Bailing Out Financial Retards
By Case Wagenvoord
09 September,
2008
Countercurrents.org
So the United States has nationalized
Fannie and Freddie and taxpayers will pickup the bill for their toxic
paper. So much for deregulation.
Actually, deregulation was a sham to begin with. All that happened is a benign regulator, the government, was exchanged for a brutal regulator, the market, i.e., if you screw up, you fail.
Then, in 1984, the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company made one too many bad loans and the concept of “too big to fail” was born. Taxpayers bailed the bank out and deregulation became a joke. This was quickly followed by the savings and loan bailout, the Bear Sterns bailout, now the Fannie/Freddie bailout and a few others that barely made the news.
However, this one is going to be a whopper! Between them, Fannie and Freddie guarantee $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities (a trillion is 10 to the twelfth power or a one with twelve zeroes following it).
Maybe the bailout is necessary, maybe it isn’t. But, two things are certain: first, someone is going to collect some very rich fees for handling the nuts and bolts of the two giants’ nationalization, and secondly, ideologues and economists will continue to tout the efficacy of an unregulated free market.
Once again, theology will trump reason.
To paraphrase Michael Ledeen, every sixty or seventy years, the American public has got to grab Big Business by the throat, slam it against a wall and teach it some manners.
It’s time.
If our tax dollars are going to be used to bail out corporate ineptitude, then the public has the right to demand a major Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), beginning with the passage of a brand, spanking new Glass-Stiegel Act that will make the old one look like a neoliberal dream.
But why stop there? Why not pass a Financial Terrorism Act. If legitimate protest at the RNC is considered terrorism, why shouldn’t bringing down an economy be treated the same?
Just as you don’t put the fox in charge of the chicken coop, you don’t let CEOs regulate themselves.
Speaking of CEOs, it’s about time we saw a few of them in orange jumpsuits. Were a street hustler in Harlem to try the same Ponzi scam they did, he’d be looking at some hard time.
Of course, it will never happen. Both the White House and Congress are corporate employees, and you sure as hell can’t fire your boss.
As long
as America’s one-party system continues to thrive, our financiers
can be confidant that as long as they are “too big to fail,”
they can do any damn thing they please. Only the most egregious violators
are ever punished. But in or out of jail, the public is still stiffed.
