MWC News - A Site Without Borders - - Bush natioalizes the economy

We’re all socialists now,
We’re all socialists now.
Dubya’s nationalized the economy,
We’re all socialists now.”

(With apologies to Garrison Keillor.) OK, folks, welcome to full-blown oligarchy–government that socializes the losses of big business while privatizing the profits and promoting corporate welfare through gigantic contracts for military build-ups and outdated energy plans. It’s a form of government not unlike, um, well, dare I say… oh, never mind, comparisons are odious. Google oligarchy and come up with your own examples.

Meanwhile, we’d best keep a sense of humor as long as possible, and laugh at the irony of what is happening. The administration that most loudly touted free enterprise, the “ownership society” and deregulation, while lambasting anyone who disagreed, just nationalized several of the world’s biggest mega-industries and is promising bailouts for scads of others in the form of a monster mortgage-buying scheme–pricetage? $700 billion–the biggest bailout in the history of the known universe.

Meanwhile, expenses related to the U.S. military–the most collectivist enterprise in history–will have cost the taxpayers at least $10 trillion by the end of the Bush presidency, counting annual budgets and our on-going War in Iraq, which already had cost at least $3.3 trillion, before the recent bailouts.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz makes the case that this economic meltdown should be considered part of the cost of the Iraq War, which he says soaked up much of the economy’s liquidity and prompted acts to promote artificial liquidity in the markets through lower interest rates and less regulation the past seven years.

When considering the culpability Bush bears, consider a quote from this hugely suppressed story about the fall of Eliot Spitzer, whose biggest “crime” might’ve been his crusade against rapacious practices emanating from Wall Street in league with the White House.

In the words of Spitzer, “When history tells the story of the sub-prime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably . . . it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. The administration was so willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.”

On the bright side, many undecideds will surely see this mess as yet another Republican failure, given GOP predominance in all branches of government the past 40 years (only 12 years of Demo presidential power, and predominant Republican control in Congress 12 or so of the past 15).

This has the potential to give Obama the padding necessary to prevent another stolen–or fumbled–election, though to his credit, Obama seems to have a better handle on the issue of electoral integrity than previous candidates. He’s fighting back through public lawsuits and other methods.

William Greider, The Nation: “Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses - many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?”

David M. Herszenhorn, The New York Times: “The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed a vast bailout of financial institutions in the United States, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in distressed mortgage-related assets from the private firms. The proposal, not quite three pages long, was stunning for its stark simplicity. It would raise the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion. And it would place no restrictions on the administration other than requiring semiannual reports to Congress, granting the Treasury secretary unprecedented power to buy and resell mortgage debt.”

Bryan Bender, The Boston Globe: “In May 2006, at the height of the violence in Iraq, Senator Joe Biden floated a controversial proposal: carve out autonomous regions for the three main ethnic and religious groups - Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Arab Shi’ites - and give them control of most governmental functions except for the military and oil industry, which would remain under central authority. While there remain many detractors who insist that Biden’s proposal is unworkable, a growing number of them assert that a rough approximation of what Biden envisioned - a decentralization of power - appears to be taking shape anyway.”

The Associated Press: “A federal judge on Saturday ordered Dick Cheney to preserve a wide range of records from his time as vice president. The decision by the judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, is a setback for the Bush administration in its effort to promote a narrow definition of materials that must be safeguarded under the Presidential Records Act.”

Molly Ivins and Louis Dubose, The Texas Observer: An excerpt from Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch’s Assault on America’s Fundamental Rights, the last book by the late Molly Ivins.

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