I'll Nationalize Your Banks, Mister

On my way home from work, I was listening to the NPR. I know, I know, it's Friday and I should have been rocking out to Loverboy, but I had been working all day and hadn't caught up on the news. Thought maybe I might hear some news on that Palin and the Troopergate.

Instead, I got a story on Paulson from the G8 Conference. Apparently, the US government will be handing large sums of money to banks so they can give it to other people. In exchange, we get an undefined "equity stake" in those banks. Fortunately, all signs are that the government will remain pretty hands off when it comes to control of that money. Whew! Almost had some European-style socialism there.

Fortunately, host Robert Siegel wasn't going to let this situation go with out some harding hitting questions to the reporter bring us the right-wing talking points story. Like, "why give money directly to the banks, instead of to people to pay off their mortgages to these banks?" Question is legit, the complete lack of follow up is not. The reporter let us know that giving to the banks was a much more efficient way to get liquidity in the market. You see, banks can lend out $10 for every dollar they get from the government.

Now, if you're me, it might strike you that banks giving out ten times the loans than they had capital to cover is what got us in this mess in the first place. I know it's way more complicated than that, but boiled way down (until it tastes like mud), the problem we are having is that banks and other financial institutions lent money to people who couldn't pay it back. Enough of those people don't pay back, say 11%, and you can't cover your obligations.

Siegel does not follow up along these lines. Instead, he asks "How close is this to nationalization?" And I'm like "How close is this to nationalization?" It's the fucking opposite of nationalization. This is not the state seizing control of private corporations in the interests of the people. This is the state giving itself to private corporations in the interest of the corporations.

Then Siegel suggests that we haven't seen anything like this since Jackson. Oh yes. This is exactly like the US Bank. The government being responsible for the direction of capital growth in this country through control of the vast portion of capital in the country, and the government tuning over large chunks of the people's capital to privately held banks. Practically the same thing.

Sweet jeebus. This is about as far way from Sweden as you can get. All those earning more than $250,000 can calm the fuck down. We're not seizing your wealth. We're giving you ours.

It's at moments like this that I regret being in the liberal elite.