Fournier for Congress

Bank robbery, generally understood as a crime committed against the banker, takes on new meaning under the legislation that is expected to pass the House today. The bill allows bankers to rob the national treasury to make up for gambling losses incurred by a few of them over the last couple of years.

The bank thugs didn’t hold a gun to the Congress, but they did the next best thing. They threatened the government of the United States with the immediate termination of further credit if the people failed to fork over a sum equal to the yearly earnings of 30 million workers. Just as a kidnaper cuts off his victim’s finger and sends it to the anxious relatives, the bankers cut off the credit of small business first, to show they’re serious.

Our leaders like to say that they don’t negotiate with terrorists, and they didn’t negotiate in this case. They simply agreed to pay the ransom. As often happens in such cases, capitulation is no guarantee that the bankers will liberate our abducted economy, and my congressman John Larson, who voted to pay the terrorists, shouldn’t be surprised to find the economy decomposing in a shallow grave soon after the election.

The American people went up against some high-rollers in a table-stakes showdown yesterday, and the professional gamblers blinked. The people had to call their bluff, because the people are the only ones holding any high cards in this game. We have a vote, and we can close down the table.

It’s the Rumplestiltskin story on a grand scale. The maid pledged her first-born to a troll in exchange for the ability to spin gold from straw. That’s what Wall Street’s been doing, spinning gold from straw, on the pledge of the US government to mortgage our kids and grandkids. Except that the people wouldn’t go along.

In the first place, the people don’t trust Rumplestiltskin with their kids’ money. The people are aware that Bush, Paulson, and their cronies in Congress have been running a scam. Nobody says exactly what this money is for. Nobody says where this money is coming from. When the people try to find out, through their trusted news-suppliers, where the heck the billions are going, the policy-makers leave the room. Would you pledge your first-born to people who refuse to answer questions?

To say that bailout proponents are a collection of cynics would be an understatement. On the Democrat side, they allowed more than a third of their majority to vote against the bill–mostly, incumbents who face tough election contests–believing they could pass it easily with the help of those notorious agents of greed, the Republicans. But there weren’t enough “safe” Republicans to risk a vote for blackmail. It wasn’t principle that won the day for the people, but stark terror.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Congress, in giving the Bush plan any serious consideration at all, exposed itself as an assembly of thugs and enablers. The gamblers in banking and real estate bid up prices on everything with easy credit, pocketed the profits and commissions, and put housing and a decent quality of life out of reach of half the population. Now their equity is being devalued, as prices begin to retreat to within the range of ordinary people, and they want government to make up their losses. Only a corrupt government would do such a thing. They made their buck on the inflation of the bubble, and now they expect to be compensated because it busted?

Voters also noticed that in the “legislation” proposed by the Bush/Frank/Paulson cabal there was no provision for the raising of the money. They were just going to spend it, and they never said where they were getting it from. That’s dishonest, and the people saw through it.

How would the people have reacted if Barney Frank had written a bill that called for a one-time property tax levy, graduated, on owners of more than five million, to put the banks back on their feet? The people would have applauded, but Frank didn’t propose such a tax. In fact, nobody proposed anything except the blank-check approach. No government subsidies for college loans and small business loans. No direct assistance to mortgage debtors. No rent subsidies for displaced tenants and homeowners. No public works. Nothing but the Bush plan, slightly revised. People aren’t stupid enough to accept the first solution offered to a problem as complicated as this one, especially from people they don’t trust who have lied to them before.

As low as members of Congress score on the public trust scale, the news media rank lower. News-consumers must have noticed the dismay on the faces of the TV people–their cooperation in sowing panic has been a mainstay of this blackmail attempt–as Dow Jones declined ever so moderately (much less than the gains that brought it to its current overpriced level) and didn’t crash. There was panic among the news-mongers that there was no panic. Bluff called.

Will there be a depression? Of course commerce will slow down. That was already happening. A bailout might have postponed the reckoning until after election day, but when you spend what you don’t have, you eventually have to pay up. As individuals, we borrowed to eat and work. As a nation, we borrowed to enable our leaders to loot, waste and ravage. The bill is coming due.

As it turns out, the creditors, who said they wouldn’t lend without this payment, stand to lose more by burying their money than by lending it, and so the credit markets continue to function. It might become harder to borrow, but for the vast majority of Americans, blacklisted or about to be blacklisted by credit rating bureaus, it will be no less impossible than it is now. Let this bailout die, and let’s oust this racketeering outfit that used to be our government before we allow them to dabble any further in finance.

The mock debate on the Wall Street bailout that transpired in the House of Representatives today was a travesty of government and a triumph of unreason. One after another of the supporters railed against the deficiencies in the legislation even as they pledged to vote for it, because, as some of them said, it might just work. The legislation would have entrusted the Bush administration with a blank check to purchase junk securities at a price to be set by officials with close ties to the financiers who would receive the money.

Democrats and Republicans hatched a conspiracy yesterday to pay off the bad debts of the nation’s crooked bankers. The bankers had been bidding up the price of real estate with low-interest mortgages for the past few years and pocketing the profits, when the bottom fell out of the market. Last week, they threatened not to lend any more money unless the American people give them almost a million million dollars to compensate them for their losses. Democrats and Republicans in Congress have now agreed to meet their demands, in a bailout they hope will postpone the reckoning until after election day.

This is not the sort of bailout sailors accomplish with buckets on a leaking boat. It’s more like the bailout that frees an accused thief from the slammer or that allows a flyer to land safely while his plane crashes. It’s risky, and it salvages almost nothing, and regular people are overwhelmingly opposed to it.

People understand that there’s no money to do this deal and that the value of their money and property will have to be degraded. It’s a trillion-dollar redistribution of wealth to rich creditors from debtors, whose worth has already been hurt by war, government malfeasance, and unemployment. And like a debt at the company store, it can never be paid back out of meager earnings. Our children and grandchildren will be sweating out the payments long after we’re gone.

Some observers are saying that the bailout can’t work without public support. Polls show (and congressional mail confirms) that, by a a huge margin, the people don’t want to put up the money. Their reluctance is understandable: they know their government is a collection of crooks and scoundrels whose rap sheets of lying, cheating and stealing stretch from here to Nicaragua. Trust them with a million millions? We don’t think so.

So here’s the deal. Government, clean up your act and put the executive branch in receivership right now. Get resignations from Bush and Cheney and allow the Speaker to take office and then we’ll give you your bailout check.

We’re not asking much. The investment houses had to replace their management. Shouldn’t their facilitators in government be answerable as well? Throw them out or get their resignations. As fiduciaries, they are tainted and corrupted and could never function credibly in any market of any kind. Their word is worthless. Their motives are venal. They are brutal and dangerous.

So here’s the deal. You want our money? Close down this racket. Give us back our laws. Give us back our decency. Give us back our peace. Give us back our country.

Two facts: 

US government ownership of private business is un-American. People don’t have enough money to pay their debts.

Congress is about to make an unprecedented payment on the national credit line that will cripple at least two generations of American workers. Even though Democrats and Republicans have been siphoning wealth to their rich patrons (foreign and domestic) from the rest of us for a couple of decades, it doesn’t seem to have been enough. The big owners just suffered a loss of about 10% of their U.S. holdings and they’re threatening to ruin us if we don’t make a big payment. Now. Their sugar-daddies in Washington are leaving government, and they figure they had better get it now if they’re going to get it at all.

If this sounds like racketeering, that’s because it is. It’s trillion-dollar blackmail. The blackmailers are folks who accumulated dollars by selling us crap and then loaned most of them back to us so we could afford to spend. We mortgaged everything to get the money, and we bid up the price of everything with the money they loaned us. Meanwhile, the actual value of our assets (and theirs) was degraded by war, outlaw government and criminal business practices. Now, they want their money, and, if the racketeers who run our government don’t pay them, they’ll shut the whole operation down.

Somebody could have told the creditors that US dollars were a bad risk. Here’s a nation that wages aggressive warfare year after year, that imprisons large segments of its population and drugs the rest, that craves violent entertainment, that doesn’t read, that elects crooks to public office, and that believes God is coming presently to take them directly to heaven. Responsible investors know better than to dispense money to an outfit like that. These suckers fell for an old con game–churning up sales to simulate value–and they deserve to bear the consequences. But if we don’t meet their demands, the economy will crash, our leaders tell us.

Poverty is spreading like a virus, and this makes it easy to sow panic. Certainly, the commercial news media (owners of many excess dollars) and the political class have been promoting the idea that there will be a catastrophe if we don’t make the protection payment. Notice that they never tell us where the money will be going. Which pockets will be full when the trillion is handed out? Not mine, I’m betting, and not yours, either. Ask your congressman how much of it will be going to foreign investors. Ask the pundits how much will wind up in the hands of millionaires. Ask how much will be used to augment bank accounts already swollen by two decades of frantic buying and selling.

Will we be saved if we fork this money over? It’s just a downpayment, after all, and the financiers’ creditors are merciless. As extortionists, they will demand and demand and demand, and our kids and grandkids will have to sweat out the next half-century trying to meet the obligations we take on. Then there’s the problem that the money to pay the protection doesn’t exist. We can print it, but that will degrade the value of the dollars in our pockets and bank accounts, which will buy less and less. That’s already happening.

What if we refuse to pay? That will be the end of loaned money for awhile. At least, that’s what they’re threatening. My credit card from Chase Bank probably won’t work anymore because Chinese drug-makers and Arabian oil-mongers and German wine-merchants will no longer be giving Chase money to lend. It’s not smart to lend to debtors who can’t pay the money back or who will pay it back in devalued currency. When credit dries up, commerce slows, and people lose jobs. That’s already happening, too.

So we’re screwed either way. If we don’t make up the crooked financiers’ gambling losses they won’t lend us any more money. If we do, we saddle our kids and grandkids with debts they can’t possibly handle. Either way, most of us end up broke, and many of us end up hungry and homeless. All because of our profligate system, which requires us to buy endless crap, including megatons of bombs and bullets, with money we don’t have.

If I have to choose between profligate poverty and responsible poverty, I’m inclined to choose the latter. Our leaders have disqualified themselves from making any further decisions for posterity, and we should stop them from throwing our grandchildrens’ money away. Voters should pledge not to vote for any incumbent or candidate who supports this. Let the lenders grab their lost money from the billionaires who have it. Don’t put it on my tab. Economic consequences? Bring ‘em on!

Is it possible that a tiny cadre of unelected officers–seven bankers–should have the power to commit the taxpayers of the United States to the purchase of a private company for 85 billion dollars? Where do they think they’re getting that kind of money? Can they just order the mint to print it up and send it out to the company’s creditors?

Actually, they can’t do any of those things, and whatever papers the Federal Reserve Board of Governors has generated to seal this transaction will eventually be used to stock the dispensers in the lavatories. AIG would do as well making a contract with a horse or a slice of bread.

The law is clear on this. The Fed has only the powers granted to it under Section 241 of Title 12 of the U. S. Code, entitled, just to make sure there’s no misunderstanding, “Enumerated Powers. ” The power to own and control a private company–other than a bank–just isn’t there.

The Fed is authorized by law to regulate banks and to act as a bank. That’s about it. It can’t appropriate money. It can create and destroy money with variations in the rate of interest it charges for loans, but it can’t create a government indebtedness unless the money has been appropriated by Congress. It can’t just dip into the Treasury, and it can’t print the dough, either.

If the U. S. Code means anything, the Fed’s move to “buy” AIG is altogether illegal and altogether voidable, and the next Congress (or maybe this one) will repudiate it whenever that becomes convenient, as it certainly will. That’s if the member banks, which are on the hook, too, don’t move to invalidate it first.

People disposed to rely on the faith and credit of the U. S. Government to make good on this transaction would be well advised to consult a lawyer. It’s never been tried before, because it’s a violation of federal law. Harry Truman once tried to take over the country’s steel mills when steelworkers threatened to strike. Supreme Court said, “No. ” The present crop of justices will give the same answer here.