Our country's oligarchy is become more open and less discreet about throwing its weight around and benefiting at the expense of ordinary citizens.
The nation's big financial institutions are a prime example. They gambled big time in the subprime mortgage business and on derivatives ultimately based on that house of cards. They and their executives raked in big bucks building that structure ever higher and making it increasingly unsound. When it fell, they were deemed "too big to fail" and were kept afloat with billions of dollars in taxpayer money from the public treasury, and their executives continued, and continue to be compensated in millions of dollars a year to enable them to keep on living large.
In addition to continuing to pay swollen executive salaries, the institutions used the bailout funds to expand their dominance of the market, eliminating competition by buying up smaller institutions. The government furthered, and is continuing to further the concentration of financial power by aggressively seizing and shutting down every smaller financial institution that shows signs of struggling and being in financial trouble. These smaller institutions hadn't paid the bribes -- a.k.a. campaign contributions -- on the scale that the bailout recipients routinely did and still do.
The net result of all this is that the institutions and their mismanagers responsible for creating the bubble that destroyed the economy -- taking the rest of the country into the tank -- when it burst are profiting enormously from behavior that appears to have been irresponsible from the outside.
Nor are the oligarchs sharing their good fortune. They are not making loans to small businesses struggling to survive as a result of the meltdown of the economic system that the institutions caused, and smaller financial institutions, -- those that thus far have survived -- cannot afford to take the risk of doing so.
Individual homeowners and small borrowers who experience any financial stress, get nothing but cold stares and stiff arms from the bailout recipients. Late fees and charges and increased late and default interest rates are piled on one after another as fast as applicable laws permit.
Atop the list of oligarchs is the Goldman Sachs investment banking firm. Its alums and other pooh bahs connected to it hold key positions in, and exercise virtual control over the federal government's financial policy making and oversight bodies. Is it any wonder that competitors of Goldman Sachs were allowed to fail even as other institutions of similar size were deemed too big to be permitted to do so?
Other examples of the oligarchy in operation abound. Big businesses -- GM, Chrysler, GE, AIG to mention but a few examples -- get bailout money to stay afloat. Smaller enterprises such as GM and Chrysler dealerships and suppliers, and mom and pop operations are left to sink and die, victims of malign neglect.
Its a wonderful system from the standpoint of the oligarchs: socialism for the rich (except for their profits), and laissez faire free enterprise for the proles.
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