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Government
by Wall Street?
There
are certain things I ex pected to disagree with the Obama
administration on. We knew he didn’t support marriage equality
or single-payer healthcare. There are others I expected that
there would have to be a lot of careful watching, advocating,
organizing, and protesting about before an eventual win—I
don’t like that we’re still engaged in Afghanistan, but I’m
not surprised. I don’t feel like my rose-colored glasses were
all that heavily tinted.
But I’ll admit that I was expecting to have more energy and
success with the fighting-for-the-important-things part because
I expected that, unlike with the Bushies, the Obama administration
would generally, you know, follow the law. I figured that
we’d gotten a break from a daily barrage of backstabbing “I
can do what I want and what I want is to shovel money from
the regular people into the pockets of my friends” administrative
moves.
I suppose I can say it’s not quite daily anymore. And the
friends aren’t quite the same people. And yet, I can’t say
that that makes me feel better about the blatant Wall Street
pandering, though—and the longer it goes on, the less forgiving
I find I can be.
Greg Palast, the investigative journalist who wrote The
Best Democracy Money Can Buy, published a searing article
last week in which he described how Steve Rattner, the “Car
Czar,” is breaking the law by replacing GM workers’ pensions
with worthless bankrupt stock in order to pay back bailed-out
banks JP Morgan Chase and Citibank in full.
Palast is livid, and it’s hard to argue with him. Even if
weren’t technically against federal law, pensions were part
of workers’ compensation—if pensions hadn’t been there they
would have been paid more, or perhaps taken another job with
better benefits or higher. The pensions are theirs,
not GM’s. Everyone takes a hit when the company goes bankrupt,
but the workers’ sacrifices are jobs and wages; no one should
be able to take away paid-for pensions any more than they
could take away houses bought ten years ago with GM salaries.
Meanwhile, the banks don’t even take a partial hit? This is
worthy of the Bush administration—blatant pandering to wealthy
interests that’s not even politically astute, unless you’re
a campaign treasurer.
Meanwhile, banks are trying to pay back their Troubled Assets
Relief Program bailout money—which they distinctly did not
use for its intended purpose of modifying loans and getting
credit loosened up again—so they can be free of even the window-dressing
restrictions that came with it. In order to do that, they
are supposed to buy back the stock the government took for
itself at fair market value, so the taxpayers benefit from
the increase in value that our bailout money enabled. (In
other words, we saved your sorry asses when you didn’t deserve
it.)
Unfortunately, as Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer
reports, Old National Bancorp of Indiana, one of the first
to do so, got away with paying about a fifth of what the stock
was worth, according to “standard, first-year MBA financial
formulas.” So much for getting our money back. If that pricing
prevails when other banks wriggle free, says Henwood, we’ll
be out about $10 billion.
You’d think that people who spend so much time brown-nosing
Wall Street types would be better investors/negotiators at
least.
Meanwhile, companies such as BlackRock that own “toxic assets”
and serve clients who own “toxic assets” have been hired to
advise the government on the worth of those assets. To quote
Henwood: “The polite way The New York Times, which
I feel a little guilty about making fun of given its dwindling
life expectancy, would describe this relationship is ‘raising
questions.’ It doesn’t really raise questions—it screams profound
conflict of interest. . . . No, the relationship doesn’t raise
questions. It answers them, if anyone’s asking.”
It’s no Halliburton—yet—but it’s got the same smell.
President Obama: We overlooked your relative inexperience
because we knew that you had the skills to govern well, if
you surrounded yourself with the right people. To be blunt,
in terms of economic issues, you have so far utterly failed
to pick the right people. At least, that’s the kindest, least
scary interpretation I can come up with. Despite your supposed
never-before-so-strong rules on lobbyists and conflicts of
interest that we swooned over, the foxes are once again guarding
the hen houses—and dining well.
You’ve got a lot on your plate, much of which you are handling
well, but if you want to show us that the economy is a top
concern of yours (as it damn well ought to be), and that you
do actually respect the rule of law and care about the integrity
of your administration (as you so carefully crafted your image
to claim)—you need to clean house already and quit this weird
I-quail-before-the-almighty-financial- companies crap. It
didn’t work (in fact it got us here), it won’t work, and we
need you to do something that will.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
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