"If you're one of the 2 million American families losing your house this year, it's a depression," argues Greg Palast, BBC investigative journalist, author of Armed Madhouse and onetime student of neoconservative privatization guru Milton Friedman. "If you're a mortgage shark, happy days are here again. The difference between the Great Depression and this one is that, back then, everyone was in it. Now, it's a selective mangling. Exxon's profit hit $40 billion, the highest of any corporation since the pharaohs. So how can you say the economy is going down? For whom?"
Palast's point is well taken, even as it is ignored by everyone from the Bush administration to the financial (which is to say, entertainment) media and all the way to homeowners who ignorantly refinance so they can buy that new Hummer: Your life may suck ass, but others around you are sucking you dry. And most importantly, they're crushing the dollar on their way out the door to Dubai, or wherever suits hide in the New World Order's afterlife.
"I'm sorry to tell you this," Palast adds, "but higher oil prices and weak dollars is not a failure of policy. That is the policy. Clinton had a strong dollar policy and Bush hated it. The weak dollar is a way to temporarily hike exports to create short-term pretend juice for the economy. But the weak dollar also made it easier for foreigners to buy up U.S. assets. The capitalists are cashing out of America. They're keeping condos in New York, Palm Beach and Malibu, but their investments are where the returns are fatter: Malaysia, China, India. A weak dollar helps the transfer of capital ownership."
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