Are you ready? You’ll probably hate this column. As a matter of fact, stop reading if you’re prone to bouts of depression or mental lapses of hopelessness and despair. What follows only explains how bad
People think it is only as bad, or at least as simple, as American International Group (AIG) swiping billions of dollars from the American taxpayer, as has been much the focus in recent weeks. Talk of how impressively non-stimulative the stimulus plan will likely be has quieted to a low murmur so to allow room for the white noise and chatter to envelop AIG executive pay bonuses.
Yes, Wall Street using government funds to lavishly capitalize on their own recklessness and failure is an absurdity and all praise to those having conniptions over it. Funny though, that many of those pitching fits were also praising Obama for ‘swift action’ when he pushed for bailing out these corporations to begin with.
What the tantrum children don’t understand is that all this political grandstanding, all these Chris Dodds, Barnie Franks and Tim Geithners throwing their arms in the air and feigning outrage is a pathetic load of bull. They all ‘- Republicans and Democrats ‘- signed on to this bailout, which explicitly included contractual executive bonuses. So hush.
But I digress. Let us get to the real juice of how twisted things are and how bad Washington and Wall Street together are screwing us. This goes much deeper than headlined condemnation of CEOs.
As if companies like AIG and Goldman Sachs didn’t already have enough influence in Washington with their laudable ways of mesmerizing politicians (with the crisp sound of ‘ching-ching’), we needed former Goldman CEO Hank Paulson to head what might have been the least transparent big government endeavor of all time: the bailout plan.
Then we needed him to prop up all the insolvent institutions his golfing buddies headed and anoint the rest of his former coworkers as heads of other failed institutions on the bailout list.
All is fair in love, war and undeserved billion-dollar giveaways.
Meanwhile, every sucker politician in the House Financial Services Committee is hoping they’re not exposed as being in bed with Wall Street. Someone should tell them the jig is up; we know you’re all corrupt and incompetent.
This malicious tag team of government and business, cooperating to doubly screw us in reckless ineptitude, isn’t over yet. It gets worse.
If you ever hear some quibbling Ron Paul-ite ranting about the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy (it might be me), you should listen closer to that quibbler. Every time it ‘prints money’ by buying up securities, it’s giving banks and financial institutions (like, ahem, all the ones being bailed out) more money to lend. One might think this policy has subsided, given how obviously it led to our current crisis.
And one would be wrong. Around August 2007, they pumped in about $33 billion. By November they injected $48 billion. By late December, they printed up to $58 billion. In May of 2008, it was $115 billion. Up and up and up.
The Federal Reserve, that dark and mysterious obscurity that most Americans don’t even know exists, keeps pumping in more newly-created money into the banking and financial markets in a way that’s too blatantly fascist (or would it be socialist?) to include in Obama’s legislation to ‘save’ the economy.
This all culminated in the Fed’s announcement last week that it would inject another $1.2 trillion into the economy, buying up government bonds and securities of Fannie and Freddie’s. Do remember this new money goes directly to the Wall Street giants that destabilized our entire economy, in addition to their bailout bootie.
How much more blurry does the line between public and private need to get before partisans who still believe in our two parties begin to realize what is really up? How much further do politicians need to pummel us into bankruptcy before people direct their crosshairs away from the proverbial free markets we don’t have and onto the government, who very plainly isn’t here to save us?
The tax money lost on Barack Obama’s spending spree and the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy will create so much inflation and artificial bubbling that America is really in for a wallop of a reality check. Politicians in bed with big business is bad enough, but these things will undermine our entire economy, eating it away from the inside like a cancer.
The higher up in government you go, the less accountability those master planners possess. The government is very sick and will not be here to help us when things get rough. And the market is fused with government and may not reliably rebound like the capitalists hope. There is no one looking out for us.
And that’s about how bad it is.
John Glaser is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
