By Mickey Walker - March 29, 2009
While the Obama bloodhounds are hot on the trail of AIG
officers who received bonuses for causing the company’s demise, is the world
teetering on a much graver issue of default and abuse caused by other scams and
wrongs dumped upon the American people during the past several years?
Word has been circulating over the Internet for some time how major world banks
such as JP Morgan-Chase, Bank of America, investment banking institutions AND
large pension funds, retirement accounts are in imminent danger of
collapse. Reputable financial news
sources report that these major banks and institutions hold “Demon” Derivatives,
as we speak, in numbers so vast that the world could never imagine.
Over 500 TRILLION DOLLARS worth! Say it ain’t so!
An old friend and mortgage broker friend of mine, Joe Staggs
was pretty canny about smoke and mirrors in the mortgage lending business. He had seen all the shell games played
by the big boys who suckered innocent Americans into more house than they could
afford without giving them any Vaseline for later. He was before his
time. Joe did not live to see the
first tier of the mortgage meltdown last fall, but he did forecast it many
years ago. He shuddered to think about it and what was behind the unknown
door that opened to new, uncharted waters. He knew that the borrowed
money in leveraged derivatives at over 100 times value was a train wreck
waiting to happen. His biggest
concern? Derivatives were air, not bonds. Credit Default Swaps were
bookie bets, not insurance policies. Package them as bonds and sell them as insurance policies hedged against
themselves. Joe was
skeptical. He called it all a
house of cards built on nothing more than betting which blackbird on a fence
would fly first. He and I both
understood hedging your bets all right, but how could Wall Street bundle such
deregulated cans of air and sell them as genuine bonds? How could investment brokers and
bankers gyp major players like IBM and Exxon into taking trillions of dollars
of these derivatives into their retirement portfolios as bona fide instruments
of value? Most of these bookie
markers had no serial numbers, no CUSIP numbers, and in most instances, no
record whatsoever of their birth or existence. And the SEC, dutiful to the Deregulation mentality of the
Neocons who pulled the strings over the years, emulated the three monkeys of
see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Remember how SEC President Harvey Pitt, selected by Poppy Bush, excused
George W. Bush for not filing his Form 4 Insider Trading form when W sold his
Harken Oil stock right before Harken stock tanked? He was CEO of Harken then, do you love it?
Deregulation is a fancy word for deliberate confusion and
smoke pots perpetrated to circumvent rules. Plain and simple it sets the stage for breaking the
law. And if you got the policemen
in your pocket, who cares? Maybe
this is how Lehman Brothers and other securities dealers managed to sell
billions of derivatives to sophisticated money managers and pension fund
fiduciaries who managed assets and pension funds of General Electric and
General Motors. Does no cops
watching=no crime committed? Guess
so. Look at Enron. Anybody realize that Harvey Pitt used
to work for Enron’s accounting firm, Andersen Accounting, the first to fall in
the Enron Scandal? You know, the
one that vaporized due to their allocating debt off the books of Enron to make the
mother stock look better and more appealing? I ask you, is it mere chance that the same old smelly dogs
seem to hunt the same old haunts that paid off in the past? Didn’t former US Senator Phil Graham’s
wife work for Enron back in those days as a consultant? Funny how those same old bad pennies
seem to turn up in the same old Neocon rubble of companies that self-destructed
while innocent people, stockholders, and employees got the royal shaft. Is that
being catty? Deregulation was the
opium that finally did us in, and the kingpin dealers were card-carrying
Republicans.
How can you put value on a bookie layoff of the odds of
something happening or not happening, and calling it (a derivative) something
of value? "Never own the thing that owns the thing," we
have been cautioned for years. "Own the thing, itself." To
clarify, don't own the derivative that contracts in various tranches, betting
that the value of a Ginnie Mae will go up or down, just buy the bloody Ginnie
Mae, itself, ‘cause it’s backed by the US Government. That’s right, the
former ain't nothing but smoke; the Ginnie Mae is backed by the U.S.
Government. And if anybody cares to quip how the gummint ain't got the
money either, then please tell me which you would rather own, the derivative
gone eternally south or the Ginnie Mae? It ain't rocket science.
The banks and masters of deregulation like Reagan and both Bushes must have
found some Peyote weed to smoke. And instead of lighting up themselves,
they passed it out to the people and called it real securities backed by real
money. See what the Free Market
can do for you? What if Social
Security had been privatized with Free Market wolves in GOP skins when Bush II
pushed so hard for it to pass? Think maybe monthly Social Security checks might have gone the way of
Lehman Brothers dividends, like in “poof?” Indeed, maybe Reagan and the Bushes knew very well what they
were doing. Maybe they gave the American people some free samples of this
“good shit” when they did their soft shoe, song and dance about how America
needed to Deregulate so the Free Market System could lead us all to the
Promised Land. We didn’t know it
then but we were being led to the slaughter. Just look at your latest 401K statement if you don’t believe
me. It’s like reading tea leaves,
only it’s real money this time. Yup, maybe instead of smoking it themselves, the GOP Deregulators and
brokers packaged it and sent this Derivative “Weed” out as free samples to the
American people and pension fund managers. In any event it appears
that these derivatives (darlings of deregulation) will hasten the demise
of Joe Six Pack's brief moment in history of owning two cars and a home to call
his own. And a slush fund for his kid’s college. And health
coverage. And now if you bitch about it, the Neocons might lock you
up, call you an enemy combatant (arbitrarily, of course), and throw away the
key. No lawyer. No habeas corpus. No appeal. You no longer
exist. These guys are bad to the bone. But perhaps Obama and the Democratic Congress can serve us
up some truth and justice now that the Neocons fell from grace. Cut us some slack, you know, and mend
the Constitution? Too bad 4
million jobs and 8 Trillion dollars worth of wealth had to hit the wall though
before we all woke up. Sad that
our lesson had to be the realization that our life savings and houses got
flushed down the toilet thanks to Reaganomics, Voodoo Economics, Laffer Curves,
the Trickle Down theory, Free Market Deregulation policies, and Bush II’s
borrow-and-spend wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So where is this train headed? As the Stock Market languishes and gasps for air, people are
still hording cash and refusing to spend money. Not good. The
boys in the back room say Americans must begin spending again to keep the world
from vaporizing into history as our Monopoly Money just went bad. We must spend. Turn loose of our greenbacks and
savings. Take risks. The vehicle of our economy is spending,
not saving for a rainy day. Spending makes the world go ‘round, so says the smart money. Even China has been wrist-slapped to
stop saving and begin spending lest their country suffer further economic
downturns, job-losses, and factory shutdowns. After Uncle Sam loaned banks many billions of bailout bucks,
the banks refused to lend money to businesses and individuals. The banks just didn’t get it. They were supposed to light the pilot
light of the economy again by loaning money to those who would borrow again for
business, for mortgages, etc., the things that created jobs and sustained our
American way of life. But the
banks did not cooperate. They used
the money to buy up other banks and sent much of the government bailout money
to foreign branches of their own. It seems that when the fox is watching the henhouse, he just can’t help
being a fox. Nothing works the way
it should. We had 8 hard years of
proof when Bush II and his lapdog Neocon Congress deregulated everything in
America, especially truth, honesty and clean-living. And then they stole our heritage, our Treasury, our Bill of
Rights, and our future as an honest nation that did not condone torture.
Obama ain’t even got the money to buy a potter’s wheel at
this juncture; all he can do with
the debt and deficits he inherited is to pick up the broken chards and try to
glue them back together into a semblance of something of substance that might
pull our chess nuts out of the fire. He has the hardest job in the history of any American president,
including Abe Lincoln. No one has
had to look at the top from a deeper, darker hole of debt, derivatives, and
desperation. We need to back
him. We need to censure those who
would fault his noble cause at this hour, the cheap shots taken by Rush
Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other lame politicians like Lindsey Graham, Sarah
Palin, and John McCain who find fault with Obama who just inherited the
cesspool quagmire they all helped Bush create during the last 8 years of lying
us into wars and borrowing and spending our country into the dirt. 