01-10-2017, 03:04 AM
(01-10-2017, 12:39 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(01-09-2017, 07:46 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-09-2017, 05:36 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: I think Iceland handled the situation well. Bail out the depositors, at least the domestic ones, and let the banks that needed to fail, fail.
Exactly. But neoliberals like Eric insisted that bailouts of the banks would be better.
No, not at all. SomeGuy is probably right. What Obama did was better than doing nothing. But I would have preferred a different course, restructuring and downsizing the banks that had failed and bailing out the depositers. Bail out Wall Street instead of Main Street? No, the reverse would have been better.
Initially, the neo-liberal Tea Party and progressives like Sanders and myself were in agreement against bailouts for the banks. But that was where the agreement ended.
I have written before that another round of bailouts of banks too big to fail might spark a revolt by both right and left. That would be very unpopular. But that's where we're headed if Dodd Frank and the Consumer Protection Bureau are thrown away, as the neo-liberals and Tea Party want.
Maybe the next time "Too Big to Fail" will be replaced with "Too Big to Bail Out". Bankers who were bailed out late in the late Double-Zero Decade have learned nothing except that the government will bail them out just to prevent an economic collapse no matter what economic crimes they commit for quick profits. The last time people reflected soberly on the need to preserve the financial industry lest it take everything else with it. The next time, the masses might be out for blood if the President and both Houses of Congress are widely unpopular. Government will need to protect depositors and retail customers such as big businesses with payrolls and accounts for revenue, accounts payable, and accounts receivable.
In such a case, economic elites going into the financial crisis will be at great risk of being dispossessed, exiled, incarcerated, or even exterminated. They might have made decisions that have caused mass death through wars for profit that proved even more destructive than profitable, corporate use of forced labor, and decisions to abolish the welfare system in a time of mass unemployment -- with consequent starvation. Such is a consequence of creating a pre-revolutionary scenario.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.