10.26.08
Your tax dollars at…play?
No John McCain today. Or at least not very much John McCain. Though he certainly played a role in the financial mess that’s been building up for a long time, he’s not a central character in the meltdown. He’s got more blame than some, but less than many others.
Sarah Palin? Forget her. She knows nothing. She thinks progressive taxation is Marxist and Obama’s going to come and take your house right after he lets those tax cuts for the rich expire. I’ll bet she even thinks she’s rich, but she certainly won’t after the tax bill comes in on that $150,000 wardrobe the RNC gifted her.
Hint to Sarah Palin: Use somebody other than H&R block this time. They didn’t give you good advice on that per diem and family travel thing last year. This year better just start with a tax lawyer.
Remember when a bank or two failed, the market crashed, another bank or two failed, and the next thing you knew there was Paulson with a bailout plan in his hands, saying that Congress had to enact this immediately OR ELSE? When asked how long he had had to put it together, he said that it had been months in the making, but Congress needed to read it overnight and act immediately.
Congress balked when their constituents got upset that bankers were going to get huge salaries, bonuses, and golden parachutes from this. So to sweeten the pot, Paulson announced that the money would not be spent on compensation packages for executives. And the FBI announced that they were starting an investigation into the possibility of fraud by employees of failed financial institutions.
Fast forward. Almost immediately, the FBI drops the investigation. There never was one. Large sums of money have been spent on compensation packages and all kinds of perks. AIG keeps sending its top executives to spas and resorts for “meetings”. They’re back at the till with their hands out, and guess what? They have not created a single job. They have lad off loads of people, and now the banks are planning on using the money to buy up other banks for pennies on the dollar and improve their profitability.
They are not going to lend out a dime of the money. But they want lots more of it.
Here’s the issue, as I see it. This is not just a case of suddenly the market failing. Remember, they had been working on that plan for “months”. How many months? They’re not saying. But notice that the sum total of the plan is to give money to rich people. They came up with a plan that did nothing to remedy the causes of he problem (bad loans packaged into bad investments and relabeled as good). The only thing it is doing is throwing money at rich people a/k/a “supply side economics”, “trickle down economics”, or “voodoo economics”. Needless to say, supply side economics has been completely discredited, but here we are, proving yet again that when you give money to rich people, they get richer. They don’t put it all into new employment. Doesn’t happen.
So if they started months ago, how many month ago? When might somebody have seen this coming?
Let me suggest November of 2004, right after Bush “won” the election. I had said all along that he was planning on bankrupting the country in order to eliminate the future feasibility of a social safety net. Now it appears that with his friends Bernanke and Paulson, he is planning on emptying out the Treasury as a gift to his ultra-wealthy friends. The market crash was planned. Through pulling strings and making crucial transactions, Bush and Co. managed to bring down the market so we would be “forced” to give them whatever they wanted. There was no long-term loss to them. The market will recover and they will get their losses covered many times over. And they will keep asking for money until we tell them no.
This is the biggest redisribution of wealth in history, from the poor to the rich. It will push many middle class people into poverty, and one of the purposes of this whole operation is to bankrupt the country so no one can help. The Republicans in the Senate will filibuster over and over again, then blame the problems on the Democrats.
Failure to act on a serious issue they were aware of is reckless irresponsibility. Trying to destroy the economy and loot the Treasury, the only word that comes to mind is “Treason”.
So what do we do? Find the crooks. Throw the book at them. We’ve got laws, let’s use them.
Just this week Bush said in a speech that “this moment” would be the moment we looked back to and realized that the program is working. I think not.
It’s time to for some serious reckoning.
