Column:

White House shouldn't bail out corporate failures

By Dieter Kurtenbach

Published Sept. 22, 2008

Forgive me for being angry, but I'd prefer this to be done a bit differently. Because when it is a policy of an administration not to regulate business and let the free market do whatever it is it does when it is not being regulated, I'm not big on the idea of dropping, in the parlance of our times, 'mad bank' to financially save those companies once they go under.

Again, forgive me for being angry.

I've heard a lot of flack the past few months regarding socialized medicine. As someone who had to go to the hospital recently, socialized medicine sounds amazing. How much do you think that would cost? $700 billion? Probably less. But I think that owning American International Group is much more important to the American taxpayer.

Again, forgive me for being angry.

The problem with the situation is that it screams karma. For every dollar the U.S. workforce made in 2008, 10 cents went to investment banks like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. So, 10 percent of the U.S. went out the window last week. Poof. In the words of Hawk Harrelson, "It Gone."

Again, forgive me for being angry.

Whose job was it to watch all of this, make sure something like this never happened? The government. What did the government do? Nothing. Not a thing until the market soiled itself. Then, free money for everyone. Who's going to pay for it? The American people.

The economics of this administration can be put in a nutshell: privatize the profits and socialize the debt. For a group of people that is so against any sort of positive socializing of basic services, it sure is pretty keen on pawning their expensive fuck-ups on the people they are supposed to be serving. But it is in the best interests of the American public, according to the administration, to privatize your social security funds to firms like Lehman Brothers, as the administration suggested in 2005.

This is the definition of living by the sword and dying by the sword and, at this point, I think that we can honestly engage in a discussion regarding Bush the Terrible as the worst president in American history. From the war in Iraq to the Patriot Act, Katrina to No Child Left Behind, he's been horrendous. We can also bring up the Kyoto treaty and the veto of stem cell research funding.

Don't even bring up the firing of the U.S. attorneys and Alberto Gonzalez. Remember Harriet Miers' appointment to the Supreme Court? It was political suicide for anyone other than Mr. Bush. For him, it was merely a hiccup on a path to total failure.

I really could keep going. When everything else had gone to hell in a hand-basket, and then our economy regulates itself into obscurity, it is apparent that we are flat-out screwed.

But, alas, we don't have to put up with Mr. Bush much longer. And while we know that the next president has an uphill climb ahead of him, it now appears that the grade of that hill will require mountain gear and the climbing skill of a man who could climb K2.

Now, the candidates have major differences in positions in regard to how they would propose fixing this economic crisis. One is flip-flopping on regulation and felt it prudent to quote Herbert Hoover the day after the market went bottom up. The other thinks that we are in another great depression, part two. It's really uplifting thinking by the lot, but both seem like more viable options than ones from the administration that just put billions of dollars, billions of dollars we don't have, into foreign stock markets. It's just a big, old-fashioned free-for-all, and we citizens are going to foot the bill.

Again, forgive me for being angry.