Happy Days
Some thoughts on the ongoing economic collapse

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
9/17/08
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/happydays.htm

One of my readers dropped me a line in the wake of my piece, “The
Bloodletting,” saying, “Seems like somebody should write about what
the implications of the Wall Street debacle may have relative to the
privatization of Social Security, which I understand McCain & Co. are
still advocating. It's not popular and thus hasn't been on the top
rung, but it's pretty clear it's still on their agenda....”

Back when the push to privatize Social Security was in full swing, a
favorite gimmick of right wingers was to post tables showing rates of
return on various investments. The dates of the investments, like the
stocks themselves, were usually cherry-picked to produce optimum
results . If you had bought 5,000 shares in Microsoft in 1980 you
would own Canada and several of the outer planets by now. Instead of
getting a boring old check in the mail every month that never had any
surprises. Those tables assumed that someone would know exactly what
stocks to pick, and when to pick them, and wouldn’t charge you a dime
for that service.

Such calculations had a way of making those government checks look
pretty puny.

Now, if you had taken your life savings and all the money that was
deducted from your checks over the years for Social Security, and let
Lehman Brothers manage it, you would be looking at a rosy future in
which you could reenter the workforce at the age of 85 and hope for a
part time job as a greeter at Walmart.

My reader probably surmised correctly that Republicans would continue
to push for privatizing Social Security despite all this, and there’s
a dirty little secret there: they aren’t interested in privatizing
Social Security for your benefit; they want to privatize it so they
can control the funding and loot it.

I watched the employees from the suddenly defunct brokerage houses
scurrying out onto the streets of New York and London with their desk
contents in cardboard boxes, and wondered how many of them were
long-time secretaries just a few years from retirement and now
realizing that their pension had gone up the spout. Bankruptcy allows
companies to forego paying debts such as private pensions, something
that would have resulted in serious jail time 25 years ago, when
companies weren’t allowed to TOUCH the pension funds, let alone invest
them in dicey stock portfolios. One in three private pensions failed
prior to the ongoing economic meltdown, and that number can only
increase. The problem with private pensions is that they are private,
and subject, not only to greed and criminality, but the usual vagaries
of the market, which can lash out and destroy healthy well run
companies as well as all the corporate shells that have been gutted
through free market accounting.

How bad are things right now?

Bonds hit negative interest rates today. That means that market
speculators were so frantic to find something stable to hang onto
until the storm passed that they were willing to pay the government
interest on the bonds, rather than the other way around.

In Moscow, the market stayed open a full hour and a half before it
crashed again. It had lost a staggering 17.5%% the day before – the
equivalent of the Dow dropping 1,800 points – and it lost another 13%%
today. It’s one thing to say it lost a third of its value in two days,
but it really managed to do it in four hours spread out over a two day
period. Well, Russians do everything in a big way.

And who would have thought that the Bush administration would end up
socializing more of the economy than FDR ever dreamed of? The Feds
have sunk well over $300 billion into bailing out the mortgage houses,
investment banks, and American Insurance Group. They flat-out own 80%%
of AIG, and I wonder if they should change the name to People’s
Insurance Group. Just as a reminder of how it came to fall from its
pinnacles of free market power.

Here’s a stray thought: the government runs AIG as an insurance
company, specializing in medical insurance. It isn’t run on a
for-profit basis, and employees are all civil servants.

I wonder how it would do as a socialized insurance company in
competition with Snake Farms and the Tramplers and so on? Especially –
dare I say it? Medical coverage?

Americans say they don’t want nationalized health. They really believe
that millions of Canadians cling to barbed wire all along the US
border, looking out like Auschwitz inmates, all because Canada has
public health. But they’ll hold still for single-payer. One insurance
company, one set of forms, consistent and non-profit-oriented
coverage.

Wouldn’t AIG fit the bill now that it’s owned by the government, i.e.,
us? If we’re going to bail these undeserving upholstered parasites
out, we should get something back in return.

We’ve got McPander running around sounding like Will Rodgers, talking
about the fat cats and the hard workin’ laborers. It’s funnier than
hell to watch, and I guess he’s gotta do something to distract from
the fact that he supported Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the Commodities
Modernization Act, two of the many nasty little bits of legislation
the GOP pushed that led us to our present mess.

But neither McCain nor Obama are doing much other than promising
change and an end to the economic spiral. Nothing is being said about
how a lot of the deregulation that allowed the banksters to run
hog-wild and eat their own children needs to be rolled back
immediately, if not sooner, and the massive monopolies and oligarchies
/ consortiums that have so corrupted our government and economy have
to be broken up. The guys on wall street don’t like to admit it, but
the economy really does do best when the big companies are broken up
into little companies that must compete, and bankers have to follow
rigid – and conservative – rules.

You can never stop money from influencing and corrupting. As long as
humans are imperfect, that’s going to happen. But you can contain and
control it, and keep it at a level where you don’t have a handful of
people robbing the vast majority of the society blind, and using some
of the stolen money to buy media and legislators who are willing to
tell the people they are much better off if they are poor and let rich
people see to their welfare.

I don’t know if we can escape another Great Depression or not.
Obviously, you and I would both be better off if we can. But I
remember that it was the Great Depression, and the loss of power and
prestige among the plutocracy, that made the vast reforms leading to
the incredible economic engine of post-war America possible.

Maybe this time we won’t wait until a third of the population is
starving.

--
"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government
talking
about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order.
Nothing has
changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists,
we're
talking about getting a court order before we do so"
-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!
Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

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--

What do you call a Republican with a conscience?

An ex-Republican.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=8827 (From Yang, AthD (h.c)

"Prosperity and peace are in the balance," -- Putsch, not admitting that he's against both

Putsch: leading America to asymetric warfare since 2001

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!
Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.
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a.a. #2211 -- Bryan Zepp Jamieson