The good banker?
Time urges their irrelevance by naming Bernanke "person of the year."
As much as this makes me see red they do note the designation is not intended as an award of merit, but as recognition of influence regardless of good or ill....
yeah, most people are going to remember that. The article itself practically fauns over him. Disgusting.
Stengel goes on to blather about how Bailin' Ben saved the country from another depression. Oh, if the world were so simple.
No mention is made of Bernanke's years with profit vampire Goldman Sachs where he essentially participated in the fraudulent practices what Time so eagerly claims he saved us from!
He managed to convince Congress that the country would collapse without the banks and so the Congress sold out the public, only to have the banks in turn return almost INSTANTLY to their profit scheming with impunity, posting record profits within 2 quarters.
"We want to work with the banks to make sure that they balance the appropriate prudence and caution against the need to make good loans for the economy, and for their own profits." —Ben Bernanke
The banks should have been let to fail. We would at least be free of their chokehold. As it is we are now their slaves. Democracy is a lie if it is always the rich and powerful that are protected and the working citizen is left to live in ruins, which is essentially what has happened.
So, to Mr. Bernanke, what do to say to all the ordinary people who's lives were ruined in order to save the precious banks?
Time asked him somthing similar:
"So, I'm a fringe economics type, I'm not personally, but I'm saying a reader picks up TIME Magazine, and they see this and they go, oh, my God, Ben Bernanke, low interest rates caused this whole thing. He's just an extension of that devil man, Alan Greenspan. Low interest rates, this is the whole cause. What's your bullet answer to that?
It's hard to give a bullet answer.
Myth-busters answer.
Monetary policy in the early part of this decade was accommodated for good reasons. There was a recession in 2001, there was the jobless recovery, inflation was very low. Keeping interest rates low to get the economy back on track was a reasonable thing to do. I think there are a lot of forces that led to the crisis, a whole range of things were relevant there. I don't think that monetary policy was a particularly important source of the crisis."
WTF? What is that supposed to mean?
Mr. Bernanke, what do you say to the middle aged man or woman with no insurance who has been unemployed for so long that they aren't even counted among the jobless- what do you say when they see the banks paying millions in bonuses to their executives and posting record profits?
What do you say to to everyone buried in debt or has been ravaged by deceptive lending practices?
What do you say to people have no hope, no savings and no where to turn? How do they fit into your "too big to fail" plan? That it could have been worse? How much worse can you get than unemployed, broke and homeless?!
FUCK YOU, Mister Bernanke, FUCK YOU and the privilege you rode in on.
And FUCK YOU to Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, and all the bastards at banks raking in billions for themselves and their evil corporations, and shame on Congress and Obama for going along with it all.
Greenwald give a more articulate critique at salon.
