For What Price is Socialism?

$900,000,000,000.00 that is $900 Billion dollars. That is how much the US Government has spent bailing out companies this year. Moreover, it may not include the sneaky little deal they did with at least $87 billion in repayments to JPMorgan Chase & Co for providing financing to underpin trades with units of bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers.

A few years ago, I was having a discussion with some people regarding politics, economy, etc. I had opined that I thought the future economy in America was going to look much more like the European Quasi-Socialist model in my lifetime. Most of the Conservatives balked at that idea. They said that Wall Street would never allow it to happen. Well, as it turns out, not only has Wall Street allowed it to happen…they are begging for it to happen. Socialism is happening in this Country, though no one wants to use those words because it will really freak out Americans. That is what is happening. The Government will call it bailouts, loans, assistance, etc but we have Nationalized $900 BILLION of our financial system. I thought it might happen , I kind of expected it to happen, in order to compete in a world economy; I just never thought it would be Republicans to do it.

However, it would appear that the final nail in the economic coffin is just being hammered. Now the Fed is asking the Treasury to bail it out with some capital. So now, not only is the fox watching the chicken coup, it's asking the chickens to sharpen the axe. I like the last quote in the story where a Treasury official says it is to “help them better manage their balance sheet”. Kind of like the same words, we have been hearing from Wall Street firms a few days before they go under.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury Department quickly put a new special financing facility to work on Wednesday, raising money for the Federal Reserve to use in a costly bid to rescue crumbling U.S. financial institutions.
Just minutes after unveiling the financing program, Treasury said it would sell $40 billion of cash management bills -- essentially a fresh batch of debt -- on Wednesday at the U.S. central bank's request as part of what a Treasury official called an attempt to "help them better manage their balance sheet."

This particular rule has been on the books for at least 10 years. The SEC has decided, today, to enforce the rule. WOW! It only took them this long to figure out how much of an impact it was taking on the economy.

The government took other measures Tuesday to help alleviate the turmoil in the markets. The Treasury said it will start selling bonds for the Fed to aid it with its lending efforts, while the Securities and Exchange Commission said it will strictly prohibit naked short-selling starting Thursday.
Short-selling is when traders borrow shares of a stock they expect to fall and sell them — if the stock does indeed fall, the traders buy the cheaper shares to cover the borrowed ones and profit from the difference. Naked short-selling occurs when sellers don't actually borrow the shares before selling them; it's a practice some say is partially responsible for the huge drop in the shares of investment banks like Lehman, Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns Cos., which JPMorgan Chase & Co. bought earlier this year.

As President Herbert Hoover wrote in his memoir regarding speculation: "There are crimes worse than murder for which men should be reviled and punished." Among them are inaction when our entire nation desperately needs a sign that Washington understands the true dimension of the problem.
I have known some Wall Streeters, and a few of them, by there own admission, have no idea what the rest of the country is about. They see Wall Street (and Manhattan) as the end of the earth. Well now that they are out of jobs, they may want to get out and see the rest of the Country. There are tons of jobs in Middle America that need to be filled, some of them presently held by illegal aliens that people seem to complain about, although not as much anymore….