They are called investment bankers, speculators, lobbyists, regulators and politicos. But in truth, the people involved in the current financial meltdown initiated on Wall Street and Capitol Hill are super scoundrels. And they are un-American to boot.
In her Sept. 27 New York Times column, Maureen Dowd takes it a step further: “Who would have dreamed that when socialism finally came to the U. S. A., it would be brought not by Bolsheviks in blue jeans but Wall Street bankers in Gucci loafers?”
“Maverick investor” Jim Rogers, one of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s critics, shudders at considering the consequences of expanding government’s bailout role in the present financial crisis. He told Fortune magazine’s Marc Gunther that “America is more communist than China right now . . . . This is welfare for the rich.”
Paulson’s recent bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for a total of $5.4 trillion in mortgages to a downward spiraling U.S. housing market, will cost taxpayers, but no one knows ultimately how much.
Joe Klein insists in Time magazine that “The real economic woe is yet to come, as credit dries up and the economy slips into recession.”
The fundamental thing that so-called “Joe six pack” and most other Americans don’t know is that America’s top export is debt. Now get this: In order to sell debt, America has to borrow money! So, for the near term, Paulson guarantees buyers that debts are backed by the U. S. government. In worst-case instances, U. S. treasuries replace the bad debt.
Unless an American’s reading habits are rather broad, he or she could easily complete college and not understand that America is a republic that we call a participatory democracy. In it, we elect people to represent us.
An oligarchy exists, though. It is an “elite” band of government, business, academic and religious members who actually rule us. It is an upgrade of Europe’s Middle-Age mercantilism. Democracy mostly exists only among these members.
Through commission or omission, they are all in on the greed. They are now selecting their fall guys, if need be, if public outcry is loud enough that some bodies have to be reprimanded, and even jailed (for a short time) after showy trials.
Notwithstanding the $700 billion bailout package approved last week, there is still the weak dollar problem.
“The binge of recent years would not have been possible if the Fed [Federal Reserve] had had a prudent monetary policy,” Forbes magazine editor Steve Forbes writes. “It is within the U.S. government’s powers to make the dollar strong.”
Fraud, greed, stupidity and short-sightedness, like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, could not be stopped, and the market so far seems to possibly be galloping toward destruction.
In the October issue of Portfolio magazine of business intelligence, Jesse Eisinger writes in his “Wall Street” column, “But the prevailing political and economic ideology of the past 25 years has been to discount the propensity of markets to encourage these tendencies.”
There is the belief that markets will always correct themselves, even when super scoundrels bleed the system into a coma.
Eisinger adds relief for a hopeful future: “It has become clear that the opposite is true. Markets tend toward excess and run amok if unchecked. A tax that nudges markets toward becoming more rational and less frenzied would be a good start.”
Sen. John McCain can’t win a convert here or with Eisinger, who ends his piece with this: “And raising revenue for
a deficit-ridden government from people who can afford it would be a nice little bonus.”
My God! That’s what Sen. Barack Obama has been saying since way back during the primaries.
Al_Calloway@Verizon.net
Pictured above: Al Calloway
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