Thoughts from an article written by Norman Markowitz.
If you believe that the masters of capital are moving away from the principle that Oliver Stone immortalized in the film “Wall Street, “that is, “Greed is Good,” get a load of Seidman’s comment about his activities. “It is an enormous market [the battle to both get a piece of the $700 billion and to buy up institutions cheap that government funding will revive] I am really enjoying this.” “Fortunes will be made here, no doubt about it,” another former Resolution Trust official notes. Another official notes with a bit a guilty glee, that while the financial crisis is a disaster for the nation, “the opportunity going forward is unprecedented. It is fantastic. It is as if I had been in training for this for the last 40 years of my career.”
These men and their firms see the crisis as a way to make millions for themselves and billions for their clients. They are the “vultures” of state monopoly capitalism, like the old Wall Street “bears,” coming in to both buy cheap in the midst of a crisis in which it is public assets that will be sold off. Right now, as Sam Zell, CEO of the bankrupt Tribune Company, who made his fortune buying up Savings and Loan properties in the first great bailout notes “the best opportunity right now is in the debt area, mortgages. We have been buying all along.”
Millions of people face foreclosure on their homes and “the best opportunity right now is in the debt area, mortgages.” Tens of millions of workers who live paycheck to paycheck face the possibility of unemployment which will devastate them and their families and prominent figures like William Seidman are “really enjoying this.” This is the system that praises itself as the foundation of progress and civilization, which defines conduct that would be considered pathological in normal social relations as good?
What this shows is the necessity for a policy to make this “bailout” very different than the last one. It is time to look seriously at public ownership and forms of regulation that will stop the profiteering, perhaps by making those who be these institutions be subject to various surcharges and other forms of taxation that will return to the public sector the built of the profits which come from them. The Obama transition team should take with a pitcher of salt “advice” from these former bailout officials. They have little to offer, except perhaps as an example of what not to do in distributing the $700 billion in public investment.
JUst some thoughts from the economic battlefield.