A house of cards on a hill of beans
Sunday, September 28, 2008



Deregulation. That’s it, to my thinking. That’s at the core of the problem with our flattened, crushed, stomped-out economy. Since Reaganomics, the push of business against government has been to deregulate. Government was made out as the bad guy, the uptight bully, strangling businesses with red tape and unnecessary restrictions on the free market, thwarting hard working industries from making a good honest buck.
Once the drive to deregulate began, it hit every sector: savings and loan, telecommunication, import export, oil and energy, banking, real estate, insurance. They fell like dominos. Now we’re a trillion dollars further in debt and the guys who did this are looking to the taxpayers to bail them out. I’m against it.
I know we’re trapped it seems. Here’s a grim analogy: imagine all the bridges in the Bay Area were privately owned by one company, that was run by a spendthrift who squandered all his money at the race track. Then to recoup it, he doubled all the bridge tolls. First we gave him the money to waste, now he wants double from us to restore his failed bridge business. If we refuse to pay, he shuts down all the bridges and goes out of business. Now we’re trapped. We can’t get around. Everyone suffers. It’s a hostage situation.
The government is supposed to protect us from enemies -- not just crazy terrorists with C4 in their vests, but from greedy overlords. Greed is our greatest enemy, and it is rampant in this country. It is the government’s job to protect the people, not to fleece the people to bail out the same idiots who created this mess in the first place.
I’m no friend of the banking industry, as you well know if you read this column when it’s not funny. I’ve taken heat for it by a small few, been accused of exaggerating the skullduggery. It would be hard to exaggerate the current economic situation.
I’m against our money being controlled by anyone other than us and our public government representatives who are answerable to American citizens and must do their work in public with cameras and microphones and reporters and overseers and vocal critics.
I’m against private think tanks and councils and commissions and foundations who whisper and keep secrets. I’m against energy commissions run by energy company CEOs and energy lobbyists. I’m against CEOs being appointed to head public offices assigned the tasks of overseeing the CEOs’ former employers. It’s the fox guarding the hen house.
I’m against our banks being run by appointees who can plan in private. I’m against fractional reserve banking – eg loaning more money than you have on reserve – eg printing money out of thin air -- because it gets abused and abused and abused. Banks print money, loan it to other banks, who can then print more money, loan it to others banks, and so on to the cupola of a house of cards.
The first people to get their hands on that Monopoly money get to spend it in an un-inflated market. By the time those dollars trickle down to the Average Joes they have inflated the market and are worth pennies on the dollar.
I’m angry as the rest of us at these shady real estate firms who gave risky loans to people made poor by other shady business dealings, then sold the debts to other shady businesses and everybody won until now, when everybody loses. Well, not everybody. The money that has been sucked out of our economy over the last few decades didn’t cease to exist. It’s stuffed away in a few dozen deep pockets somewhere and there’s a whole lot of laughing going on in a handful of mahogany-lined lounges and tropical retreats.
I’m sick and wary of short sellers because it’s easier to destroy a company than it is to make it thrive. There’s real money to be made in running a shorted company into the ground.
I’m against the idea of privatizing everything under the sun, including the sun. The are powerful efforts afoot to privatize prisons, water, war, highways, schools, retirement funds, seeds, disaster relief, voting, democracy and the American way.
The sick irony is that those who loathe even the hint of socialism are all in favor of the American people as a group buying up all the failed banks, insurance companies, and real estate houses in the country. If this deal goes through America will be a socialist country. We, the people, through bad advice and failed leadership, will own everything that can’t make a profit.
Imagine a basketball game or a football game without referees: no one there to watch for foul plays, to blow the whistles, throw the flags, levy the penalties. That’s the way our business model has been working in America for too long. The government has been firing the referees, blurring the lenses, cancelling the instant replays, denying access to the locker rooms, and driving all the players into forced secrecy through contracts of non-disclosure, and now they’re tripling the price of tickets.