Investment Banks Are Liars And Thieves, According To Investment Banks Enabled By The Bush Government

Investment banks, after engineering another fraud on the people of the United States, a fraud enabled by the current government of the United States, have finally admitted what anyone with any common sense already knew.

They are dishonest.

Case in point, from an AP story in today’s Globe

…Bear Stearns chief executive Alan Schwartz assured investors last week that the fifth-largest US investment bank had a strong balance sheet with plenty of cash. He gave few other details – and full-fledged panic ensued.

Clients rushed for the exits, decimating the stock price.

By the weekend, Schwartz was forced to sell his company for just $2 a share to JPMorgan Chase & Co. to avoid bankruptcy.

The only thing that convinced Morgan to do the deal was that the Bush Administration agreed to buy thirty billion dollars worth of worthless securities, freeing Morgan from any obligation or risk.

That’s the Republican version of the free market. Use taxpayer money to save the butts of rich people who chose to take risks in the financial markets. Whatever happened to the Republican mantras of personal responsibility? Of being accountable for your actions? Apparently those only apply to racial minorities and working class white people and non-Republicans, but not to rich Republicans, and certainly not to Republicans in Congress and the Administration.

Republicans and Conservatives will say that the action was necessary to protect the economy, to protect all the ‘little people’. That’s crap. The government is doing nothing but protecting the butts of political funding sources and taking care of the wealthy. In the process the government is ensuring that no lessons will be learned and that this will happen again sooner rather than later. The Bush Administration is telling the financial community that they have free reign to commit any egregiously fraudulent act, no matter the cost, and the government will bail them out if they lose money.

Meanwhile hundreds of  thousands of people are losing their homes because financial institutions found clever ways to suck them into unsupportable mortgages, which the institutions immediately sold to third parties which immediately bundled them into securities packages where they sat like time bombs in financial institutions around the world. And Bush and friends refuse to do anything about that huge drag on the economy, blaming the borrowers who were, in effect, defrauded by financial predators who knew they would never be held accountable for their deceptive practices.

Earlier in the story chief financial officer Erin Callan of Lehman Brothers said:

“There will be a lot more honesty from us as an industry, and it is painfully obvious this will be the biggest change.”

The only reason these people talk about being honest is because they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and they want to stave off much-needed regulation, regulation to replace the rules which would have prevented this meltdown but which were dismantled by Republicans in the name of their trickle-down (read ‘piss on the peasants’) economics.

Matthew Albrecht, an equity analyst at Standard & Poor’s said:

“Investors are requiring more information,” he said. “And when it comes down to it, they don’t want to own what they don’t understand. The best way for that to happen is when transparency trickles down to the common investor.”

Don’t the money people just love that ‘trickle’ metaphor! People would be wise to note that the bulk of the word spells ‘trick’, and that if something is trickling on you, the vast bulk of that something is not getting to you. What you get is nothing more than the table leavings of people living on the good food. You get the leftovers and the garbage.

And the response of the Bush Administration?

Well, Bush, who has demonstrated time and again that he lives in a bubble of ignorance and delusion encompassing just about everything in the real world, tells us that he’s ‘on top of the situation’, when he clearly isn’t.

Wall Street isn’t the economy. People don’t sit around their kitchen tables talking about Wall Street averages and their favorite investment bank. They talk about medical costs raging out of control. They talk about whether they’ll have enough money this month to buy gas, heating oil, or food. They talk about whether they’ll still have a job next week.

Meanwhile, Bush and his family and friends rake in vast sums of money from the skyrocketing oil market, and have yet to issue any call or take any significant action towards conservation or developing alternate sources of energy. Why would Bush encourage conservation and alternative energy? His base of ‘haves and have mores’ are getting wealthier by the second from a marketplace that is impoverishing millions and weakening the country for generations to come.

And the government’s immediate response to the problems their friends on Wall Street are having? Bail them out. Use taxpayer money to buy worthless securities. Cut bank rates savagely to stimulate borrowing and spending, ignoring the millions of people who depend on decent interest rates from CDs and savings to buy food and fuel and pay bills. Save the rich, piss on the peasants! That’s the Republican way.

Cutting interest rates also further weakens the already moribund dollar, which is rapidly becoming a laughingstock around the world. Of course the rich people have the option of putting their wealth into stronger currencies and investments, and cleverly avoiding paying what little tax they are responsible for.

And the Bush Administration’s other remedy, handing out money to everyone so they’ll spend it and ‘stimulate’ the economy? Where’s he borrowing that from? Or is he just printing more money? What happened to the stimulus of the two massive tax cuts Bush handed to the rich? Those worked out well, didn’t they? For the tricklers with the offshore accounts and investments, certainly.

And then there’s the elephant in the room. Three billion dollars a week wasted in Iraq, on a senseless war built on lies and dishonesty and a treasonous fraud carried out on the people of the United States by a cabal of conservatives who have been proven wrong over and over again, but continue to hold positions of power and influence, and to whom Bubble Boy Bush listens religiously. Serious economists put the ultimate financial cost of the war, if it were to stop  this year, at between two and three trillion dollars.

Nonetheless Bush, Cheney, and McCain blithely go about the business of extending the war and occupation for another hundred years. And the heir apparent, McCain, demonstrates time and again that he has no clue, none, about the economy, about the war. He can’t even tell the difference between Iran and Iraq, much less demonstrate any understanding of the complex currents of religion, economics, and politics that swirl throughout the region.

All these things are tied together and they possess an evil synergy that threatens to bring the United States down to the status of a pathetic, weak, begging, has-been nation.

And the people who created the disaster? They’ll tell you over and over again that it’s not their fault.

They’re lying.

That’s the Republican way.

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