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Topic: No Free Lunch! Corporations & Banks Must Be Held Accountable (Read 1377 times) |
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Blunderov
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No Free Lunch! Corporations & Banks Must Be Held Accountable
« on: 2008-09-29 13:40:14 » |
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[Blunderov] Austin Cline makes some good points. Bailing out the bankers is not the only possible "socialist" solution...
Jesus General
Sunday, September 28, 2008
No Free Lunch! Corporations & Banks Must Be Held Accountable
Posted by Austin Cline at 7:30 AM
Republicans make a lot of noise about holding people "accountable" for their actions, but the only people they seem to want to actually be accountable are the average people who live along Main Street. In contrast, all their rich donors who work or do business along Wall Street are insulated from accountability. This hypocrisy is directly related to the economic problems afflicting America today and is arguably responsible for incidents like the Enron crash and resulting impact as well as the current banking crisis.
There are, of course, a lot of difficult issues involved in the banking crisis and it's doubtful whether anyone fully understands what's going on, how it started, or how to fix it. However, we shouldn't let the complexities of the economic situation blind us to the fact that the real origins lie outside of economics and firmly in the realm of Republican power politics. Regardless of whether a clean economic fix to the economic problems can be found, a political fix to the political problems must be pursued.
But what sort of accountability can be imposed on America's corporate culture? I think that one of the primary targets should be corporate charters themselves. Corporations can act as fictional persons with a lot of the rights of real persons, yet they can "live" a lot longer and can amass a great deal more wealth and power. It's time to stop treating the corporation as though they have a right to exist in perpetuity — corporate charters are privileges, not rights, and they should only exist so long as it's in the public's interest that they do, which is to say only so long as they behave.
We have to remember that the purpose of corporate charters is to shield people from liability — but they are still supposed to have limited liability. When a corporation goes bankrupt, this doesn't necessarily mean that the people who manage are personally liable for all the corporations debts and this is reasonable. What's not reasonable is for managers to direct a corporation in ways that run counter the to well-being of the rest of society — often with shareholders cheering them on because such behavior can boost profits in the short term.
When corporations stop behaving and start acting contrary to the public's interests, the corporate charters should be revoked. Perhaps they can be allowed to submit a new application and charter within a short time period, but if they fail to do so or if it fails to impress regulators, the government should step in to dispose of the assets. Had Enron's charter been revoked instead of simply allowing it to go into bankruptcy, the assets could have been disposed of in a way that allowed the proceeds to flow to the bottom of the food chain first — all the people whose pensions were destroyed by Enron's unethical behavior.
The same can happen with investment banks that prove to have been behaving improperly. Instead of bailing them out, the government should step in and take control of firms that have been playing fast and loose with people's mortgages. Assets should be disposed of or managed in ways the benefit first and foremost the people whose mortgages are in trouble, not the bankers who have been misbehaving. What it all comes down to is what benefits the people and the public, not what benefits Wall Street, banks, bankers, or CEOs.
A bailout that props up misbehaving banks but allows those banks to keep foreclosing on mortgages is immoral. A bailout that keeps people in their homes while foreclosing on bad banks — even if just a few as examples — will be good for everyone in the long term. The people should have confidence that they won't lose their assets due to bankers' misdeeds; bankers should have confidence that their asses are on the line if they don't fly straight.
And the shareholders? Well, caveat emptor — if they won't hold corporate leaders accountable through their own power, they can't complain much about how much they lose when the corporation they have shares in is broken. The people who should have the most sympathy are innocent employees whose jobs will be interrupted or lost — at least until other firms step in and purchase control of the relevant assets — but the disposal of assets should occur with an eye towards ensuring their future as much as possible.
For too long, corporations have been getting a free lunch by having the status of persons, having assets protected from misdeeds of managers, and not being held fully and completely accountable for their behavior. Trickle-down econcomics has means that the people get pissed on while the wealthy are allowed to acquire ever more power, establishing a virtual corporate aristocracy in which the corporations are allowed to write their own laws and decide how the laws are enforced.
Aristocracies of the past were sometimes eliminated by putting the aristocrats up agaisnt the wall and shooting them, or even beheading them in the public square. We can't quite do that to a corporation, but revoking a few charters may be the next best thing. Corporations don't have numbers, guns, or any other base of power besides money, but even that sort of power can be checked with the right laws and strong standards of accountability. So whom do we make an example of first?
Posted by Austin Cline at 7:30 AM
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Blunderov
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Re:No Free Lunch! Corporations & Banks Must Be Held Accountable
« Reply #1 on: 2008-10-01 08:45:48 » |
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[Blunderov] They're not the men their fathers were. Lenin recalls a time when the sky was black with falling millionaires.
"I get up, and nothing gets me down.
You got it tough. Ive seen the toughest around.
And I know, baby, just how you feel.
Youve got to roll with the punches to get to whats real
Oh cant you see me standing here,
Ive got my back against the record machine
I aint the worst that youve seen.
Oh cant you see what I mean ?
Might as well jump. jump !
Might as well jump.
Go ahead, jump. jump !
Go ahead, jump."
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/v/van+halen/jump_20142804.html
[Bl.] PS. Who will be the first to use the phrase "Wall St's 9/11"? (apart from me of course.) Somehow I do not foresee this happening anytime soon. Our bankers are freedom fighters and not terrorists of course...
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MoEnzyme
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infidel lab animal
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Re:No Free Lunch! Corporations & Banks Must Be Held Accountable
« Reply #2 on: 2008-10-02 00:06:04 » |
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So the Senate takes the same bad bill, dumps a great big extra turd on it, pushing it ever closer to the trillion mark, and hands it back to the House. I'm not impressed.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Blunderov
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Re:No Free Lunch! Corporations & Banks Must Be Held Accountable
« Reply #3 on: 2008-10-06 12:24:00 » |
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2008-10-01 08:45:48 | PS. Who will be the first to use the phrase "Wall St's 9/11"? (apart from me of course.) Somehow I do not foresee this happening anytime soon. Our bankers are freedom fighters and not terrorists of course... |
[Blunderov] Seems I was wrong about that...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=FLO20081005&articleId=10459
Shock & Awe: Bi-Partisan Beltway Terrorists Launch Economic 9/11 on the American People
by Chris Floyd
Global Research, October 5, 2008
Uruknet - 2008-10-03
You've seen the news. You know the score. The House of Representatives has now completed the economic terrorist attack inflicted on the American people by the nation's elite.
The bailout bill -- or as Arthur Silber more rightly terms it, the "Extortion Bill" -- is already law, thanks to the Democrats in Congress, and to Barack Obama, who spent the day working the phones and twisting arms to make sure the $700 billion bonanza for the filthy rich passed without any more of the hiccups that held it up earlier this week.
The plan that Obama made his own -- despite its origins in the poison kitchen of the Bush White House -- is far worse than the version voted down on Monday. Every reputable economic expert says that the plan is unworkable; it will not solve the problems at the root of the current economic crisis, but will only make them worse. It entrenches many of the fraudulent practices that led to the meltdown in the first place, and rewards the perpetrators for their misdeeds with a gargantuan amount of public money, which they can now use to carry on largely as before, albeit with a few new toothless "oversight" mechanisms operated by their own Wall Street cronies, and their bribed-and-bought hirelings on Capitol Hill.
There were many viable, reasonable, eminently centrist alternatives to the radical, plutocratic Bush-Obama scam -- alternatives which would have been politically palatable to a broad spectrum of the electorate. One of the best ones of this ilk that I've seen was outlined in the eminently mainstream Washington Post earlier this week by two eminently respectable Yale economists. (You can find it here.) There were many other such practical and effective plans offered by reputable experts, any one of which could have gone a long way toward protecting ordinary citizens now exposed by the meltdown, supporting the banks, and stabilizing the markets -- all without effecting one of the largest single redistributions of wealth since the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917.
None of these plans were considered or debated or even mentioned, not even for a single moment, by the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate. Instead, they joined the Republican leadership and the Bush Administration in repeating, over and over, the Big Lie that there was NO OTHER CHOICE but some basic version of the unworkable Bush plan. The Democrats -- led by Barack Obama -- not only threw a political lifeline to the most despised president in American history (in the middle of an election year!), they deliberately took ownership of a measure widely rejected by the American public -- a class war weapon of mass destruction whose malign effects will reverberate through American society for years, perhaps generations to come.
Why have they done this? Why would they do such a thing? Why would they commit such an egregious offense against their own people, when they could have very easily NOT done it, and had the near-unanimous support of the American electorate in standing up to the Bush plan and choosing some other completely mainstream alternative?
You already know the answer. It's because they do not serve the American people. They serve a very small yet brutally powerful ruling class. And this elite wanted the Bush-Obama extortion plan, and no other, to make sure their power and privilege were not unduly threatened by the debacle that their own monstrous greed and fraud have made.
II.
Let's go back to Arthur Silber on this, as we have done so often during the financial crisis. As always, he goes behind the heated headlines to see the deeper threads of connection knitting the bipartisan economic-domestic Terror War with the bipartisan foreign policy Terror War that is now wrapping the world in flames. And he traces one of the prime roots of this sinister web: the American elite's belief that whatever they do to maintain their primacy -- however many people they kill, how much destruction and suffering and degradation they cause, at home and abroad -- it is all reasonable, rational and right...because they are doing it. Here is Silber in "Terrorist State, At Home and Abroad." [And again, you should read the whole thing, with the many links that broaden and deepen the scope of the argument.].
First, he quotes William Pfaff on the U.S. government's "aggressive, neverending global interventionism":
Militarized or otherwise, American policy remains under the influence of an unacknowledged and unjustified utopianism. This is the unanalyzed background to the work of all Washington's foreign policy agencies. It permeates the rhetoric and thinking of Republicans and Democrats alike. It is the reason Americans can think that history has an ultimate solution, and that the United States is meant to provide it.
Now Silber:
It has long been apparent to an honest observer that "utopianism" of this kind is immensely and unforgivably destructive, just as it is obvious that the belief that one person or one nation has the "ultimate solution" constitutes murderous arrogance of the kind we properly associate with the greatest monsters in history. One of the most deeply pathetic aspects of the tragedy of Iraq is that not a single element of this belief system has been dislodged in even the smallest degree. Thus, we continue to hear Obama, along with every other prominent national leader, proclaim: "The American moment has not passed. The American moment is here. And like generations before us, we will seize that moment, and begin the world anew."
Where it matters, on the ground, the American drive to world hegemony translates into brute force used to make others behave in the manner the U.S. government demands. Such force will often be deployed in the form of economic assistance, but offered only on certain conditions, which therefore more accurately means economic intimidation. On other occasions, the interference becomes harsher, while it is still kept under wraps to some extent: thus, we have numerous covert operations, sometimes used to engineer the overthrow of duly constituted governments. When all else fails, military force will be employed openly and with carefully crafted righteous anger.
It will also be cast as a "favor" to the victims, as Silber notes:
...just as the genocide unleashed by the U.S. government in Iraq constituted a benevolent, disinterested gift to more than a million slaughtered Iraqis, and to many more millions made homeless refugees. "Freedom isn't free," our viciously stupid propagandists announced to the dead, maimed and displaced Iraqis, neglecting to note that it was beneath our lofty status to inquire whether the gift was desired in the smallest degree, especially when acquired by these methods and with the associated costs. (This assumes that "freedom" was, in fact, the goal, which of course it was not. All of this is propaganda, remember.)
The fundamental lesson is unmistakable, and unmistakably evil in intent and execution (a word made horribly appropriate in more than one sense by our government's actions): you will do exactly as we say -- or else.
Now comes the turn to the domestic scene:
Just as it is not possible for an individual to restrict what constitutes a fundamental psychological methodology to only one area of his life, so a ruling class will not employ one approach in foreign policy while dealing with matters of domestic politics in a radically different manner. In any case, the U.S. ruling class never had such a desire: in one way or another, other nations would be made to submit to the demands of the U.S. government -- and the same is true for U.S. citizens. The citizens of America will do exactly as the ruling class demands -- or else. As far as the ruling class is concerned, you have as little reason to complain as the murdered Iraqis do: the ruling class only wishes to improve your life. The ruling class acts only on your behalf, and "for your own good."
You now witness these tactics of intimidation and of the most transparently, viciously manipulative fear-mongering deployed by almost every member of the ruling class in connection with the bailout bill....I have several other news articles offering comments from other members of the ruling class, and I could easily find many, many more, all to the same general effect: be terrified and do what they say. Or else. If you don't understand the urgency and necessity of doing exactly what they say, you're just stupid. In that case, you should obviously turn your life and your money over to your betters. Let them dispose of all of it as they see fit. That's why they're your rulers, isn't it? They know what's best for you.
...The system is now set up so that when the ruling class is particularly intent upon a certain objective, even your obedience isn't required any longer. After all, what are you going to do? Move to another country? Not vote for any of these bastards in November?
Most Americans won't do that. They protest now; once the deed is done, they'll go back to their lives, such as they will be at that point, and devote themselves to making the ruling class more wealthy and more powerful.
To a terrorist government, you're irrelevant, as irrelevant as a slaughtered five-year-old Iraqi girl. But they'll continue to try to scare you to death. You're easier to rule that way.
I suggest you get used to it. This is your future...
In a later piece, written as the House was passing the bailout, Silber hammered home to the grim implications of the key role played by Barack Obama in its passage. [Again, see the original for copious links]:
First, Obama and the Democrats fully own the extortion bill. Obama and the Democrats, as much as the Republicans, are nothing but whores for the sickeningly corrupt financial and corporate interests that control the U.S. government. I've been pointing this out about Obama for some time. Furthermore, in their determination to make certain that the ruling class's affluence and power are maintained with the work, blood and lives of "ordinary" Americans for generations to come, both Republicans and Democrats have turned their terrorist tactics on Americans with close to full force. All that is missing are the bullets -- but they may not be long in coming as conditions deteriorate. It should be illuminating (read: nauseating) to see most of those who would condemn brutal police state actions when ordered by Republicans watch identical events in total silence -- and in this context, silence means consent -- because a Democrat orders them.
Second, and see an earlier essay for much more on this subject, Obama's election will ensure the death of significant political opposition in this country for the foreseeable future as much as any single development can....
To sum up: the triumph of the ruling class, again, the destruction of the present and future for all other Americans, and the annihilation of political opposition, all within a matter of months.
Remember: there were viable alternatives to the Bush-Obama scam. It did not have to go down this way. It happened because the bipartisan political elite WANTED it to happen. And they wanted it to happen because those who have bought and paid for them wanted it to happen. As the old saying goes, you dance with the one that brung you.
But an even more apt quote, perhaps, is one we have used here many times, referring to the remark that the Emperor Tiberius once made when a groveling Roman Senate gave in once more to his authoritarian dictates: "Men fit to be slaves."
Chris Floyd is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Fritz
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Re:No Free Lunch! Corporations & Banks Must Be Held Accountable
« Reply #4 on: 2008-10-06 21:14:35 » |
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Blunderov, the Jump you Fuckers picture really says it all, and should be the new Meme we need to promulgate.
Your call on the 9/11 term usage; clearly shows your on the pulse 
What I think we need at this juncture is a "follow the money thread" started, to see where the dwindling mothers milk pumped from the US tax payers bruised breasts and raged nipples, actually goes now; except I'm not sure how that could be done.
Sigh
Fritz
Jump you Fuckers !
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Hermit
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Re:No Free Lunch! Corporations & Banks Must Be Held Accountable
« Reply #5 on: 2008-10-09 01:05:04 » |
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The true pumping will only begin under the next administration which will indubitably face: a deliberately wrecked currency; the steaming shards of a looted economy; debt significantly larger than that faced previously by any nation - ever; ongoing commitments it cannot sustain; has run out of easily accessible natural resources including, as it will soon discover, the most critical of all, fresh water; and has - overwhelmingly - the dumbest*, most impoverished** population with the highest personal debt levels in any industrialized country. Ever.
The future of the USA may be projected from a recent article about the financial meltdown of Iceland, which said
Quote:Fortunately, the long run macroeconomic potential is good.
Iceland has plenty of untapped natural resources and a well educated workforce.
The long run economic outlook is therefore favourable. |
If this conclusion is true, and we have no reasons to doubt it, then the US, and its Northern and Southern economic dependencies would appear to be in desperate trouble. How desperate might be evaluated by noting the unseemly haste with which the thoroughly cowed masses and their representatives provided the architects of the disaster with the keys to the public trough.
Kind Regards
Hermit
* That some seem to imagine that the glassy eyed, slack jawed, fervid Sarah or the neurological time-bomb McSame (watch his petite mal freeze-ups while he is speaking and go back to videos a year old to see that it is a new and increasingly serious pathology) is going to lead them to the promised land while continuing the looting and lying introduced by Reagan and the Bush bandits proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
** Personal debt that has skyrocketed to over $140,000 per family in a country which, though it holds half the worlds wealth, has given a large slice of it to the top 1% and most of what is left to the top 20%, leaving everyone else to chew toothlessly (they can't afford dental care) on long stripped bones.
CEOs' average pay, production workers' average pay, the S&P 500 Index, corporate profits, and the federal minimum wage, 1990-2005 (all figures adjusted for inflation)
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:No Free Lunch! Corporations & Banks Must Be Held Accountable
« Reply #6 on: 2008-10-10 08:06:37 » |
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Quote from: Hermit on 2008-10-09 01:05:04
<snip>debt significantly larger than that faced previously by any nation - ever; </snip>
<snip> population with the highest personal debt levels in any industrialized country. Ever.</snip> |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7660409.stm
Page last updated at 02:21 GMT, Thursday, 9 October 2008 03:21 UK
US debt clock runs out of digits
Until last month, the clock had enough digits to measure US debt levels
The US government's debts have ballooned so badly the National Debt Clock in New York has run out of digits to record the spiralling figure.
The digital counter marks the national debt level, but when that passed the $10 trillion point last month, the sign could not display the full amount.
The board was erected to highlight the $2.7 trillion level of debt in 1989.
The clock's owners say two more zeros will be added, allowing the clock to record a quadrillion dollars of debt.
Douglas Durst, son of the late Seymour Durst - the clock's inventor - hopes to replace the Manhattan clock with its lengthier replacement early next year.
For the time being, the Times Square counter's electronic dollar sign has been replaced with the extra digit required.
For its part, the digital dollar symbol has been supplanted by a cheaper version - perhaps a sign of the times for the American economy.
Some economists believe the $700bn bail-out plan for ailing US financial institutions could send the national debt level to $11 trillion.
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Hermit
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Re:No Free Lunch! Corporations & Banks Must Be Held Accountable
« Reply #7 on: 2008-10-10 09:41:45 » |
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The numbers in the above article are scary - but they are also wrong, wrong wrong!
It is valuing the current commitments and alleged assets taken on by the US Government and Treasury at face value, never mind prudently calculated Future Values and certainly not at the values determined by reasonable economists, does not allow for the horrendous effect of interest on the loans and does not even hint at the known contingent liabilities. Which, taking the pre-bailouts was at $ 9.5 Trillion takes us to $ 16 Trillion in contingent liabilities by any reasonable accounting valuation. To try and explain by analogy, the uncontested $ 620 Billion "ordinary" military expenditure, which Congress passed while juggling with the $700 Billion bailout for bankers and $120 Billion of associated pork, does not contain anything to cover the KNOWN $150-$600 Billion needed to get us through another year of Bush wars, nor the $4 to $5 Trillion (in present dollars) KNOWN to be the minimum needed to provide for long term care of the injured and veterans, nor the $10 to $20 trillion estimated replacement cost of equipment KNOWN to have been worn out and destroyed by incessant wars and not funded to date.
Meanwhile the treasury has been buying its own unsold T-Bills through the Bahamas (via the stabilization fund) and this is effectively buried in the no longer readily available M3 data which points to an excess of off-balance-sheet debts totaling some $63 Trillion before taking the derivative debacle into account. This is exactly the kind of dishonest accounting that caused the Enron scandal and exactly what current corporate accounting standards are supposed to address. If we treated congress and the administration as we now do corporate management, they would all now be headed to jail. Deservedly so.
Given that the Republicans have been raiding Social Security since the 1980's, preventing the establishment of an investment fund to provide an income stream to handle the KNOWN actuarial liabilities, there is now a contingent actuarial liability heading north of $ 50 Trillion towards $100 Trillion in an era when soaring fuel prices would be crippling global economies even without these well deserved fruits of economic insanity.
Kind Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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