Wall Street Socialists-The Meltdown Is A Bipartisan Affair Hidden Below A Mile Of SHIT( Amy Goodman)

[kpete]

Published on Thursday, September 18, 2008 by TruthDig.com
Wall Street Socialists

by Amy Goodman


She went on: "It's about taking on too much leverage and borrowing to take on the risk and borrowing again and borrowing again, 25 to 30 times the amount of capital. ... They had to basically back the borrowing that they were doing. ... There was no transparency to the Fed, to the SEC, to the Treasury, to anyone who would have even bothered to look as to how much of a catastrophe was being created, so that when anything fell, whether it was the subprime mortgage or whether it was a credit complex security, it was all below a pile of immense interlocked, incestuous borrowing, and that's what is bringing down the entire banking system."

As these high-rolling gamblers are losing all their banks' money, it comes to the taxpayer to bail them out. A better use of the money, says Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and an economic adviser to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, would be to "save these 4 million homeowners from defaulting and being kicked out of their houses. Now they're going to be kicked out of the houses. The houses will be vacant. The cities are going to (lose) property taxes, they're going to have to cut back local expenditures, local infrastructure. The economy is being sacrificed to pay the gamblers."

Prins elaborated: "You're nationalizing the worst portion of the banking system. ... You're taking on risk you won't be able to understand. So it's even more dangerous." I asked Prins, in light of all this nationalization, to comment on the prospect of nationalizing health care into a single-payer system. She responded, "You could actually put some money into something that pre-empts a problem happening and helps people get health care."

The meltdown is a bipartisan affair. Presidential contenders John McCain and Barack Obama each have received millions of dollars from these very companies that are collapsing and are receiving the corporate welfare. President Clinton and his treasury secretary, Robert Rubin (now an Obama economic adviser), presided over the repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, passed after the 1929 start of the Great Depression to curb speculation that caused that calamity. The repeal was pushed through by former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm, one of McCain's former top advisers. Politicians are too dependent on Wall Street to do anything. The people who vote for them, and whose taxes are being handed over to these failed financiers, need to show their outrage and demand that their leaders truly put "country first" and bring about "change."

more at:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/18-5

[Skink]

1. This is just starving of the beast.

Thank a Reagan democrat.

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. I love it when someone cuts to the chase.

[bananas]

3. Did she really say "shit"?

[Wilber_Stool]

4. If they had just given

the two million people that had defaultable loans $10,000 to make up the difference between what they could pay and what they needed, this would all be over now. What would it have cost? 20 billion.

[malaise]

5. And that's the simple truth although

Republican deregulation policies are the primary reason for this madness.
K & R

add

[mzmolly]

6. Barack Obama getting money from employees of Fannie and Freddie

does not make him responsible for this crisis. And, Clinton would have stopped digging a hole when he saw one.

[glitch]

7. Amy's good but she ain't perfect.

She does seem to bend over backwards to find fault equally, an old school tendency to appear non-partisan. IMO.

[tomp]

8. bending over backwards, really?

how naive of you to think this a a purely republican-caused crisis.

[glitch]

9. You assume too much, but thanks for the response.

Your real answer lies somewhere between "purely" and "equally".

[tomp]

10. hair-splitting self defense, anyone? nt

[glitch]

11. B/W thinking. nt