Skip to main content

What are your thoughts of the rich on welfare? Read the article to see if you agree.

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. They have lost "confidence" in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another's portfolios.
So they have stopped investing. 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.
I don't fault Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, for being so interventionist in trying to save the economy. On the contrary, Bernanke deserves credit for ignoring all the extreme free-market bloviation. He doesn't want the economy to collapse on his watch, so he is willing to violate all the conservatives' shibboleths about the dangers of government intervention. As a voter once told the legendary political journalist Richard Rovere: "Sometimes you have to forget your principles to do what's right."
But if this near meltdown of capitalism doesn't encourage a lot of people to question the principles they have carried in their heads for the past three decades or so, nothing will.


We had already learned the hard way -- in the crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed -- that capitalism is quite capable of running off the rails. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was a response to the failure of the geniuses of finance (and their defenders in the economics profession) to realize what was happening or to fix it in time.


As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted of the era leading up to the Depression, "The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing."
But in the enthusiasm for deregulation that took root in the late 1970s, flowered in the Reagan era and reached its apogee in the second Bush years, we forgot the lesson that government needs to keep a careful watch on what capitalists do. Of course, some deregulation can be salutary, and the market system is, on balance, a wondrous instrument -- when it works. But the free market is just that: an instrument, not a principle.
In 1996, back when he was a Republican senator from Maine, William Cohen told me: "We have been saying for so long that government is the enemy. Government is the enemy until you need a friend."
So now the bailouts begin, and Wall Street usefully might feel a bit of gratitude, perhaps by being willing to have the wealthy foot some of the bill or to acknowledge that while its denizens were getting rich, a lot of Americans were losing jobs and health insurance. I'm waiting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...ml?hpid=opinionsbox1
Original Post

Replies sorted oldest to newest

quote:
Originally posted by JJPAUL:
What are your thoughts of the rich on welfare? Read the article to see if you agree.


I'm waiting to see if the usual crowd that comes in with their hand-wringing cries of "buh-buh-buh that's SOCIALISM!" whenever we talk about bailing out individuals (via universal health care, etc) feels the same way about bailing out Wall Street.
OK, I'll bite. I absolutely detest the fact that the government is having to bail out the failed business. I also detest the fact that most of their employees will lose everything they had invested and the former CEO will walk away with all of his "earnings". I absolutely detest that my tax dollars are going to be used to prop up this failed business. Do I thinkn it smacks of "socialism"? yep, sure do. that being said, it is probably one of the smartest things that the government has done lately. If the company was allowed to "belly up", the impact of that on the market would have been enough to send the foregin traders into a tailspin, which we could not have stopped. Their would have been banks and other similar companies shutting the doors today. I saw where the local RSA had a sizeable chunk of money in that firm as well, so my guess is that we will be asked, thru our property evaluations, to prop up those losses to the RSA over the next few years (just a guess, but if history repeats itself....live and learn).

there is no secret here that I will be the first to say I absolutey abor the government interference, and am sick and tired of bigger government and promises of increasing my taxes to rpovide for those who have put their priorities over what is best for their families. How many guys riding around out there on Harleys this weekend di not have health insurance? How many smokers out there can afford two or three packs a day and will not spend those dollars toward buying some type of health coverage, but yet when they find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun in the form of a lung tumor want the absolute best care avaialble to them? How many out there lived the good life, fished every weekend in the fine bass boat and toured the country in the RV, and when retirement comes around finds it hard to live on the meager amount of social security because surprisingly they never put a dime back for retirement purposes?
We in this country are about experience some very troubling times, and those of us who have seen it coming for a while will see our retirement funds and equity which we have put aside raped and plundered to the expense of those who have sat idly by and done nothing.

No I do not mind helping my neighbors, I give generously to those that I can. I am compassionate and sometimes find myself giving that which I cannot afford. I have traveled to other countries to help those in need, but I also believe there comes a time and place where those we help, or those desiring it, need to recognize some form of responsibility.
"[The] modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating."
- Thomas Jefferson

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
- Thomas Jefferson

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power (of money) should be taken away from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs."
- Thomas Jefferson

"The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction. I sincerely believe, with you...that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
- Thomas Jefferson

"To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill [chartering the first Bank of the United States] have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution. They are not among the powers specially enumerated."
- Thomas Jefferson

"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution - taking from the Federal government their power of borrowing (from privately-owned corporate banks)."
- Thomas Jefferson

"We are undone, my dear sir, if legislation is still permitted which makes our money, much or little, real or imaginary, as the moneyed interests shall choose to make it."
- Thomas Jefferson

Will we ever learn?

DF
CNN Money reports that at least three present and former Bear, Stearns players are big time losers.

The past CEO/Chairman james Cayne lost $477.8 million. The present CEO/Chairman alan Schwartz lost $115.7 million. The present CFO/COO lost $20.6 million. Who let the CEO and Chairman of the board hold both positions? Rather like putting a fox in charge of hen house security. B/S employees held 30 percent of the stock. I will not shed a tear for any of them. They made the mess and over invested in one stock.

Hope SEC verifies these losses and prosecutes any who didn't lose big for insider trading.

Add Reply

Post

Untitled Document
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×