I got your "whiners" right here

[SHRED]

They did it with logging of old growth forests (blame the spotted owl and treehuggers).
They are doing it with "domestic oil drilling" (as if it is "ours" that "we" would benefit and then blame the Democrats).
And now they are doing it with the economy (Phil Gramm's latest calling us "whiners").

An article that identifies the true "whiners", as Gramm calls us.
However, leave it to the Corporatists to blame the people.
They always do.
Divide and conquer is their game while they build on their corporate bailouts using our tax dollars.
Socialism for the wealthy.

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Wall Street's Great Deflation
posted by William Greider on 07/14/2008 @ 12:38pm


Phil Gramm, the senator-banker who until recently advised John McCain's campaign, did get it right about a "nation of whiners," but he misidentified the faint-hearted. It's not the people or even the politicians. It is Wall Street--the financial titans and big-money bankers, the most important investors and worldwide creditors who are scared witless by events. These folks are in full-flight panic and screaming for mercy from Washington, Their cries were answered by the massive federal bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the endangered mortgage companies.

When the monied interests whined, they made themselves heard by dumping the stocks of these two quasi-public private corporations, threatening to collapse the two financial firms like the investor "run" that wiped out Bear Stearns in March. The real distress of the banks and brokerages and major investors is that they cannot unload the rotten mortgage securities packaged by Fannie Mae and banks sold worldwide. Wall Street's preferred solution: dump the bad paper on the rest of us, the unwitting American taxpayers.

The Bush crowd, always so reluctant to support federal aid for mere people, stepped up to the challenge and did as it was told. Treasury Secretary Paulson (ex-Goldman Sachs) and his sidekick, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, announced their bailout plan on Sunday to prevent another disastrous selloff on Monday when markets opened. Like the first-stage rescue of Wall Street's largest investment firms in March, this bold stroke was said to benefit all of us. The whole kingdom of American high finance would tumble down if government failed to act or made the financial guys pay for their own reckless delusions. Instead, dump the losses on the people.

CONTINUED
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/336722

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[Waiting For Everyman]

1. Thanks, SHRED...

... a right-on article.

"Instead of propping up Fannie Mae or others, the threatened firm should be formally nationalized as a nonprofit federal agency performing valuable services for the housing market. That is the real consequence anyway if the taxpayers have to buy up $300 billion in stock. The private shareholders 'are walking dead men, muerto,' Institutional Risk Analytics, a private banking monitor, observed. Make them eat their losses, the sooner the better."

I couldn't agree more.