Wall Street Was Stunned. Washington Was Stunned. Everyone Was Stunned.by
Vin Suprynowicz “Quite a coincidence that you’re interested in this one,” the salesman says. “Another lady was just in here wanting it and she ran home for her checkbook. I can’t guarantee it’ll still be here in half an hour.” Eleven days ago, the entire government of the United States – OK, no one invited the Supreme Court – sat in the White House in front of the gathered cameras and played used car salesman. From Bernanke of the Fed to Paulson of the Treasury; from Harry Reid to Nancy Pelosi; from Chris Dodd to John McCain to Barack Obama to their docile front man George W. Bush, the government sat there stern-faced and swore in all earnestness that the nation was in an economic crisis – a LIQUIDITY crisis (despite the fact the Fed has been printing up and handing free money to the big bankers all year, by the billions). Congress was going to have to hand to the nation’s rich, fat cat bankers – who have already salted away their billions in bonuses and stock options for slicing up and reselling 13 years worth of bad mortgages – a big new IOU payable by America’s struggling taxpayers. And – after Banking Chairfolkpersons Chris Dodd and Barney Frank assured us for years that everything was fine – the crisis was so urgent the thing had to pass within days: No time to bother reading it! But by the time the bailout finally came to a vote on Monday, six days ago, part of it was missing. The tens of billions of dollars in that “vital, desperately needed” bill that would have funded what the Wall Street Journal called the “Barney Frank-Chris Dodd slush fund” – constitutionally forbidden money for Barack Obama’s “Acorn” scam and scores of similar socialist squeeze plays – had gone missing. If the whole package was desperately needed, why did they take that part out (only to replace it this past week with $192 million for rum producers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, $33 million for companies operating in American Samoa, $6 million for the producers of wooden arrows – 448 new pages of pork added to what was once a three-page bill. Talk about “vital”!)? Then, when the House finally voted, the proposal … lost. Wall Street was stunned. The news Media were stunned. Washington was stunned. If everyone in the whole city – Republicrat and Demopublican alike – said it was necessary, if the New York Times and the Washington Post said it was necessary, if CBS and ABC and MSNBC soberly intoned that it was inescapable, unavoidable … how could it lose? The answer to both of the above questions is the same. The rubes out here in Flyover Land no longer depend on the carefully slanted statist-agenda “newscasts” at the TimesPost and CBSABCMSNBC. They’ve got Rush Limbaugh, who pounded on the Acorn handouts for days. They’ve got the Internet. (Go to LewRockwell.com to read Gary North; Ron Paul; Doug French; Bob Murphy; Shawn Ritenour – especially read Murphy and Ritenour.) The rubes can even share the real news via cell phones. I went out to dinner Tuesday night with some friends. They asked if I’d seen anything on the major news stations, or moving on The AP wires, about demonstrations outside the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Reserve in Washington. I admitted I no longer watch TV much at home, though Fox or CNN are usually flickering in the background at work. I said I hadn’t seen a thing about any such demonstrations. Our dinner companion handed me her picture phone, displaying a photo from the demonstration outside the stock exchange, unmistakable with its big post–9-11 American flag. The demonstrators were showing a touching level of concern and empathy for the Wall Street bankers and brokers inside. The biggest hand-lettered sign on view read “Jump! You Fu**ers!” I somehow doubt Americans were shown that on their network evening news last week. Which is why they no longer trust the network evening news, any more than they trust any of the clowns who sat around that big table at the White House 11 days ago. The Democrats in Washington enacted the Community Redevelopment Act under Jimmy Carter in 1977, and then put the whole deal on steroids under Bill Clinton in 1995. Federal regulators refused to approve perfectly prudent bank mergers unless everyone participating cranked up their racial quota ratings by making “enough” bad loans to inner city minority folk, even if they had to let them use their welfare and unemployment checks to “qualify” for a mortgage. This worked great when it came to buying Democratic votes in their corrupt inner city plantations, where the first core Democratic constituency is kept terrorized by drug cops because they’re disarmed, and too illiterate to find a way out thanks to the good offices of the second core Democratic constituency, the teachers union. In the long run it didn’t work out so well for the banks. Then, having broken the American banking system so badly they couldn’t fix it even with eight months of handing the bankers free money as fast as they could print it – never mind how the resulting inflation turns our savings and pensions and paychecks into chamber pot residue – they have the nerve to inform the puzzled peasants that we’re going to have to loan them “just a little more” to tide them over, “Oh, about … sevenermillibillionders.” “About what?” “About seven hundred billion dollars. Just a ballpark figure, you understand. Worked it out on this napkin, here.” “Is that billion with a ‘B’?” “Sign here. Patriotic thing to do.” Congressmen, facing the voters in five weeks, admit their e-mails were running 80-20 against the Biggest Attempted Armed Robbery in History. Let’s figure that means they were actually running 98-2. What went wrong is that the rubes weren’t buying it anymore. If the liars were lying about needing a couple tens of billions for Acorn and these other walking-around-money ghetto hustles, why should we believe they were telling the truth about ANY of it? Congress just changed and updated the bankruptcy laws, to make things easier for creditors. What’s wrong – don’t the banks who pushed for those rule changes want to file for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 and have a receiver auction off their assets under the same rules they just rewrote for some Joe or Jane who falls behind on the mortgage? Instead it was “Please wave your magic wand, Mr. Bernanke, and turn us into ‘bank holding companies.’ ” If you or I wanted to form a “bank holding company” we’d be submitting documents and undergoing audits and waiting for bureaucratic approvals for years. But the rich cronies of Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke ask for some magic fairy dust to change them overnight from “investment banks” into “bank holding companies,” and they GET THEIR WISH? Why didn’t they ask to be turned into guys in colorful spandex suits with superhuman powers? This is a joke. This is like James Bond climbing over the rail of the fancy yacht in a wet suit with spear gun and SCUBA tanks, peeling the thing off, underneath he’s wearing a tuxedo WITH A FRESH RED CARNATION, whereupon he walks inside to join the fancy cocktail party already in progress: “Hello, I’m a bank holding company. Name of Bond.” Throw down some chips on red 16, break the bank, retire to the stateroom to see if a naked blonde you’ve never met before is waiting to entertain you, ring for the steward who shows up with coffee and 700 billion dollars on a silver tray. To win this election (which is not to imply that his winning the election would do us much good, mind you), John McCain needs to hammer the fact that he was calling for regulatory reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for years – that the folks who stood in the way of that reform were the Democrats who were on the payoff list, big time, for the lobbyists and PACs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Chris Dodd, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton.
But he won’t do that, will he? They wouldn’t even let poor little Sarah Palin point out that global warming – which is a good thing since it will allow us to grow wheat 50 miles further north, but unfortunately isn’t likely to last long – has nothing to do with “man-made greenhouse gases.” When the public believes in a crock, don’t upset them. Just say, “Of course I support carbon caps.” And dunking witches. October 7, 2008 Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Copyright © 2008 Vin Suprynowicz
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