Four Horsemen Page #4

their bank accounts?"

"You will have a revolution on your head!"

"So fork over the money!".

"Borrow, create it out of nothing and give it to us,

so we can face our problems and

not go under, or otherwise".

This is what mr Hank Poulsen did

in the US congress,

he went there one day and told them:

"We need 700 bln dollars,

and we need them now!...

Or else...."

Is this system we call capitalism

really capitalism?

in a capitalist system government

is supposed to be small

but today the state is more bloated

and evasive than it has ever been.

Individuals and companies are

supposed to operate in a free market,

good enterprises rewarded with profit,

and flawed enterprise with failure.

But during the 2008 banking crisis

the people saw the western

economic system divided in a way

they we're told it could never happen.

Socialism for the rich

Capitalism for the poor

In America for example the banks

that got in trouble

got bailed out by the government

That's socialism.

And people argue against

socialism in america and yet they're probably

the most socialist country in

the world right now.

We have a system which isn't even

a proper capitalist system

in which people make misstakes,

are they going to be punished?

Are poor people making misstakes

and are they getting punished?

or even worse, that they even

don't make any misstake,

and they are being forced to...

...people do misstakes of the rich.

When the taxpayer is footing the bill for

the missplaced speculation of the bankers

then suddenly instead of the

economy serving the human being

the human being is now in perpetual service

to amoral financial organisations

It was the head of the Federal Reserve Bank

Alan Greenspan who after 9/11 slashed

interrest rates to encourage lending

Bankers needed new participants

to keep cash flowing into

a system that had become

a global pyramid scheme

All this newly created money

entered the housing market

and created unprescedented inflation

houseprices rose and rose

new mothers we're forced back into the workplace

to service huge homeloans

and the anglo-american dream became

all about land speculation

The housing market in the west

isn't about ownership

it's the only way ordinary people

can get ahead

and ordinary people can't get ahead

but by wages

What we've created is a mass bubble

economics around housing

that sucks in a huge amount of capital

takes capital for genuine innovations

in the economy

and puts it into a speculative use that

has no genuine productive outcome

If you talk to people in germany,

they don't see any connection

between owning a piece of property

and them being inclined towards democracy

it's lots of people who rent their housing there,

and they're perfectly

comfortable with that arrangement

But it is true that in a somewhat different

context Reagan & Thathcer pushed

for more people to own housing

and this is part of the problem because

if you push people to buy

housing before they are ready,

you push dubious loans on them

and they don't understand

what they give themselves into

You could have huge adverse

repercussions.

Exactly what led to in part,

the subprimes in the US

It has nothing to do with democracy,

it's just a bad economic idea

The break through that occured

around 2000 in the US

was when bankers found out

that the poor are honest

and they realised if your not rich,

you have a different set of values

and you'll think that a debt is a debt,

and that it has to be paid

and that people will try to pay the

debts that they're stuck with

even if the debts aren't valid,

or bigger than expected

even if they really can't pay the debts

When you lend in banking institutons,

when they drew up contracts

with flexible interrest rates, I think they knew

in the beginning that these problems

we're going to come back later on

and that folks wouldn't be able to

afford the mortgages as the interrest

rates increased

They put a lot of people in situations

where they

we're taking food out of the refridgerators,

taking kids out of higher education

They we're not able to afford college anymore,

and it's making a really bad situation worse

The banks engaged in what was

a criminal conspiracy

To charge more to the blacks

and the Hispanics

The banks got together,

backed the Bush administration

to block the state proscecutions of

racial lending in order to charge more

and to exploit the minorities

These we're loans made by one of

the major lenders in the country

Wells Fargo.

They targeted minority communities in the city,

put borrowers into loans that they could not afford,

and of the subprime variety,

therefore more expensive and less

advantageous to the borrowers

Hiding predatory lending practices in the

small print of complex financial products

was only ever going to enrich one set of interrests

In many of the communities in which

african-americans live in,

the city was establishing momentum.

There was development activity

that was occuring.

We would see signs of vitality

in many of these communities.

The results of the Wells Fargo forclosures,

and the subprime lending practices

of that lender and others,

has significan'tly impaired that progress

and brought it to a halt.

They don't worry about it,

they dont come in to the heart of it

they really don't see the struggle

if they stay outside of it

That's like looking at the cover of a book,

but if you don't go inside the book

you'll never know what the book is about

So they're not worrying about

the one to whom they sell

and it's wrong.

If they'd see they'd be willing to help.

What happened in Baltimore is

just an example of

what's happening all around the world.

One way to frame this injustice

is by branding it a

race issue, but when we look really closely,

we can see that there's something at play here

that transcends race...

Profit!

It's not an accident for instance,

that we had the regulation on the fincial

industry that was such a disaster.

The lobbyists of the industry

amount to 5 per congress person

They pay 5 people for every

congress man to explain to them,

persuade them that they should

pass legislation that is favourable

to the financial industry

The poor people that are devastated

don't have the money.

They couldn't hire 5 per congress man.

So the way our democracy works

is on an unlevelled playfield

The financial sector has aquired

enormous power,

partly through political contributions

and so buying favours,

but mostly through ideological control

convincing people that finance is good,

more finance is better and

unregulated finance without limit's is best

that's the cornerstone what we call in the US,

the Wall Street Washington corridor

I mean if people need any proof

as to who is controlling Washington,

when the bail out came after

the Lehman Brothers collapse

80% of the poulation was against the bail out

Not withstanding that, the congress

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