Pay No Attention To The Economist Behind The Curtain
Filed Under Kitchen Curtain | Posted on October 5, 2008
As this column was being written, the U.S. House of Representatives, for a variety of ideological reasons, rejected the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout. The bailout plan was written by Wall Street alumni and contained virtually no provisions addressing the root causes of the economic crisis. The author applauds Congress’s newfound courage and encourages further independent thinking.
Toasted by the Wall Street Journal and other megaphones of the bean-counter class as “the nation’s first MBA chief executive,” Bush carefully spoke in the passive voice to avoid dropping any clues he may have abrogated his assigned responsibility to govern.
He spoke vaguely about investment banks that “found themselves saddled with” toxic assets and banks that “found themselves” with questionable balance sheets. With a delivery style honed through eight years of lying, Bush deadpanned that “the gears of the American financial system began grinding to a halt.” Now, “our entire economy is in danger.”
Meanwhile, sliding down the scale toward the middle and lower classes, there has never been enough money to address decay in the lives of the “special interest groups” who so greedily demand “government handouts” in the form of “entitlements.” No wonder ours has been described as a system that privatizes profit while nationalizing loss.
If the bailout itself was a source of outrage, the feigned sense of surprise on display in virtually all quarters over Wall Street’s collapse should be a source of national shame. The flaws in the economic house of cards that Reagan built have been apparent since the 1980s, yet those who profited wildly from the sham were allowed to deflect serious criticism through their domination of an imbedded corporate media.
A key feature of Reagan’s new economy was deregulation, portrayed as the silver bullet allowing free markets to work their natural magic unencumbered by government meddling. But the history of deregulation reveals nothing either natural or magical. In 1989 the Senate Ethics Committee, a toothless body by all accounts, determined that three Democratic and two Republican U.S. senators had improperly interfered with the oversight duties of a regulatory body charged with preventing abuse in the savings and loan industry.
In 1999, Texas Sen. Phil Gramm earned his stripes in the Reaganites’ war on the New Deal by gaining passage in the Senate of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The new rules virtually guaranteed conflicts of interest between the investment, commercial banking and insurance industries by removing safeguards put in place under the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act by a Congress educated by the Great Depression. Simultaneously, Gramm, widely touted as McCain’s choice for Treasury Secretary, was creating the “Enron Loophole,” which enabled that infamous episode.
It’s been “go along to get along” and those who rock the boat don’t get invited to the ball. Instead, many of those labeled as left-wing extremists find themselves scrambling for handouts at the multitude of nonprofit organizations set up to combat the madness.
Tags: 1980s, assets, curta, curtain, fur, moneyRelated posts
Leave a Reply