Is the Global Financial Meltdown a Conspiracy?

I don’t necessarily think it is. It’s one thing to get this from Matt Taibbi (in his latest Rolling Stone column) and various “alternative” news sites. But this time it’s coming from Jim Jubak, the financial columnist for MSN. It’s a lot harder to dismiss him as just another tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nut who hates capitalism.

He says Congress and Wall Street “want to pretend that the current global financial crisis… was an accident caused by some unfortunate confluence of greed and asleep-at-the-switch regulators.”

Instead, he says the current global catastrophe is “the result of a conscious, planned looting of the world economy. Its roots stretch back decades. And it wouldn't have been possible without the contrivances of the bought-and-paid-for folks who sit in Congress.”

For example, this past March 5th there was a “show trial” (Jubak’s wording) conducted by Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Richard Shelby (R-AL). Their two “sacrificial victims” (his wording again) were the supervisor of insurance for New York State and the acting director of the Office of Thrift Supervision. Both of them were thoroughly reamed out for evading their regulatory responsibilities.

Jubak says: “By trotting out these sacrificial victims in this show trial, our representatives in Washington hope you won't ask the hard questions, the questions that show that they bear far more responsibility for this crisis and for the destruction of trillions of dollars in global assets than any state insurance commissioner or Washington bureaucrat.”

This is a long article but it’s well worth reading, since we all want to find out what the F#$%! happened so we can hopefully prevent it from happening again.

cross-posted at Bring It On!