Steve Bannon slammed politicians in Washingon, D.C., for the lingering fallout of their actions after the 2008 financial crisis during a two-hour interview on PBS’s Frontline.
“They go to [President George W. Bush] and say, ‘Hey, by 5 o’clock today, we need a trillion dollars of cash infusion into the system, or the American financial system will collapse in 72 hours, the world financial system will collapse 48 hours after that, and we will have global anarchy and chaos,'” Bannon said, describing how Chair of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke and Secretary of Treasury Harry Paulson reacted when Lehman Brothers collapsed on Sept. 18, 2008.
Banon, 66, claimed the financial meltdown was a bigger disaster than any blow inflicted by terrorists or revolutionaries in the history of the country.
“What nobody could ever do to us, Osama bin Laden, nobody, we’ve now done to ourselves,” Bannon continued. “We have literally caused a financial crisis that will bring down the entire system in 72 hours. The biggest revolutionaries that have gone after the United States could never dream of what we had done to ourselves.”
“Nobody, nobody has ever been held accountable for it, nobody has ever taken responsibility for it. We have never recovered. We have never recovered from that catastrophe,” Bannon said. “The bang that went off on Nov. 9, 2016, at 2:30 in the morning was lit in the Oval Office on Sept. 18, 2008.”
Bannon ripped former President Barack Obama, who he claimed “saved the wealthy” by “bailing out the people who are guilty” and suggested that an economic underclass had been punished by the actions of banks, hedge fund managers, and real estate brokers, which “all still exist.”
“The guy who is going to pay for it is the little guy. We live in neo-feudalism. This is not capitalism. This is where you have an underclass, a lumped-in proletariat almost that’s taken care of by the state. You have the very wealthy, and you have this kind of neo-feudalist working class and middle class in the middle that pays for everything. And the guys in the top, we’ve socialized the risk.”
Bannon also claimed that saving accounts are useless because interest rates have bottomed out and that the pension fund system is destroyed because of the government’s monetary policies after the 2008 financial crisis.
