While Warren Buffett prays to heaven to alleviate our fiscal crisis, another large bank fell last night as regulators swooped in and sold Washington Mutual off to JP Chase for pennies on the dollar. It helped the FDIC by not having to deplete more billions from the fund, but it hit Wall Street hard as the financial center lost their sixth largest bank. Now, this was their fault of course, by dabbling in the irresponsible lending and trading bad mortgage securities. I don't take any pity on the rich bastards that made this happen but there does need to be a solution.
Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) had a great one:
Obviously making Wall Street pay to clean their own mess isn't thought of so highly down in D.C. Basically the majority of the House wants to give a bailout but the Dems want oversight and the Republican leadership (but not all Repubs) want to give out a giant blank check for the President. Its funny (and also tragic) that Bush and his remaining followers want to go the socialist route for their buddies while the Socialist in the Senate probably has the best plan in the room.
Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. [...] advocated a new government fee of .25 percent of every stock transaction to ensure that the government can recoup funds to pay for the aid that it provides to lenders. “If this is truly such a catastrophe, I don’t see how anybody can object to a one-quarter of one percent fee,” DeFazio said. Others who attended the session said that proposal seemed to be gaining little traction.
Bernie Sanders knows whats up. The rich benefitted by screwing the rest of us and now that they ran out of credit they are begging to be able to continue the status quo. In an ideal world, Sanders would have the power to make them pay. While it won't happen now, with enough primary and general elections, perhaps one day we can accomplish that by electing all of the challengers out there that see this bailout as one big giant mess.
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