Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Nationalize Wall Street

Nationalize Wall Street :For the People Owning the Too-Big-To-Fail Corporations





By Charles Brown

It is important to point out that the Too-big-to-fail banks and corporations
did in fact fail back in 2008; even though they were bailed out.  The demand
the Wall Street rulers made to Washington for a bailout was a confession that 
the whole financial system was insolvent. The USA's, We the People's,  bailout brought
 the finance system back from the dead. Capitalism does not add up.
 After 500 years, it ends up that capitalism is bankrupt and insolvent
by its own generally accepted accounting principles.

The shadowy finance ministers who ordered President Bush to bailout Wall Street,
said that certain financial institutions are "too big to fail".  If they fail they will destroy the
 financial system, and so the federal government must save them in order to
avoid total economic disaster for America and the world.

So, they were given trillions of dollars of what amounted to semi-gifts
( sort of "pay it back if you can at your own pace"; would that we could get
such terms in loans from these same banks)
, and the concept of "too-big-to-fail corporations"
gained wide public awareness.

Although, there was not total collapse , the bank failures that did
 occur triggered the so-called Great Recession.
We, the 99%,  suffered and suffer still enormously from that
recession as it resulted in all around economic distress for
tens of millions of Americans over the last six years.
These failures of the leading private institutions of
our Economy, led to an excruciating economic Depression for the Many.
Large swathes of the middle
and "lower" classes suffer poverty, foreclosure, unemployment, and the
many ways of misery, premature deaths, disease, divorce, crime, etc,
that are generated by economic downturn , especially in a jobless
recovery only for corporate profits and exploitation by the 1%

It is objectively true that this would have been worse for the 99% if
the Too-big-to-fails had not been bailed out. So, it is not the case that
these corporations should not have been bailed out, but that their Creditor,
The People, should get more for their bailout money than they did:
ownership of the big debtors.

To reiterate,_circa_ 2008, with the insolvency of financial institutions designated
Too-big-to-fails by our nation's highest financial ministers ( in other
words straight from the horse's mouth), We, the People, learned of or
were reminded of a category of economic life that had not been so
explicit in the national discourse. These Big Banks were bailed out
and avoided bankruptcy with guarantees or assurances of 
anywhere from $16 to 29 trillion by the
United States of America, because the national unelected , financial ministers
declared that their failure would bring down the entire financial
industry of the US and perhaps "the West". In other words, the
insolvency of the Too-Big-To-Fail corporations was in fact the
insolvency of the whole financial system. It was a confession that
capitalism doesn't add up; it fundamentally cannot meet its own
standard of moral hazard. Wall Street's debts exceeded its assets by a
dozen or two trillion dollars, at that historic moment.

Any debtor of Wall Street creditors who reaches such a moment , must
not be bailed out because of the danger of moral hazard. If we apply
Wall Street's own standard to itself, the 2008 bailout represents the
biggest moral hazard in history, pretty much. So, the principle of
moral hazard is dead.

General Motors and Chrysler, two of our largest corporations, though
evidently an order of magnitude smaller than the Wall Street
Too-big-to-fails, were also bailed because they arer too
big to fail without devastating economic impact.
. The bailed out Too-big-to-fails, owned and controlled and
expropriated by the 1%, continue to live in fabulous luxury greater
than any ruling class in history,

There is a long history of government bailout of corporations (
(History of U.S. Gov't Bailouts
http://www.propublica.org/special/government-bailouts
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail)

The Great Recession caused many states ,including, California and Illinois, actual insolvency ,
though it was not declared; and they were bailed out of deficits by
the Obama Stimulus plan.

What is to be done now so many years from The Financial Big Bang ?

Well, like the Big Bang, it is still affecting us.

We, the People, who bailed out the Economy, must have ownership and
control of all Too-big-to-fail corporations. Private owners , who put
private interests above public interests always, cannot be trusted
with control and distribution of the products of the Economy's
Too-big-to-fail Economic Units, because their failure does not impact
the incomes of the 1% current owners, but only the lives of the masses
of people. The failure of  Too-big-to-fails is dumped on the 99%, and
avoided by the 1% who own them now. The 99% must own them, therefore.

We must reverse the current circumstance in which , essentially, the
Too-big-to-fails own The People, as demonstrated by their ordering the
Presidents and Congress to give them dozens of Trillions of dollars
without their giving up ownership of themselves in exchange as would
occur in any such transaction in the "free" market. The
Too-big-to-fails still owe the People for the
Bailout. We, The Creditors, are coming to Collect.

Enact a .law :requiring the Federal Reserve to report and list quarterly on
all too-big-to-fail corporations, and initiate proceedings to take them
over. Use the same criterion as was used in the bailouts.

Enact a Law: One of the rationales for exploiting interests from debtors,
recipients of loans, is that the creditor puts its money at risk.
Since, the Too-Big-to-Fails will be bailed by the government if too
many of their loans fail, their interest rates should be abated or
negated, because they are not taking the risk they claim.

Reassert federal ownership of General Motors and Chrysler. Chrysler has been bailed out twice by the federal government.
 Take Federal ownership of JP Morgan, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, AIG and
all Wall Street, Too-big-to-fails. before they fail again.

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