Welfare Queens

There was a letter in the local fish-wrap just recently warning people that kvetching about Exxon's record profits (new records set in 3 successive years) showed an ignorance of how profit margins work, and expose us to the sin of Envy.  It's the latter point that I laughed at most harshly.  Ya' see, the rich have rigged the game in their favor, and to *not* recognize that is just simply stupid.  It's not envy.  It's the crushingly certain knowledge that you have too little, and what you have the richest will find a way to take.  They'll even use your government to take what you have so they don't lose what they've already stolen. 

E. J. Dionne puts it best:

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard.
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The biggest, most respected investment firms threaten to come crashing down. You can't have that. It's just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are "too big to fail," because they could bring us all down with them.

Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don't expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?

In a deal that the New York Times described as "shocking," J.P. Morgan Chase agreed over the weekend to pay $2 a share to buy all of Bear Stearns, one of the brand names of finance capitalism. The Federal Reserve approved a $30 billion -- that's with a "b" -- line of credit to make the deal work.

The Horror!

 

Just like that, some people’s stakes of $100 million or more in Bear were ravaged, and senior executives like Thomas A. Marano, the head of mortgages, and Bruce Lisman, a co-head of equities, were furious. Entering the weekend, Bear executives felt confident that the firm could be sold for several billion dollars, if not more. But $236 million — how could Bear have sold for such a price? Why didn’t the firm seek financial help earlier, they and others asked,
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For James E. Cayne, the firm’s chairman and former chief executive, holding on to his Bear stock was a point of pride, and he rarely, if ever, sold. A billionaire just over a year ago when Bear’s stock soared past $160, his 5.8 million shares are now worth about $28 million at Monday’s closing price of $4.81.

I've been saying for years that pandering to the rich (trickle down economics) was  just one more way to heap their burden on your own back.  How does the load feel now?  I even warned (though probably poorly) Geeguy and his readers that distributing wealth to the companies getting rich off the Iraqi boondoggle, while borrowing money at enormous rates to foster the illusion that 'we're just like them in our riches' was going to come back and bite us right in the ass.  Notice, that would be "bite us", not the Wall Street banking Welfare Queens.

Mr. Cayne will have to make do with his $28,000,000.  Many of his employees, very much like investors in Montana Power, are now in indentured servitude to the riches of the richest.  WE, you and I, are too.  We've just underwritten the loans of all those poor dupes who borrowed money on false promises  (kinda like the President, except he only promised to pay back our money.)  Geeguy is waking to the idea that the rich own our asses because we will be required to service them. 

Me?  I'm just tired of this shit.  And it's going to get worse.

Comments

[Mark Tokarski]

Am I right that the dollar is now worth 91 cents in Canada? Bush truly is a miracle worker.