As a lifelong republican, I would have expected losing a nuclear war with the Soviets as a much more likely reality than watching my own political party transform the United States into a replica of the former Soviet Union, but that is what has happened since February of this year. As of this writing, the US government has printed a trillion dollars to socialize the losses of the American investment banking system. Just the losses have been assumed by the taxpayers, mind you. The profits, at record levels and barely taxed for a decade, remain firmly the property of those who have driven the global financial system, not just ours, into a meltdown not seen since 1929.
When the USSR fell in 1991 most scholars attributed the collapse to a fundamental difference between Communism and Capitalism. In Russia, the government owned everything. This meant that it owned all of the risk involved in any venture and all of the potential losses. In America, the government allowed the private sector to take all of the risks involved in business and thereby assume responsibility for all of the losses these ventures might accrue. Government here assumed no risk. It simply taxed the winnings, the profits. This was the fundamental difference which allowed America to emerge the triumphant winner of a 75 year long ideological war.
What the heck has happened? As of this evening, the US taxpayers own a trillion dollars of worthless securitized debt instruments, acquired by the treasury in exchange for “gold standard” treasury bills as New York investment banks, who cannot sell the junk for more than twenty cents on the dollar, dump them at the discount window of the Federal Reserve at full face value to the tune of $70 billion per week. The US government owns a larger percentage of the world’s largest insurance company, AIG, than the communist Chinese own of their largest “state owned” businesses today, since AIG insured these trillions of dollars of junk debt instruments and can’t come close to paying the claims against them. Each US taxpayer is now the part owner of what the New York Times calls “an incalculable amount of bad debt,” up to $5 trillion, half of the country’s mortgage marketplace.
With the stroke of a pen, the USA has become the former USSR - with one terrible exception: The USSR owned the losses AND the profits. We just bought the losses. Any profits that come from the total discharge of risk and loss by these firms will be kept in the firm grasp of the businessmen who sold us this trash under the guise that they are “too big to fail.”
Republicans and conservatives overthrew the regulation that would have continued to prevent today’s disaster on Wall Street, saying it was a dated legacy of liberals who wanted government to control the financial industry. (Google the Glass-Steagle Act if you need education about how we’ve arrived where we are, it’s all out there.) It is ironic then, isn’t it, that once Phil Gramm and his well-paying supporters got exactly what they wanted, in less than a decade the same party’s government now owns most of the bad debt and in effect controls the industry? Who is the socialist?
There should be a few more stipulations, however, than we the people who are bailing the yachts of the ruling class are getting so far in exchange for our “uncalculable” contributions.
The passports and assets should be seized and frozen, immediately, of every single CEO, COO and director of every firm that has sold this garbage, insured this garbage, provided a Triple A Credit rating to this garbage, lobbied congress or the executive branch to deregulate and allow the trading of this garbage or voted in congress to allow this situation to occur while we the people, who have had our National Debt Obligation literally doubled with the past two weeks (with the Fannie/Freddie obligation potential of $5 trillion more dollars), take the time needed to get to the bottom of the massive, unprecedented fraud that has been perpetrated upon us. The perpetrators who've accomplished this without a single vote being cast to authorize this spending should not be able to just fly away to Dubai or Paraguay on their private Gulfstream jets, like the Saudis did on 9/12.
If we’re Back in the USSR, boys, lets find out who did this, give them a fair hearing and send the criminals to Siberia for the rest of their lives, not to the beaches of the French Riviera or the luxury of Palm Island in the Gulf of Arabia.
