Barack Obama’s election as president was brought about by a confluence of three normally separate groups of people.
- Soros and the internationalists, who are often seen promoting the United Nations and the European Union as the only proper vehicles for national governance. That is, the internationalists make the rules, and the member “states” figure out how to live within them.
- Wall Street thieves, who knew a corrupt Chicago politician would play ball and bail them out of their bad bets.
- Progressive, socialist and communist morons who wanted something for nothing.
Can you guess which of these groups chose wisely?
The progressive, socialist, communist morons were the easiest to satisfy. All they wanted was “anybody but Bush” and pie-in-the-sky promises. Be careful what you wish for.
The internationalists are in the process of achieving what World War I, World War II, the Korean war, Vietnam and the Cold War failed to deliver: The international insignificance of the United States in world affairs. That’s because we’ll be broke. Without a strong America to provide leadership for the free (and wannabe free) world, the internationalists expect little trouble creating the new world order they’ve been drooling over since the League of Nations.
The Wall Street thieves don’t much care who runs the world, as long as they can make a buck off of it. They’d already had two terms of Clinton, Bush I and Bush II to perfect the rules for derivatives and the supporting computer models that shaved a few fractional points off the market in their favor, and made them phenomenally rich at other people’s expense. This quarter of a decade was long enough for inbreeding to set in, and these thieves came to believe that the fruits of their theft had become their birthright.
Greed, however, knows no bounds. So the Wall Street thieves allied themselves with the poverty pimps in the Democratic Party and Congress. Here they developed the “Community Reinvestment Act.” This noble-sounding legislation pressured banks to make loans to people who never could or would repay them. But the good news was: Freddie and Fannie would buy these loan packages and sell them to hapless investors who thought they were buying a 30-year stream of nice, dependable mortgage payments.
Housing prices soared, due to increased demand from all the new homeowner wannabes. Middle income America took note. Banks, which now only made money originating loans, and couldn’t care less if they were ever repaid, got fat, dumb and happy on their cut of the refinancing milk and honey.
It was a formula that seemed to work for everybody. It just never seemed to occur to anybody that eventually houses would become more expensive than buyers could afford. Until they did. Poof! Instant collapse. And now nobody wanted to invest in loans they had no idea were likely to be repaid. But the firms selling them to sucker investors were loaded to the gills with them.
Bailout time!
Congress allocated $750 billion in bailout funds. Maybe you believe that “we the taxpayers” bought the loans that nobody else wanted? You’d be wrong. That idea is what created the Resolution Trust Corporation when the savings and loan industry went belly-up in the 1980s. And it worked, putting a floor underneath inflated property prices and reassuring investors. The property was sold and the country recovered.
What “we the taxpayers” bought this time was rapidly declining stock in banks that were technically bankrupt. The money was used to pay off big stock market and derivative bets that had gone bad – and would have bankrupted other banks that were playing the same game.
The latest chunk of bailout funds went to AIG insurance. Well, of course. Nobody wants the life insurance check they get after Uncle Milligan’s funeral to bounce! Get a clue, folks. That’s not the part of AIG that was bailed out. AIG’s real business was “insuring” the big banks’ investments against going in the wrong direction.
Well, that’s the direction they went. Instant insolvency. But, unlike Mr. and Mrs. America when they are late with a credit card payment and their interest rate goes to infinity, Uncle Sam picked up the tab on this one. Again. And again.
The answer, of course, is more regulation – by the same fools that regulated us into banks too big to fail, big investors who have to be paid, and mom and pop America stuck with the bill.
It’s change you can believe in.
