AN INTERESTING STORY ...

I was teaching graduate courses in Mexico in 1993 when I ran across the Spanish-language translation of Benjamin J. Cohen's book, In Whose Interest? International Banking and American Foreign Policy (1986). I had read the English language version of his book a few years earlier, and was happy to see it in Spanish. I used it in one of my graduate courses in Queretaro, Mexico.

I mention this because in his book Benjamin Cohen discussed how bankers understood that if they were big enough and overplayed their hand that they would be bailed out by their governments. My favorite chapter was "So What's New?", which explained how banks and nation-states have historically played a silly game of "Who Needs Money Now?", only to lend and bailout each other when appropriate.

The moral of the story is that what we are seeing with Citigroup and the financial sector in America today is NOT new. Banks know that they will be bailed out if their problems are big enough. This kind of stuff has been happening literally for thousands of years. Moral of the Story: The $3-4 trillion that's been committed by the U.S. government so far is just the beginning (Worse, these dynamics constitute the real Graveyard of Empires).

I share this story because I want to emphasize that what's happening now is not new. This stuff happens for a reason. I'll be commenting on this later.

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Note: When I invited Dr. Cohen to CSUB to discuss his work I complimented him on the Spanish language version of his book. The translation was first class. He replied, "I didn't authorize a Spanish language version." I laughed (nervously) and told him that it was translated in Cuba (the Cuba-Mexico connection is another story). The communists - especially during the Cold War - were always interested in how the state props up capital in capitalist societies. There's an ugly lesson in this for all of us today.

- Mark