It’s official – let’s end corporate welfare

[midnight]

President Obama upon signing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

That’s a great sentiment. It’s exactly what I want. Private actors should be responsible for private mistakes. If that doesn’t work, then their business should go through bankruptcy. If there’s some unique, socially valuable purpose that the business serves, then it should be nationalized. In fact, nationalizing the home mortgage market would be a much better option than what we’re doing now.

But like the President pronounces, we could at least make sure that no more public money goes out the door footing the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes. The President obviously agrees with the Federal Reserve system since he renominated Chairman Bernanke, but the White House does not have direct control over the Fed. It does, however, control the other federal agencies. Tomorrow we could start the task of making Wall Street pay for its own mistakes. We could end guarantees of private debts and start selling the various private assets we’ve accumulated on the government books. In fact, setting aside the unlimited and unbudgeted backstops guaranteeing future losses on debt, just the current expansion of government assets over the past year has been as large as the TARP program funded by EESA in 2008. From the last SIGTARP report (PDF Warning).



Or, we could keep doing what we’re doing. We could keep backing private liabilities that have no legal claim upon the public coffers. We could keep not investigating criminal activities that would be inconvenient for the financial crooks should they be prosecuted. We could keep the double standards of firing auto CEOs while the financial CEOs make massive amounts of personal compensation. We could keep ‘pretending and extending’ instead of forcing financial firms that made bad bets to write down their bad debts.



http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/61078

Let's not keep doing what we have been doing. Let's put Americas working people back at the table, create jobs, and stop using them to finance the welfare system for the corporations.

[midnight]

1. A good video about debt and rebirth discussed by Elizabeth Warren.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlcNSwaIxpI&feature=player_embedded

[yurbud]

2. Obama is starting a new breed of corporate welfare with education reform:

private contractors delivering public education. Kind of like having a blackwater run your kids elementary school. What could go wrong?

[flyarm]

3. + 10,000!!! You have that right!! eom