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.

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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.

Main Street quakes when Wall Street shakes, and today is no exception too the rule. The nation is trembling beneath the uncertainty that is bouncing Wall Street giants around like pin balls in an earthquake.  It is getting to the point where the more idiotic the political “reporter” makes his or her story, the more some folk like it.

After all, it’s more important to clamp down on real or imagined political insults than it is to formulate an equitable plan for restructuring the nation’s vulnerable monetary and banking system. It is more important to come to the bottom of the “pig insult” than it is to punish felonious bankers, and restructure our antiquated, self-destructive banking system.

Lehman Brothers has filed for bankruptcy protection in one of the largest (again…) bankruptcies in the nation.  Bank of American purchased Merill Lynch and the Federal Reserve and other major banks are opening up the  spigots, praying that  flushing “cash” in the system will shore up the holes and quiet the ruckus.  Wall Street looks like a dangerous game of doominoes (dominoes, apocalyptic style) and the players are running around, looking for a rescue.  

Only one problem:  many of the would-be rescuers are a hairsbreath away from disaster themselves.

Not to fear, though. Somebody, somewhere will save us from our inattention, greed, ignorance.  Somebody. Somewhere. Sometime.

Yeah, right.  Dream on, there, sheeple.  Look for the savior with a white hat--and  look closer for the fangs and carnivorous smile.

Solving this mess will entail pulling ourselves away from the idjut box and demanding that our leaders work at something other than scandal mongering and mud slinging.  And that’s the problem.  This crisis is so monstrous and has such destructive potential, that you can bet more idiocy and diversion is cooking as we speak.

If people stepped away from the diversions and kept looking at what is really happening within our banking and economic system, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’d be interested in more than real or imagined ‘pig insults.’  For sure they would be asking tough questions and not falling victim to childish questions of whether one candidate “disrespected” another.

Political writers around the nation note the opinions of the Republican and Democratic campaign’s candidates.  An AP writer pens, “With chaos rocking financial markets, John McCain assailed "greed and corruption" on Wall Street and promised to clean it up, while Barack Obama blamed White House policies and said his opponent would only deliver more of the same.” (15-Sep-08)

With the Obama-Palin-McCain soap opera grabbing headlines, we forget that there is a third party candidate for President.  Cynthia McKinney, a former congresswoman from Georgia, is running for President on the Green Party ticket, but you would never know it, given the pig, lipstick and out of wedlock baby news coming from the main stream news streams. 

Whether you agree with her politics or not, the fact that McKinney is a BLACK WOMAN, a former congresswoman who served six terms in the House, a woman who came out against the ‘war’ long before others did, and is on the TOP position of her party’s ticket, should merit more news coverage than the “pig insult”. 

The Green Party’s website provides a partisan rendition of McKinney’s history and views, much of which has long since been “lost” by the mainstream media:

McKinney lost her seat because Georgia allows cross-over voting during primary electionsm and thousands of Republicans in her district voted on the Democratic ballot in a strategy that's prohibited in most other states. That minor incident in 2006 between McKinney and a Capitol Police officer was a media exaggeration -- no charges were ever filed. If the same scrutiny had been given to White House high crimes and constitutional violations at the time, Bush and Cheney would have been removed from office by now. In fact, McKinney was the first member of Congress to introduce a motion for impeachment, while Obama and most of his fellow Dems have rejected attempts to hold the Bush gang accountable. (votetruth08.com)

These days, we don’t want to hear anything the mainstream media ignores and sidetracks, particularly when that news could give us nightmares.  Nightmares about the collapse of the nation’s financial system.  Nightmares about the loss of our homes, cars, pensions, and bank accounts.  In short, we’d rather escape into fantasies rather than deal with news about the possible, or even probable collapse of the nation’s banking industry, real estate market, and yes, “our way of life.”

Who needs the reality of a nightmare economy when we can divert ourselves with “The Young and the Ridiculous”, “As the Candidate Spins”, and “All My Lobbyists”?

And, here is the reality of what we are running from. Insurance giant AIG is looking for a massive amount of cash to shore up its allegedly shaky foundations. The company’s shares lost over half their value as of September 15, according to major financial reporting sources.  The company reportedly will divest itself of several divisions in order to raise cash, as the market nervously looks on, following a tried and true path taken by scores of other troubled financial services companies.

Meanwhile, another financial services giant, reputed to be the nation’s largest savings and loan, Washington Mutual, experienced a 50% drop in share values, fueling concerns that the company may not have enough resources on hand to weather current problems.  AIG, WaMu and dozens of other high flying financial behemoths are flying low these days.

Other major financial institutions took pre-emptive steps Monday to try and calm both investors and employees, while the handwringers in and out of government short-circuit their political neurons trying to pre-empt the other side with solutions to “the crisis.”

A writer from the Philippines puts an interesting twist on the old saw about political means: 

One can say that disaster politics is traditional politics by other means. A simple question of helping our less fortunate countrymen has turned into a political tug-of-war on who will be given credit for spending public money on the disaster. (http://moncasiple.wordpress.com/2008/06/29/politics-of-disaster-2/ )

And, that is the heart of the matter today.  From a political standpoint, how will the candidates manipulate the crisis and morph it into a form whereby they can take credit for, if not solving the problem, spending money on it?

Authors Website: http://www.lulu.com/davis4000_2000

Authors Bio:

Wanna be member of the anti-word police, author, columnist, activist and muckraker extraordinaire. Author of:

Land, Legacy and Lynching: Building the Future for Black America

Urban Asylum: Politics, Lunatics and the Refrigerator Woman

Contributing editor: (works in progress)

Red, Black, Brown & Green: Ethnic People and the Move to Economic Self-Suficiency

Screaming Doors (novel)

Screaming Doors