Sometimes mere coincidence can be telling.
Yesterday and today two different actions were taken by the US Congress. Yesterday the Senate killed a bill which would have extended unemployment benefits past the current limit of 99 weeks. Then today, the Congress passed the Financial Regulation bill whose eventual shape even the financial press admits will do little to nothing, to change the fundamental character of Wall Street and its Big banks.
So at the top of America’s pyramid of power and wealth, those who created this global financial disaster, have successfully avoided almost any real curbing of their power or privilege. Those at the bottom of the same pyramid, however, who are the dirt poor and powerless, are going to be allowed to get poorer.
There are many who think if you are unemployed for 99 weeks you are by definition a feckless, parasite. Let’s just suppose for a minute, that every single person who is unemployed, not just those who have been so for 99 weeks, but all of them, are indeed the kind of people who took out insane loans they could not pay off, defaulted, lost everything and now think that other Americans owe them a living. Parasites basically. Let’s just pretend. Who does that sound like to you?
Didn’t Wall Street Bankers take on insane loans which they could not pay back? Didn’t they go bankrupt, demand to be saved, and then live high on the hog off the public’s money while all the time refusing to pay any of their debts? Or have I missed something?
And yet one of these groups is reviled and cast out from among us for being worthless parasitical scum, while the other is not. The voices of the righteous from the financial world and their spluttering flatterers in the financial press don’t care to notice the unwashed and hopeless. They have never met them. I have. They aren’t all as the bankers would have you believe. Some are. But not all. It seems not every banker is a lying, cheating money grabbing sociopath. But every unemployed person is a worthless ignorant scum whose predicament is wholly their own choice and fault.
If we are going to be righteous about social parasites surely the least we should do is be consistent?
What was the real crime of the long term unemployed? Was it that they couldn’t afford to bribe, sorry , lobby Congress quite as lavishly as the other parasites? Could you really blame those at the bottom of society if they saw it this way?
A couple of million Americans who have been unemployed for 99 weeks will soon be without any unemployment benefits at all. I don’t know what they will tell their children. What do you think they should they tell them? And every single week in America, tens of thousands more will join them. And each of those same weeks, the bankers who profited and are still profting from this whole mess, will take home millions of dollars more, to stuff into their wallets that already hold millions upon millions.
Does that seem like a fair and just situation to you?
When the bill that would have extended unemployment was killed, no one even noticed. It hardly made a column inch. It wasn’t news anyone even cared to mention. The moment the final toothless shape of the financial regualtion bill was known, every banker noticed. Sudenly it was safe to profit again. Bank stocks started to rise and with them the broader market. Confidence! Confidence in what, for whom?.
Why was a financial regualtion bill the cause for a bank stock rally? Was it because the financial class could see the banks were not going to have to pay for the 1.3 Trillion of bad debts Faniie and Freddie had to buy up last year to save the banks? Was it because they could now be sure that the banks would not be expected to set up a fund to cover the cost of any future massive bank failure? That cost will be bourne by the public and maybe ‘later’ some costs would be recouped. Might it have been because they could see most of the lucrative and destabilizing swaps and derivatives trades were not going to be taken from the banks? I could go on.
Banks paid millions to lobby Congress and got what they wanted. Nothing has happened to change the essential nature of the banking system. There are no leverage limits, no mark to market, no meaningful curbs on specualtive opertations or betting against products they only just sold. It is, ‘as you were’.
Is any of this coincidence?
You write that Banks paid millions to lobby Congress and got what they wanted. (which I do not doubt for one moment)
I've been arguing on another web site with some Americans about the current financial shitstorm and I've come up with this idea…
The banks lobbied congress to allow them greater freedom to loan money to people who previously weren't allowed to get a mortgage.
All these sub prime mortgages weren't a liberal government idea, the government were swayed by the banks that this was an achievable idea and the banks did this because they viewed this untapped market as a way to create even greater profits.
The banks would of made the case that house prices historically have always risen and if a few people defaulted on their repayments, all the other loans would be paid and would cover the losses.
Do you think that It was really the government forcing banks to loan to the poor or the banks actually wanted to do this themselves?
There is no doubt that the banks wanted to do it. Ask yourself this. If the banks had not wanted to do it, if they had thougth it would harm their profits would they have done it. Could the goverbnemtnhave forced them? The goevrnemtncan't force them to lend now. How could they have forced them to lend back then.
The goevrnment did have a house ownership[ programme and did want wider home owner ship. But that doesn't mean the government drove the whole thing against the wishes of the banks.
The banks wanted to issue more of their own unregulated paper currency. Expand the money base, inceasse leverage, and it is a liscence ot print money. Literally. For this they needed a source of debtors. The sub-prime was a PART, only a part of that bank requested and rewiored flow of debtors.
It is those who are ideologically committed to defending the working of the Free Market as perfect and infalable who always argue that it must have been the goegvrnemtn distorting the otherwise wise functioning of the market.
You won't win against fundamentalists but you certainly can have fun.
Enjoy!