in the world is now governed by either a NeoConservative or a NeoLiberal government.
And the rhetoric of the NeoLiberals and the NeoConservatives notwithstanding, they are both equally committed to a cruel and immoral corporate capitalist agenda beholden only to the vested interests of the billionaires and mega-millionaires who are sucking the world dry.