Via Joe Bageant …
The financial pros … the mob’s fixers and hit men ?
The last three or four paragraphs of the excerpt below set out clearly, in my opinion, why the "bailout" can be considered theft on the part of those who control the government, in cahoots with those who run the financial system.
They don’t want to give up what they made swindling people over the last 6- 8 years, and in order to scare people enough to comply with the ransom note, they are threatening to let the financial system disintegrate (after having made it into a real house of cards).
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Bail Out is Just More Trickle-Up Economics
[Snip … ]
Flips were the buzzword of the day. Just about anyone, from the sidewalk wino on up, could qualify for a mortgage. And the price of real estate always went up. So it was a no-brainer to simply bid in for whatever real estate you could get and sell it to the next greater fool. Like all ponzi schemes, the last guy in the chain suffered all the losses.
Now if this happened to your brother-in-law, everyone would express their deep sympathy and then snicker that you knew he was a moron all along. Sooner or later he comes around asking for a handout. He tries to tell you how it’s really in your best interest, how it would avoid painful situations for his family, the children and so on.
The difference this time, is the last guy in the chain happened to be the so called financial pros — giant investment banks, hedge funds and derivatives holders. Of course your brother-in-law doesn’t have connections to the Fed, the U. S. Treasury and the White House. These guys do. So the net effect is they simply don’t want to pay up — plain and simple. They concoct all sorts of nonsense about why it’s really in your best interest, how it will avoid painful situations and so on.
So the so called bail-out is just another in a long line of brazen attempts to move your money to the pockets of the very, very rich. This is trickle up economics. It was formerly just called a swindle.
It’s the same as your brother-in-law, except this time they signed your name to the debt. The idea is to dump the losses on people who had the good sense or sufficient control of their greed to avoid overextending themselves to begin with.
Let me explain it in simple terms. About six years ago I bought a 900 foot one bedroom condominium on the North Carolina coast, paying a little under $100,000. I sold it because the expense was more than I could handle with the condo dues, insurance and so on.
This past year a realtor I know had five of his clients purchase a 900 foot condominium on the North Carolina coast paying $1.5 million. Not one put a single nickel into it. The first and second mortgage covered everything including the mortgage brokers, mortgage bankers, real estate agents, real estate attorneys, and the developer. All made out handsomely.
Now my condo was probably better situated than theirs, at a closer beach with more amenities. I actually make a little more money than they do. The difference, and this is absolutely key, is that I expected to have to pay for mine. None of the other guys expected to pay anything. They expected to flip for an amount roughly twice my annual salary. When it came time to actually make some payments, no one was home.
The reason for this, obviously, is that their condos were never worth anywhere near that price to begin with. The price quickly melted to about $800,000, then $600,000 and there are no takers. I would probably be willing to pay about $250,000 if I was in the market.
Now here’s where the bailout swindle comes to play. The bailout is intended to prop up the mortgages that were made on the funny money. They want us to pay up on the $1.5 million in mortgages that we all had the good sense to avoid.
They are not asking for any return of money from the mortgage brokers, mortgage bankers, real estate attorneys, real estate brokers or developers. And none from the purchasers. Every single wrong-doer in the scam walks.
And we should pay for them so that an insanely inflated price won’t have its day of reckoning.
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Brilliant.