Article: The "Ownership Society"

Are you enjoying the show?

What are you thinking as you watch the destruction of what once was the greatest economic engine on earth? The Bush Crime Family's rapacious efficiency in devouring everything it touches has been truly amazing. The military; energy policy; the regulatory agencies necessary for consumer safety; our education system; the availability of decent health care. The examples of theft, fraud, lies and deceit are endless.

And now, in the final days of this completely corrupt Bush/Republican enterprise, one after another, financial institution after financial institution, all are collapsing, sucked dry, utterly hollowed out, every single asset stolen, and all of it engineered by the most outlaw organization in history.

Investors - not all of them greedy manipulators - watch as their financial stocks plunge 70 percent in less than a year. Chaos and panic are so close to enveloping the entire U.S. financial structure that one of the key bandits - Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson - was compelled this weekend to offer yet another "snatch and grab" taxpayer-funded handout to yet another pair of financial organizations by opening the doors to yet another corrupt cesspool of capitalist thieves, the Federal Reserve. The proposed "loan" would go to two more (now essentially) unregulated financial rip-off experts, the oh-so-cutely nick-named Fannie Mae (correctly: The Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddie Mac (The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) mortgage companies.

It's not going to work. All this shifting hither-and-yon-back-and-forth-over-here-over-there-now-you-see-it-now-you-don't-bullshit of the nation's remaining financial liquidity will ultimately do nothing to replace the trillions of dollars wasted, misappropriated, and stolen. Which was the Bush Crime Family's intent to begin with. Break everything. From the military to the banks. Smash it all. Fill it with corruption and watch it rot. Steal these dumb-ass taxpayers blind. Bankrupt them. Drive them into so much debt and poverty that eventually they'll accept any job at any wage they're offered. Rip them to pieces. Burn their dreams. They are nothing. Zero. Less than zero. The Crime Family members get the profits, we get the losses. They make hundreds of millions, we file for bankruptcy.

It has all been about privatized profits and "socialized" losses - as Paul Krugman points out in his column today. Krugman zeroes in on the latest scam, the "bag-holding" the tax-paying suckers once again will be forced to perform in order to rescue the nation's two largest mortgage holders.

"The case against Fannie and Freddie begins with their peculiar status: although they're private companies with stockholders and profits, they're 'government-sponsored enterprises' established by federal law, which means that they receive special privileges. The most important of these privileges is implicit: it's the belief of investors that if Fannie and Freddie are threatened with failure, the federal government will come to their rescue.
"This implicit guarantee means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized. If Fannie and Freddie do well, their stockholders reap the benefits, but if things go badly, Washington picks up the tab. Heads they win, tails we lose."

Heads they win; tails we lose. Again. Remember the S&L corruption of the 1980s? (John McCain would remember that clearly.) S&L owners (like Bush Crime Family brother Neil Bush) offered impossibly high interest rates to attract lots of federally insured deposits, then gambled with or simply stole the money. When many of the criminals' bets went bad, the public ended up covering the enormous "losses." The cleanup cost taxpayers more than $100 billion. Or was it 200 billion? 300? We - you and I - will never know the truth.

Remember a few years ago when Bush (or was it Cheney?) touted the term "ownership society"? Uh-huh. Go buy a home. No money down. No money needed. Ever. Smoke and mirrors. Pretend it's all real. Pretend you have something. Watch how they snatch it away. Listen to the tearing sound. Smell the fear that is flooding the country.

So, here we are again. Ripped, raped, laughed at, bankrupted so the connected, the rich, can continue to play. And steal. And laugh at the unimaginable damage they leave in their polluted wake. Again, then, the questions: How much more of this will we continue to absorb? How much longer before we finally resist? When does the revolution begin? And, where?