How can a political candidate take credit for “solving the banking crisis?”
The US mortgage and banking industry is a fine example of elephants dancing on marbles these days. We are seeing scores of our financial giants try to do the impossible-put off the inevitable collapse of America’s fiscal house of cards, and try to look as if they have everything under control. The question is: do you believe it?
Instead of: what the #%%#%# have we done with nearly 8 years of deregulated blind regulatory eyes, the boyz and gurls in Washington are now trying to outdo each other in who “would be” the toughest on solving the banking-real estate-foreclosure crisis. Blah, blah, yadayadayada.
Today’s political candidates are trying to out do each other on how tough they would get on the financial industry, but the fact remains: anything “to be done” is merely closing the barn door after the fat cats have made out like bandits.
And they have been really busy while the regulators slept. Wall Street’s financiers, mortgage banks and other assorted unindicted felons, have been busier than a two dollar hooker on payday, making sure they come out ahead in the ongoing catastrophe we call the investment banking industry.
The suits on Wall Street and beyond have filled their pockets and secured their futures with multi-million dollar golden parachutes and severage packages. To use an old saying: they’re laughing all the way to the bank.
While the employees of those very same corporations saw their pensions and 401 (k) plans dry up, along with their jobs, their bosses were collecting gazillion dollar performance bonuses. While more than two million homeowners stand to lose their homes over the next two years, our “leaders” are busy bailing out the very folk who brought us this great disaster, under the disguise that we can’t let the financial felons go under because they’ll take the nation with them.
This whole nightmare is a prime example of disaster capitalism: we cause the disaster, profit from it and the American taxpayer picks up the tab. Ain’t it wonderful?
Now, let me depart for a minute here and explore the concept of profiting from self-inflicted disaster capitalism. If a bonus is given for doing a good job and if these executives got millions of dollars in bonus dollars when the companies they “ran” or, ran into the ground, went belly up, am I being a conspiracy theorist here, if I wonder whether their real job was to destroy the company they were hired to “run”?
The nation is undergoing the most massive financial turmoil since the Great Depression, with the majority of the pain nearly a year away in 2009: that’s when the interest on millions of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) jumps up and puts the bite on more than 2 million mortgage holders.
We’re nine months into what has been a year of pain and misery for millions of Americans, with possibly the worse yet to come. Blogger Frank James broke it all down and put it this way: “Anyone who isn’t scared by what happened on Wall Street over the weekend is truly clueless or on some very heavy duty drugs.” (The Swamp)
Right now, we have almost an entire quarter to go before the interest rate increase in Adjustable Rate Mortgages--ARMs. Nevertheless, right now, Wall Street’s “best” are falling like dominoes, with “healthy” corporations swallowing their endangered counterparts like a great white shark on steroids. And, through it all, the “powers that be” are praying that the bottom doesn’t fall out before November, because both parties are bogged down in election year minutia, not disaster solutions.
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac (some political candidates haven't a clue about what these agencies do), Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, violence and desperation in the nation's "no jobs, no future" streets,
There are two months before we elect a new President, two months of dirty politics, misstatements, lies, obfuscations, cheesy photo ops and speechifying. As the nation’s eyes turn to the disasters on Wall Street in the real world, the spin meisters get busy trying to pull us back into fantasy land, with the next installment of diversion, division, and disaster masking.
The more bad news comes out of Wall Street, the sillier this election campaign gets. We have the potential of the entire economy cracking apart and our beloved spin meisters are howling that Senator Barak Obama has “insulted Gov. Sara Palin by calling her a pig.” Or, so say a few of our conservative yellow journalism diverters in chief.
They’re treading water in front of a massive economic tidal wave, as bank failures, expensive wars, business failure/downsizing turn our economy into swiss cheese. The magicians and flim flam specialists are throwing smoke in our eyes, aided and abetted by their unindicted felonious counterparts in our government.
