The Fix Is In

The other contributor to this blog has been lax, while I have been merely absent. This will attempt to correct that, and to address a question that has been bothering me for a few months: Why are the Big Banks and Wall Street on board with the Marxists? Does it smack at all of conspiracy that Paulson came from Goldman Sachs, as did Rubin, the mentor of Geithner, as did Summers, and that all of the major moves we have seen recently seem to benefit only Wall Street, and do nothing for the rest of us? Could it be because, while Paulson told us that "credit markets were frozen" and that there was an "electronic run on banks", all that was really happening was that he and Bush were looking around the room, so to speak, and seeing that a few big investment houses were having trouble borrowing, and that had to be fixed? But was there a credit crisis? How many unsolicited mailings did you receive during the last quarter of 08, or for that matter this quarter of 09, offering you yet another credit card, refinancing of your mortgage, etc.? Consumer credit and other forms of producer credit were, it seems, doing just fine.

Why is power being consolidated in the Oval Office while these Wall Street firms and banks take in billions of our taxpayer dollars to accomplish ... what? Goldman claims it was "forced" to take 25 Billion from the government, but otherwise doesn't need the bailout. But Goldman got at least 13 of the 170 Billion paid to AIG, which, in addition to Goldman, paid Bank of America, Merrill Lynch (and who got that little company?), UBS, JP Morgan, Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Barclays additional Billions. AIG, the company that Sean Brodrick reports lost $7700 a second in the last quarter of 08 (total over 61 Billion), was nothing more than a conduit to pay the friends of Paulson, Geithner and Summers. How did the people who cheered when the laws changed to allow banks to play in the derivatives market get to run the government's programs to "fix" the problems created in part by that travesty?

My next entry will provide some historical perspective to these "fixes", but does anyone smell a rat? Is this change we can hope for? Or nascent corruption? Desmond Lachman, an official at IMF, wrote in the Washington Post that the recent "dalliance" (see my post below) shows that we should compare the US not to Japan (and its ten-year hiatus caused by poor government regulation in attempting to solve its "crisis"), but rather it should be compared to Argentina, Russia, and Thailand, which collapsed under their own corruption.

Once government assumes the "Commanding Heights" of a command economy, liberty and free markets can and will be held hostage to the "friends of the state", and capitalism is only a twisted, ugly shell of the magical system that made this country great. If you think I am overreacting, ask yourself - how is Obama's insistence on the firing of the CEO of one of the largest companies in the US any different than Putin's arrest of the CEO of Russia's largest oil company, when they disagreed? A despot is a despot is a tyrant is a king is a dictator, and they are all corrupt.