Going through some old magazines that should have been clipped and recycled long ago, I found the following tidbit (time-sensitive details omitted for effect):
The public, as usual, is in a fog. If the [political party] and the media cooperate, the fog won’t be lifted until [. . . .] after [the President’s] reelection, [when] you will finally be given the full details of another monstrous financial scandal — and the bloody bill that has come due. The media will belatedly begin searching for villain. Experts will explain that ordinary citizens have no choice but to provide tens of billions of dollars to clean up the mess. If this scenario sounds familiar, it’s because the same sequence of events played out in the [major financial crisis of 3-4 years prior], for which taxpayers are now in the process of ponying up $200 billion.
This is from a William Greider essay in Rolling Stone with the (probably familiar sounding) title, “Bailout Now, Pay Later.” Greider goes on to explain the depths of the then-current banking crisis, that the necessary solution — i.e., government shutdowns of big, Big, BIG banks such as Citibank — will almost certainly not be the solution pursued by the then-sitting administration, and that the government’s bailout of all these failing banks will come back to bite taxpayers in the ass later. Hard.
Sounds like 2008, right? It certainly does. But my magazine hoarding ways run much, much deeper than that. (Though I’ve almost purged everything by now. Honest!) This is from June 1991. Occupy Wall Street clearly got to the party much, much later than it should have . . .
You can find a brief explanation of “Rerun Sunday” here.
The post above originally appeared on 6 January 2012.