Crack smoking welfare mothers with big screen TVs are responsible for this mess. The $700 billion bailout that us hard working types, and our children, and grandchildren, are going to have to pay down is the fault of people with lousy credit who bought houses they couldn’t afford.
If you can’t afford to pay for something you shouldn’t buy it. All this talk about greedy stockbrokers and speculators is rubbish. You can find a few bad apples anywhere but this falls squarely on the shoulders of the people who should never have applied for a credit card or a home loan.
This is the view of a friend who admits that he “drank the Republican Kool-Aid,” which I guess means he has surrendered any responsibility for thinking logically or considering anything that contradicts what he hears on FOX News.
If it were not for hypothetical welfare mothers and the Democratic House and Senate who allegedly entitle them to spend their welfare checks at Best Buy, conservatives would have no donkey to pin the blame on. But this meltdown is a direct result of the lifting of any restraint or regulation on the money making lending schemes of the corporate interests that control our political system and the media.
Prior to the Great Depression, economic downturns were part of the natural rhythm of the economy, a way for the economy to self-correct. These depressions were painful but the country got through them. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent panic to pull money out of banks, confidence in the economy was nil. In order to ensure that Americans would not have to resort to keeping their life savings in coffee cans in order to sleep at night, Franklin Roosevelt authorized the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation through the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
The agreement was that the government would cover bank losses if necessary but bankers and investors were accountable for following regulations, that is, laws that prevented them from extending credit and loans to borrowers who could not demonstrate some ability to pay them back. Well, that did not sit well with many large businesses that relied on a free flow of credit to sell their automobiles, suburban ranch-style homes and Florida swampland.
From FDR’s time until now, Big Money has sought to roll back the laws which restrain them from being able to engineer schemes to take more money from working people’s pockets and put it into theirs. This included money that workers might actually earn at some point in the future because that is what credit is.
Ronald Reagan, patron saint of deregulation, helped remove some of these noisome rules and laws. The theory was that if you let Big Money do what it wanted, it would make Bigger Money. Somehow this would trickle down to the workers but certainly not in the form of Big Money having to pay taxes. The FDIC arrangement worked fine until the Savings & Loan scandal of 1990. Remember Neil Bush? You should, because you’re still
bailing him out and the price tag for that cluster was a measly $150 billion.
The Glass-Steagall Act was finally repealed in 1999 with legislation authored by then Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, now chairman of a Swiss bank. This was pushed by a Republican Congress who had some sort of Contract taken out on America at the time.
So my question to my Kool-Aid drinking friend is this, why isn’t the free market correcting itself? Why are the hardcore capitalists looking to the government to save them? Why are the Republicans willing to extend them $700 billion in credit with no oversight and regulation since unregulated speculating, bad lending and betting on derivatives is what got us into this mess?
The investment crowd has had a very profitable three decades, wheeling and dealing with less and less government oversight. They convinced the government to trust them to be responsible and then they partied it up. Now these Wall Street mothers are worried they may have to give up their country club homes and big screen TVs and they want their welfare checks.
I think they ought to stop playing with other people’s money and go out and get real jobs.
Windham resident Mike Mack frequently and freely lends his opinions tot he Lakes Region Weekly
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