Buchanan has a great piece up today at LRC. He stresses an aspect of The Great Bank Robbery of 2008 that I hadn't considered:

Since Americans save nothing and have to borrow from abroad to finance our trade and budget deficits, wars and foreign aid, what the secretary proposes is this: that Congress authorize the Treasury to spend $700 billion to buy up the toxic paper on the books not only of U.S. banks, but of foreign banks operating in the United States. According to The Washington Times, the Treasury would also be authorized to buy up securities backed by rotten auto loans, student loans and credit card debts.

Thus America would be borrowing from China, Japan and the Middle East to tidy up the balance sheets of the banks of China, Japan and the Middle East. And all the rotten paper will be offloaded onto U.S. taxpayers, who hopefully will be able to recoup some of their losses, because some of the paper will be good.

Up till now, I am embarrassed to admit, I had been thinking in terms of American power players. But now I realize that this is global in scale.

Clearly the politicians in various democratic countries aren't really running the show. If they ever really crossed their big funders, then at best they would serve out the remainder of their term, and then lose re-election. What is worse, they would forfeit the unofficial golden parachute that they surely must get from staying friendly with these groups while in office.

As Buchanan says, the US empire is clearly cashing out. And so the parasites are getting ready to jump ship, maybe to Dubai but my guess is China, which will soon be (probably within 20 years) the dominant world power once again. (If you don't believe me, just ask Jack Bauer's dad.)

The parasitic power elite (and I still don't have any idea who these people are) have sucked the US system dry. When its government was relatively small, the country was extremely prosperous. But it made more sense to "overfish" it, and run it into the ground after a hundred years of a rapidly growing State.

At this point, though, they have apparently decided it will be more profitable to concentrate on fleecing the Chinese or Russians. Those economies have a much better long-run future.

And that is why their point man, Hank Paulson, is trying to steal as much as possible before being chased away by the natives.