Rich Zubaty the Rude Guy here. This is the text of Podcast 89, my first UnPodcast. Making audio podcasts has been a labor of love for over 6 years and the love is gone, and the labor is going into other creative projects. Plus only a couple guys even email me or send money any more. So you must be bored with them too.
However, sometimes important things come up and I will write them down and post them here, just like a regular blog.
I can already tell it’s gonna be much messier and less refined that a spoken podcast. Sorry. It’s all I have time for.
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I just learned the frightening truth about our pathetic slick-ass conman sell-out president. According to economist Michael Hudson, as soon as Obama gets re-elected he is going to dismantle Social Security. Only a Democrat can do that. Republicans would be crucified if they tried it, just like George W Bush was. But, just as he believed the generals about the wars – not the diplomats, not the Vietnam vets, not even the soldiers fighting it – but the generals who get promotions ONLY when there are wars – so, when it comes to the economy, he believes the old school, trickle-down, Milton Friedman, neoliberal, free market economists. After 40 years of constant failure starting with Richard Nixon these trickle down guys are still doing things the Chicago School way, and Obama, who knows nothing of economics, is just following along. What a jackass. Who ever said this guy was smart?
Here is a president who has taken a stand on gay marriage, but refused to take a stand on the health insurance public option. Indeed, he stonewalled it to death, having made a backroom deal with the insurance companies. Here is a president who just said: “corporations are not people”, but he does not have the balls to make Eric Holder and his Justice Department prosecute the fraudsters on Wall Street: Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, John Corzine. These guys have stolen billions of dollars from the economy via lying and fraud and they are still walking around like princes.
“Corporations are not people.” I love it. Except that’s a Supreme Court issue and as president he will never have to deal with it directly. The same way gay marriage is a state issue and he will never have to deal with it directly. But on the things he DOES have to deal with what do we get? Knee-jerk conservatism, trickle down economics and kissing the ass of Wall Street.
It’s the same old Clintonista Liberal crap of being progressive on social issues, like gay marriage and women’s rights, but remaining shamefully conservative on economic issues. Like free trade, and hands off Wall Street.
Obama does not have the balls to stop the Afghan War. After ten years fighting over there he just had to fly into Kabul at night so Air Force One wouldn’t be shot down. And he wants us to think he has it almost wrapped up over there? What a transparent liar. What a gullible fool. Romney is a criminal and everyone who worked for Bain Capital should be put in jail, but at least he gave Massachusetts universal health care. Obama couldn’t even pull that off. 10 million Americans will still go without healthcare because Obama wanted a mandate and not guaranteed health care for all. More on that coming up.
Obama has no progressive action credential whatsoever – just talk talk talk talk talk. He doesn’t have a goddam thing to offer the Left but gay marriage. ABC news announced he favors gay marriage, because his daughters Sasha and Malia, who haven’t even hit puberty yet, convinced him gay marriage is cool.
So when he got into office he was taking advice from Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, and now he’s taking advice from Sasha and Malia.
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As I’ve said in earlier podcasts, marriage is a religious institution. Government should have NO say in it. It is a violation of the separation of church and state for government to meddle with marriage and every one of the founding fathers would be appalled to see that marriage has been absorbed into government. Get married in church get divorced in church. But no, government couldn’t leave it alone. Government invented no fault divorce and overnight created a 65% divorce rate. And now with gay marriage they are making a mockery of thousands of years of religious tradition. There may be some 2000-year-old religion that allows gay marriage, but I don’t know of it. So first the government usurps marriage from the church, then creates no fault divorce, and now it says gays can get married. What the fuck is this? If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck it’s really just a turtle with feathers.
I’ll never get married again. However, I could be induced to join a civil union. Sign a clear legal statement about shared property and legal obligations to one another. That isn’t only “good enough”. It’s the very greatest extent that government should be invited into “marriage”: establishing the economic agreements. If some renegade church wants to marry gay people good for them. That’s their business. Get married in church and get a legal civil union and you’re all set.
But that’s not what this is about. This is about Barack Obama being a political whore. Saying whatever sounds good to the Left to get our support after 3 and a half years of ignoring us. Shitting on us. Never again, for me. Voting for Barack Obama is a moral hazard. I won’t do it.
I don’t want to watch men kissing on TV so Obama can get reelected and take apart Social Security. It makes my skin crawl.
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According to Peter Schweizer in his book “Throw Them All Out”, for every one dollar raised for Obama, by Obama’s Finance Committee Members for the 2008 campaign…for every one dollar…they or their companies got $25,000 dollars back. One to 25,000. Have you ever heard of such odds? No wonder these guys bet on politicians, it’s light-years better than the craps tables. All you gotta do is win once and vavoom! A thousand dollars turns into 25 million!
So if you want to keep Social Security intact, vote for Romney. Tell Obama to go pick cotton and find out what it really means to be part of the working class.
Let that fascist Mitt Romney and his Bain Capital cronies take over. Then the Leftist talking heads will start criticizing the president again and the Leftist activists will take the streets and we will have civic involvement again. And we’ll halt the dismantling of Social Security. No more of the knee-jerk liberals refusing to criticize a brown-skinned guy who’s trying to wreck Social Security and virtually the entire legacy of FDR.
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I just read a very difficult book, Confidence Men by Ron Suskind, former national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal…which corroborates, in fine detail, what I have been saying for years about Barrack Obama. He has no management experience and no idea what a president does or how he does it… Still!
Just before Obama’s first state of the union speech I was talking to a longtime Hispanic friend of mine – and fellow Obama supporter – and I told him this: “If you ever tell anybody I said this I will deny it. But…the White House is now being run by four Jews and a nigger, and I don’t think any of them know what the fuck they’re doing.” Obama’s cabinet appointments were atrocious. Larry Summers, Clintonista blowhard who gave us unregulated derivatives and can never admit to being wrong about anything. His fellow traveller Robert Rubin who gave us the “business Democrats” under Clinton, and deregulated Glass-Steagall so he could become chairman of Citigroup and walk away with $100 million dollars as he ran the company onto the rocks of securitized mortgages. David Axelrod, newspaper reporter turned campaign adviser who thinks Obama is the Black Jesus. And Rahm Emanuel, vicious cynical Chicagoland deal-cutter who torpedoed the public option and fucked up health care.
I don’t hate these guys because they’re Jewish. I’m half Jewish. My kids are Jewish. I hate them because they are arrogant assholes playing on the world’s biggest political stage and fucking with things they don’t understand and don’t care about. These guys are mechanics, not automobile designers. They do not have my interests (or yours) at heart.
I don’t distrust Obama because he is black. I distrust him because he has a track record of stupidity, foot dragging, indecisiveness, and no experience whatsoever as a manager. He’s only ever managed two things in his life, the United States Presidency and his daughter’s basketball team. In that order.
According to Suskind, Obama’s staff manipulated him by way of what could be called “re-litigation”. In other words, every time Obama wanted to do something they didn’t like they would pile on with a bunch of questions and warnings and offer to do more research. So the implementation of the decision would be stalled until it died. Slow-walking is what Washington calls it. Stonewalling is what I call it.
Obama wanted to break up Citibank to send a message to the “too big to fail” banks. His staff slow-walked it until he dropped it – as he is prone to do. Summers claiming they were “protecting Obama from himself.” He wanted a securities transaction tax, which I have advocated many times on this podcast. They slow-walked it and killed it. And the same with the Wars and Health Care and everything else. We elected a guy to be president, and his staff of Washington insiders and Clintonista hacks ran the place.
And let’s get this straight. This is Obama’s fault. He hired these guys. He doesn’t know jack shit about war, Wall Street, health care, economics, global warming, green energy, or just about any other topic you can mention, apart from Constitutional Civil Rights cases. We don’t need a Civil Rights expert as president who spends his time in office figuring out how to circumvent our civil rights laws to help CEOs and generals. Bush waterboarded innocents. Obama is murdering them with drones! We need someone who can liberate us from useless wars and Wall Street theft. And this is not the guy. Three and a half years later he’s still not the guy. He’s about to destroy Social Security.
Obama’s technique, as revealed by Suskind, is to give a big “important” speech, then retreat back into the woodwork, and play golf and give speeches on other topics, while the real worker bees in Congress produce specific legislation…at which point he will reappear in a big flourish to sign it and take credit for it. He gives speeches! That’s it! And he thinks that’s leadership.
What is he supposed to do? The same things Lyndon Johnson did to browbeat the Congress into passing the very Civil Rights legislation that paved the way for Barrack Obama to become president.
Lyndon Johnson kicked the balls of congressmen who opposed him – like Obama should have done with Joe Lieberman and Blanche Lincoln when it came to passing a public option. Johnson threatened opponents with political annihilation: cutting off their funding, shaming and embarrassing them publicly, marginalizing them, ostracizing them, refusing to move any of their bills, freezing them out of government.
And what did Obama do? He wanted to be their friend. What a feminized girly boy. He called a summit on the economy and invited all the Wall Street bigwigs. They were shuddering in their Armani suits as they walked into the room. Obama takes the podium. They expect him to talk about starting derivatives trading exchanges or a financial services tax, instead he says: “How can I help you.” How can I help you? This is what you say to a student who has done poorly on an exam. Not to the motherfuckers who just destroyed the world economy. How can I help you? He’s a fucking idiot!
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Confidence Men by Ron Suskind is a hard book to read because journalists don’t know how to write. They just string together articles they wrote earlier, repeating the same shit over and over again, bracketed by anecdotes and hearsay they got from interviewing some drunk assholes who used to work in the White House. It’s a 500-page book that a good writer could put into 50 pages. But to do that you have to go out on a limb and conceptualize bold thoughts. Not just report data. If Ron Suskind can’t find some professor who used to work with Obama to say that he “runs his cabinet like he used to run his graduate student seminars” it won’t show up in the book.
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The problem is, no so-called Liberal will say anything unkind about bona fide assholes who happen to be blacks or Jews, and sometimes, goddamit, it has to be done. George Bush’s crew were demented bastards, but they got the job done. They made up wars out of thin air and invaded other countries. Obama’s assholes can’t break up a bank, much less a country. When Enron blew up George Bush completely disowned Ken Lay, one of his biggest contributors. Left him on the beach to die. In my mind, probably even had him assassinated to cover up his own dealings with him. He had to. The guy was paying him money in order to use him, to create legislation, specifically designed to make Enron less transparent, and the whole thing stunk to high heaven. So Bush threw him under the bus. But what does Obama say? To the same category of assholes? “How can I help you?” Jesus Fuck!
I can’t vote for this guy again. I live in the state where he was born and he is gonna take it like a hurricane so my vote here doesn’t count anyway. If I lived in Florida or Virginia or New Mexico I suppose I would be conflicted about the whole thing. I don’t want to lose my foodstamps and my housing and have to live in my car again.
But dammit, these guys squandered the biggest political opportunity I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. They squandered the years and years of volunteer work I did to discredit George Bush and the Republicans, and call for something new. There was, for once, a real chance for real change. And they kicked it around so long Ted Kennedy died and the arrogant feminists of Massachusetts lost his seat to Republican Scott Brown and the filibuster-proof Senate evaporated and the Democratic Senate and House super majority couldn’t pass a bill to wipe its own ass. What total fuck ups.
I hate Larry Summers. Everything Larry Summers did as Obama’s economic adviser was designed to put his fat ass into Ben Bernake’s chair as Fed chairman. He didn’t lift a finger to clean up the destruction he caused by deregulating Glass-Steagall and refusing to regulate derivatives. Thank God Obama was not stupid enough to appoint Summers to the Fed when Bernake’s term ran up. But too bad he was so afraid to hurt Larry’s feelings that instead of appointing someone like Joseph Stiglitz to the Fed, he made another non-decision, and reappointed Bernake…and we are left wallowing in the same old zero interest rate speculators paradise…instead of building back up a real economy, built on savings that are fairly rewarded by higher interest rates.
What a fucking mess. If a small time asshole like me understands this why don’t the writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post?
The only time to fix something is when it’s broken. But oh no, Obama, like he listened to the generals about Afghanistan, listened to the generals of Wall Street, who told him they were too fragile to be messed with right now. “Let’s reform when we get back to being stable again.” As they raked in record profits and paid themselves record bonuses and continued to create instability…because traders profit from instability. In unstable markets people trade a lot and pay a lot of commissions. When markets are stable they hold onto their investments and read about them on the financial pages.
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And Occupy Wall Street? What the fuck happened to them? They left Zucotti Park with half a million dollars? They’re masturbating on local issues and have veered from their international lunge at the throat of financial services fraud. Maybe I should run away to some other country again. I just don’t know where to run any more.
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And now, the woman who invented derivatives, Blythe Masters, head of currencies and commodities at JP Morgan, has decided that when we want to invest in soybeans and corn we should just call our bank, not the commodity exchanges. In other words, banks intend to start speculating in commodities. They are going to run the price of food through the roof and starve people all over the world. What a heartless brainless soulless bitch. Hasn’t she done enough damage? Hasn’t she starved enough babies and killed enough people with imploding derivatives? Now food? Where is the government that is going to stop these bastards? These people make me miss the USSR.
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OK here’s where I’m supposed to insert an audio clip with Max Keiser with Michael Hudson about what free markets are supposed to mean. [Max Keiser Show 259]
http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-259-max-keiser/
[Also Keiser 285 on oil and gas markets]
http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-285-max-keiser/
Both of these shows are worth watching. Max Keiser on RT TV.
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OK, here is a good interview transcript from Michael Hudson. I chopped it up, so you just have to pick the peaches from it.
http://truth-out.org/video/item/9047-what-americans-can-learn-from-eurocrisis
Transcript
Paul Jay, in Washington, Senior Editor: The Real News Network.
Guest:
Michael Hudson is a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).
Hudson:The banks really have no power at all except the power to bribe, and in Europe—in South America, the power to assassinate, which they do quite frequently. All they can do is bribe. Remember, we had the same argument over here about three years ago, when Sheila Bair wanted to take over Citibank, and she said, look, we can foreclose on Citibank, we can close down all these big banks on Wall Street anytime. They’re insolvent. We can pay all the depositors. There’s no problem at all. (The big banks are acting) like the sheriff in Blazing Saddles saying, I’m going to shoot myself in the head if you don’t do what I want. If the government were to take over the banks, they can pay all the depositors. The only people who would lose would be the very wealthy, who have more money in the banks than they’ve got insured. Sheila Bair said the bank bondholders would suffer, the counterparties would suffer. The banks have no power at all. The problem is the corruption of the politicians, who are just demagogues pretending to oppose the banks while actually being in their pocket. The banks don’t have any power. They don’t have any economic power, except their power to bribe politicians…
Jay: Now, that would be a start for really changing the course of things, because if it hadn’t been for the public bailout, most of the banks wouldn’t be around anyway.
Hudson:That’s right. The government became the major shareholder of the insolvent banks here, like Citibank and Bank of America. The same thing in Europe. If European banks caused the crisis, the governments can simply say, okay, we’re taking over the banks. Now we own them. Now that we own the banks, we’re going to write down the mortgages to the price that people can pay. We’re not going to pay other rich people. But financial reform and tax reform have to go together. And they’d say, we’re actually going to roll back all the tax cuts for the 1 percent, and we’re going to the begin taxing real estate again, we’re going to tax monopolies, we’re going to reintroduce progressive taxation just like we had for 30 years ago. If capitalism worked 30 years ago with higher taxation, with strong labor power, with a good property tax, and with affordable houses, it can work again. All of the bailouts are unnecessary, except if the banks and their politicians can convince people that there is no alternative. So that’s really the banks’ argument.
Jay: And why did capitalism change to this extent over the last 30 years? Isn’t it because the finance sector has become that much more powerful, that much more dominant in the economy, somewhat as it was in 1932-33 when it was very dominant?
Hudson:The change over the last 30 years has been a drive by the finance sector to become steadily more dominant. So the finance sector has started a lot of think tanks, they’ve funded research institutes, and they’ve bought control of the public media, so that they’ve been able to convince people that there really isn’t an alternative to bailouts and austerity. They only talk about whether there is to be more austerity, or chaos. But, of course, the alternative to austerity isn’t chaos; its economic democracy, it’s progressive taxation, it’s taxing the rich, it’s writing down the debts. There are many alternatives. And what they’ve done is make sure that none of these alternatives get discussed in the public press or in the media. That’s why we’re on The Real News Network talking about it, not in The New York Times or the Fox media.
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Hudson: 1,000 years ago, it took a military army to come in and conquer a country and grab the land and charge the people rent…to take control of the monopolies and charge people huge markups from the monopolies, and to essentially shift the taxes off the wealthy, onto the population that was conquered. Now, in today’s world, they can’t afford an army anymore. The Vietnam War showed that no country can afford a military occupation anymore. So finance today is the means of conquering a country and getting what in the past took an army. Financial conquest is how you shift the taxes onto the population to pay the financial sector, how you load a population down with debt and make a population pay interest and amortization and penalties on debt service, you make a population pay for schooling instead of getting it free or a low price as used to be the case, you make a population take on a lifetime of debt in order to get a home that used to be affordable, you make the governments go into debt for the banks, so that in Europe governments don’t have a central bank to monetize their own deficits, but actually have to borrow money from banks. You essentially empty out an economy, and you take its economic surplus financially without an army, just by trying to promote what really is junk economics and junk politics…it’s the economics of Rubinomics in America under Clinton and Rubenomics in America under George Bush, and now with a vengeance under Obama—.
[God Damn Robert Rubin!]
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Hudson: I think the people who vote for Romney are the same people who voted in Europe to, essentially, throw the rascals out. When people are unhappy with an economic situation, they simply vote for the other party, whoever it is, and it’s a flip-flop back and forth. The Wall Street people – the backers of the Republicans are the same people who backed Obama – the Wall Street people very much want Obama to come in for a second term and then really move to dismantle Social Security.
Only a Democratic president can swing a Democratic Congress or Senate over to the right wing. Like Clinton with NAFTA and Welfare Reform and reducing the deficit. So the Republicans need to go so far to the right that Obama, who in the past would have been looked upon at as a right-winger or Republican…Obama can be made to look reasonable. And if you can push the crazies, as the Republicans are doing, then Obama seems less bad than the alternative. (But the reality is that if a Republican gets in, Social Security has no chance of being dismantled.)
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Hudson: Obama versus Romney. Isn’t that a crazy choice…to have to choose between these two, between an absolute terrible alternative and just a bad alternative? Where is the Left in America? Where is the Left in Europe? Where is what used to be the Left? I don’t see it anymore anywhere.
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Hudson:I think you need a third party or you need to break away from the Democratic Party with people like Dennis Kucinich or the more progressive people. You need what was called 50 years ago “realignment”. And that realignment that people saw as necessary, even back then, was hasn’t occurred, and it hasn’t occurred in Europe either. That’s why everybody is so frustrated. In France and Greece and everywhere else in Europe, they’re equally frustrated. There doesn’t seem to be any alternative. And that’s exactly what Mrs. Thatcher liked to say, there is no alternative. And it’s just amazing when there really are SO MANY ALTERNATIVES that people can be convinced that there aren’t, and become so dispirited they just give up. So the fact is that most Americans are going to vote with their backsides. They’re just not going to vote this November.
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When Adam Smith wrote about free markets he meant markets that would be free of government interference, free of interference by monopolies, free of all gaming and cheating. But a hundred years ago “free market” started to mean the freedom for corporations and governments and banks to interfere freely in the market. (Do whatever the hell they wanted.) It was a 180-degree flip onto the head of Smith’s original meaning.
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Thank you Micheal Hudson. The guy is brilliant and he can be found on the web: Democracy Now, Max Keiser, the Real News Network.
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Here are some more bullets and quotes:
Karl Marx: There’s nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.
[That is how trickle-up economics works.]
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Michael Hudson/Max Keiser Show 279 15:50
Normally when we think of budget deficits we are talking about governments going into debt to purchase goods and services and labor.
But since 2008 the budget deficits we have run up don’t purchase anything! They are just bailing out the mistakes of the big banks. They are NOT going into the economy in any way.
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Max Keiser Show 282
Only 16% of Wall Street trades are done by real people over real things. The other 84% are done by computerized front running and other means of extracting wealth.
The difference between freedom and liberty: Liberty is buying twenty spec houses on credit and driving up the price of real estate. Freedom is the freedom to afford to buy one house on the wages you earn.
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Max Keiser 262
The central banks keep printing millions of dollars, inflating our money, to keep interest rates at zero to help speculators. Which hurts savers and hurts people buying clothes and food. Our money has become just tokens in a global game called “Realityville”, that has no accountability whatsoever.
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Max Keiser Show 281: 19:40 to the end. Great stuff.
David Graeber: Debt the First 500 years
They could have printed the money and given it to the mortgage holders. But no, they printed the money and gave it to the banks.
They could print a trillion dollars and pay off the student loans, but no they want everybody to be in debt.
There are 11 Occupy Farms in New York State.
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A study with Capuchin monkeys taught them to use money. It wasn’t long before the females were trading sex for money that they could then use to buy grapes and jello. The oldest profession indeed!
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something I posted online:
Being the son of a Chicago truck driver, and routinely slapped down as a “dumb Polack” when I was a kid, I wonder today how is it that blacks and Hispanics and women all have their “identity” groups, but there are none for poor white guys. None. We’re not part of the 1%. In most cases we are the ones who gave up our jobs for the blacks and women and Hispanics – we were not the white-man overlords filling their affirmative action quotas. The only reason that Occupy is working today is because – despite the ravings of sexist bigots like Roseanne Barr – the white guys are back. The POOR white guys are back. We haven’t been dumped off into the ether over some self-righteous notion of identity politics. In so far as Leftist politics was about class struggle we were always interested and involved. But when feminists started talking about how they too should become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies we spit and walked away. When women and Mexican and blacks took our jobs for no other reason than that they were women and Mexicans and blacks what did you think was gonna happen? There’s an ugly truth here, and that ugly truth is that these identity political movements eroded and derailed the very clear class wars in America. They were a disaster, and poor white guys paid heavily for their politically correct arrogance. I’ve been fired, or not hired, from many a job in Chicagoland because I was not a Mexican. Been turned down for many a “grant” because I wasn’t black. What Occupy has done is push the reset button so that we are focused on class war again. That is very very precious. Let us not blow it. Let us not cleave to the bigots like Roseanne Barr, because if they split us away from the rest of you we will ALL lose. Let’s all point our arrows in the same direction for once. At Wall Street Banks and corrupt politics. Not at each other.
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Wanna become a Hedge Fund? Sheila Bair tells us how.
Fix income inequality with $10 million loans for everyone!
By Sheila Bair, former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Published: April 13 Washington Post Opinions
Are you concerned about growing income inequality in America? Are you resentful of all that wealth concentrated in the 1 percent? I’ve got the perfect solution, a modest proposal that involves just a small adjustment in the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy. Best of all, it will mean that none of us have to work for a living anymore.
For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them.
Under my plan, each American household could borrow $10 million from the Fed at zero interest. The more conservative among us can take that money and buy 10-year Treasury bonds. At the current 2 percent annual interest rate, we can pocket a nice $200,000 a year to live on. The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million. Or if Greece is a little too risky for you, go with Portugal, at about 12 percent, or $1.2 million dollars a year. (No sense in getting greedy.)
Think of what we can do with all that money. We can pay off our underwater mortgages and replenish our retirement accounts without spending one day schlepping into the office. With a few quick keystrokes, we’ll be golden for the next 10 years.
Of course, we will have to persuade Congress to pass a law authorizing all this Fed lending, but that shouldn’t be hard. Congress is really good at spending money, so long as lawmakers don’t have to come up with a way to pay for it. Just look at the way the Democrats agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts if the Republicans agreed to cut Social Security taxes and extend unemployment benefits. Who says bipartisanship is dead?
And while that deal blew bigger holes in the deficit, my proposal won’t cost taxpayers anything because the Fed is just going to print the money. All we need is about $1,200 trillion, or $10 million for 120 million households. We will all cross our hearts and promise to pay the money back in full after 10 years so the Fed won’t lose any dough. It can hold our Portuguese debt as collateral just to make sure.
Because we will be making money in basically the same way as hedge fund managers, we should have to pay only 15 percent in taxes, just like they do. And since we will be earning money through investments, not work, we won’t have to pay Social Security taxes or Medicare premiums. That means no more money will go into these programs, but so what? No one will need them anymore, with all the cash we’ll be raking in thanks to our cheap loans from the Fed.
Come to think of it, by getting rid of work, we can eliminate a lot of government programs. For instance, who needs unemployment benefits and job retraining when everyone has joined the investor class? And forget the trade deficit. Heck, we want those foreign workers to keep providing us with goods and services.
We can stop worrying about education, too. Who needs to understand the value of pi or the history of civilization when all you have to do to make a living is order up a few trades? Let the kids stay home with us. They can play video games while we pop bonbons and watch the soaps and talk shows. The liberals will love this plan because it reduces income inequality; the conservatives will love it because it promotes family time.
I’m really excited! This is the best American financial innovation since liar loans and pick-a-payment mortgages. I can’t wait to get my super PAC started to help candidates who support this important cause. I think I will call my proposal the “Get Rid of Employment and Education Directive.”
Some may worry about inflation and long-term stability under my proposal. I say they lack faith in our country. So what if it cost 50 billion marks to mail a letter when the German central bank tried printing money to pay idle workers in 1923?
That couldn’t happen here. This is America. Why should hedge funds and big financial institutions get all the goodies?
Look out 1 percent, here we come.
outlook@washpost.com
Sheila Bair is a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and a regular contributor to Fortune Magazine.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
