Published: October 22, 2009 08:06 pm      

Maybe it’s time for a public option with regard to banking

Wall Street insults our public’s trust again by paying out billions of “our” hard earned dollars in bonuses to their disreputable executives with “our” bailout monies from TARP, 4,793 bankers and traders with more than $1 million each in the past year in bonus payments.

These are class wealthfare’s fresh troops who certainly can afford the 7 percent tax on their incomes above $110,000. While the rest of us tread water they luxuriate in a security that frees them from everyday concerns of we common people.

These bonuses weren’t tied to national economic growth or some reasonable percentage of company profits. Morgan Stanley paid $4.475 billion bonuses. Goldman Sachs paid $4.8 billion bonuses. JP Morgan Chase paid $8.69 billion bonuses. Plus, 1,626 of Chase execs got $1 million or more. Too many executives to be capitalistically efficient.

Today we’re hearing so much about a “public option” for health care. Now it’s time for a “public option” for banking.

Health care’s public option’s intention is to induce competition within a monopolistic predicament that promotes cost-effective efficiencies for the benefit of “our” general population.

Banking’s public option would dissolve the secrecies used by “Too Big To Fails” to steal the people’s money. Why are we capitalizing banks when we don’t know what they hold on their books or how much borrowing (aka leveraging) they did using those toxic assets as collateral?

Why aren’t The Federal Reserve’s stealthy and expensive cash injections being questioned? Why are we backing the purchase of toxic assets by private investors with federal money? If the people knew answers to these questions banking’s secrecy would be indefensible and cease. Go public!

Every successful heist requires a diversion from central command. Whatever the size of the loot the idea is to keep the victim’s focus somewhere else. While we were focused on the $700 billion treasury bailout package, The Fed used a stealthy sleight of hand it had honed since its birth to take on trillions of dollars in useless assets, giving cheap loans in return to the very banks that had created the bad assets. Feel taken yet?

Americans need to quickly realize that the ages-old suspicion that their daily efforts will collectively reward their offspring with a more fruitful future than their parents were endowed with is doomed as long as private banking’s secretive tenets prevail.

Current Congressional efforts to reign in Wall Street’s greed (as would reinstituting the Glass/Steagall Act) will likely be ridiculed as fallacious by the right-wing media.

If all you do is “talk” about helping aggrieved others, you’re a Christian. However, when you cross the horizon and actually/physically help the disadvantaged the right-wing media will have you believing you’re a socialist, which you’re not!

For more information, visit www.action.firedoglake.com/page/s/Fed1207 and www.nom-iprins.com/bailout.html

Bill Arnold

Romney W.Va.