It was enlightening and hilarious to watch the politicians crawl out from under their rocks yesterday. Not an ounce of shame displayed during their numerous television interviews about their role in creating and facilitating the monstrous Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac disaster that is engulfing the American economy.
As these government-sponsored entities turn insolvent — thanks to owning or guaranteeing $7 TRILLION worth of mortgages with a capital base of 1% of that — the politicians are unanimous in their views that FNM and FRE are
The role of government in "capital- ism" ought to include a mandate to keep government-chartered corpo- rations from becoming "too big to fail".
Instead, our government delights in creating problems that are too big to even imagine solving.
too important to be allowed to fail. The irony is that Congress created these monsters and then allowed them to grow to be so big that their failure would eat us all.
Listening to the politicians talk about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is like watching South Park's "Mr. Hanky", the singing Christmas turd. Singing turds, all of them.
Topping it off is the biggest turd of all, Phil Gramm, who says that the US is a nation of whiners and that this is a "mental recession". This is the shithead who created the Enron-loophole and whose wife directly profited from Enron's criminal rip-off of America:
Excerpt: After a lobbying campaign from Enron, the CFTC exempted it from regulation in trading of energy derivatives. Subsequently, Gramm resigned from the CFTC and took a seat
on the Enron Board of Directors. While on the board of directors she received donations from Enron to support the Mercatus Center.
After the Enron scandal, Gramm and the other directors of the energy company were named in several investor lawsuits, many of which have been settled. In particular, Gramm and other Enron directors agreed to an $168 million dollar settlement in a suit led by the University of California. As part of that settlement, the directors agreed to collectively pay $13 million to settle claims of insider trading. The remainder of the settlement was to be paid by insurance.
Unfortunately, the US government is not going to be able to bail out everyone. They may bail out Bear Stearns and Freddie/Fannie, and maybe a couple of other big companies. But eventually the credulity of the world will reach a breaking point and they begin to use the US Dollar to wipe their butts — to save money.
You will now begin to hear the justifications for the taxpayers giving hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations. Do it for the sake of the children :-)
The role of government in "capitalism" ought to include a mandate to keep government-chartered corporations from becoming "too big to fail". Instead, our government delights in creating problems that are too big to even imagine solving.
Pavel C.
I've always thought anti-trust was a little vague, politically manipulable, but I really like the idea of calling anti-trust into play when an entity reaches "too big to fail" status. Wham, that would sure help crumble a lot of the giant corporations, all of which are only strangling America.
I didn't know the dancing turds on SOUTH PARK had names, but we've only had that show on over-the-air TV here for a few weeks. :)
