Anybody Remember Burning Spear's 70's song...

[Exile]

...with lines like "...do you know that Socialism is a must".....now could we set that to say an American tune? Who would have thunk?

[Gamma]

don't remember that one but johnny clarke had one called "jah bless joshua".... some minor amendments there too i suppose.

[Historian]

...with lines like "...do you know that Socialism is a must".....now could we set that to say an American tune? Who would have thunk?

Don't bother with that crap, Exile! I don't know how old you are, but while i was a young schoolboy back in the 1970s, I was old enough to remember what socialism Jamaican-style was! It's a period that I don't particularly want to remember!

Just because America is going through rough economic times now doesn't mean that socialism, a discredited and failed system (even Russia was forced to change) will be the automatic answer! So don't start singing your song as yet!!

America will pull through, just as it did after the depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. Granted, we don't have anybody of the superior qualities of a Franklin Delano Roosevelt today, but America will recover!!

[Mosiah]

Jamaica was a socialist country?

[Gamma]

tell us how you really feel about socialism?

[Exile]

Like mi mash yu corn boss? Go an listen to ALL the talk shows, news interviews and political commentaries. When GOVERNMENT gets involved in PRIVATE BANKING and are major SHAREHOLDERS it's SOCIALIST policies. Where does CAPITALIST markets beg for government intervention???

[Mosiah]

And whether Historian likes it or not, things will remain like this for the rest of his lifetime. Just like 911 changed airline travel, this crisis has brought about changes that are here to stay!

[Exile]

Billionaire Bailout: Central Bank Socialism and America's True Values Written by Chris Floyd


It is not exactly news that the Western world's fetishized "free market" is actually a mixed economy, combining cradle-to-the-grave socialism for the rich with ball-breaking, bomb's-away capitalism for everyone else. This truism was on naked display once again this week as the central banks of the United States, Britain, Switzerland, Canada and the Eurozone announced plans to provide almost $100 billion in taxpayer money to save their banking brethren from the consequences of their own greed and stupidity.

The bailout is, indirectly, a response to the mortgage crisis that has seen whole neighborhoods across America depopulated and abandoned as dodgy loans come home to roost. For years, the bankers shilled the "American Dream" of home ownership to people who couldn't really afford it, via a plethora of gussied-up con jobs which were then repackaged as various complex "financial instruments" and sold on down the line to other rubes. The financial elite made untold billions from shuffling this worthless paper around, touting it to pension funds, state investment funds, schools, small-scale investors, etc. It was a house of cards standing on a one-legged table, and it finally fell, as anyone except a highly educated, well-remunerated investment banker could have foreseen.

Now many of the world's most august financial houses are having to write off tens of billions of dollars in bad debt, with mountains more still lurking out there in the shadows. As a result, they have suddenly – and inevitably – turned on each other. Strapped for cash as they cover their losses – and mistrustful of how much bad paper their compadres might be holding – they have been choking off the inter-bank loans that lubricate the credit system. And so the Money Lords of the West have made an unprecedented collective intervention, proffering the $100 billion boodle to induce banks to start lending to one another again – "a move designed to prevent the worsening credit crunch [from] derailing the world economy," as the Guardian reports.

And indeed, the action has been widely touted as a bold, altruistic measure to save the common folk from the ravages of recession. But read a little further in the fine print, and you will find, as the New York Times notes, that "the move was intended to deal with specific problems in the interbank lending market and would not allay the biggest problems in the credit markets related to the weakening American housing market, where prices are falling and defaults and foreclosures are rising."

Now, if you or I had made a stupid investment, been reckless and greedy with our money, gambled it away in Vegas – or even just hit a patch of bad luck (ill health, unemployment, etc.) – and ended up in the red, that would just be our tough luck. It's a free market, right? You have to take responsibility for your actions; the Invisible Hand sorts everything out in the long run and gives people their just desserts. But if Big Money craps out playing craps with crap "instruments" they've concocted to squeeze a few more coins out of a few more suckers, they must be swaddled and coddled to cushion the blow.

And it is highly unlikely that this injection for the credit crunch will be the last ladling of public money for the gilded poltroons whose blind, rapacious greed has put multitudes at risk. (Indeed, the UK government has just pledged up to £40 billion in public money to bail out the upper-class crap-shooters at Northern Rock bank, after steep losses from the sub-prime orgy led to an honest-to-God, Depression-era run on the bank by customers trying to save their money from the crap-shooters' folly.) While there will certainly be consequences – dire consequences – from the growing bad debt crisis, they will not be borne by those responsible for the mess.

(And yes, I know the money on offer from the Central Banks are "loans," not cash guarantees like the Northern Rock deal; but when was the last time your friends ponied up $100 billion when you were a bit short for the rent? And where are the government-backed loans for, say, families whose finances have been devoured by catastrophic illness, or a PTSD-afflicted vet thrown out on the street by Pentagon "experts" who find that his suicidal, night-sweating dreams of Baghdad alleys are a "pre-existing condition"?)

The socialist solidarity shown by the politburo of high finance in the face of the credit crisis was announced on the same day that George W. Bush vetoed legislation that would have extended medical insurance coverage for the children of working families – and on the same day that House Democrats announced their abject surrender to the much-despised popinjay in the White House, giving up their transparently bogus bid for more domestic spending while giving Bush billions more for the never-ending war crime in Iraq. (Glenn Greenwald has a good round-up on the latter story. For more background, see this recent post. )

Billions for billionaires, billions for carnage, chaos and death…and zilch for the health of the nation's children – all in one day. A clearer snapshot of the actual values of our society could hardly be imagined.

Unless of course we add this piece of "news analysis" from the New York Times: a story about how poor little CIA agents are being "whipsawed" by all this folderol about Bush's torture regime. They were just doing their job, damn it, and they had "legal cover" for everything they did! Now they are suffering from all kinds of wiggly anxieties over their "professional reputation." It's just not fair! (And these image woes are the full extent of their worries, by the way; as the story makes clear, they will never face any criminal charges for carrying out their Master's brutal commands.)

Now the picture is complete: socialism for the rich, bare-knuckle capitalism for the poor and weak, unlimited money for illegal war – and government officials evoking the Führer-prinzip, defending torture, and echoing precisely the Nazis in the dock at Nuremberg: "We were only following orders." Behind all the preening, self-righteous rhetoric about America's greatness that pours forth in a relentless stream from every direction of the political compass, this is the reality; this is what we are.

[Exile]

Financial Socialism in America
Maswood Alam Khan
Saturday, 10.18.2008, 09:06am (GMT)


When you encounter a situation in an alien landscape you grapple with your memory in search for a near experience to conceive the new circumstances in an unknown environment. You transpose your past experience as a backdrop to reconcile with the situation you are facing.
During my present sojourn in USA I am grappling in vain to conceive the state of affairs of American financial activities. I simply don’t understand. With 30 years of experience under my belt as a banker from a developing country like Bangladesh it seems I am still in the kindergarten. Either I have to relearn banking from the United States of America or America, I am afraid, has got to learn a lot from the present and the past banking practices in Bangladesh.
Money seems to be growing on trees in America. It is amazing to observe how American government has been committing billions of dollars without batting its eyelashes: $85 billion plus $700 billion plus $250 billion plus bank guarantees—- all within the past three weeks, all for perking the Wall Street up, and all for pleasing the bankers who literally ballooned up the market by their reckless investment.
The more I read news about American government’s weird plans to salvage the sick financial institutions the more I pity Mr. Kajal of Court Chandpur of Bangladesh who, through a Ponzi scheme, swindled thousands of rural people by offering monthly interest of Taka ten thousand for investment of Taka one hundred thousand and perhaps has now been passing his bad time in jail since 2001. How pleasant life would be for Mr. Kajal of Court Chandpur had he only been a US citizen and had run his racketeering business in America!
There was a time when it was business as usual for all the banks in Bangladesh to inflate profit in their annual reports on the strength of all loans in their ledgers as solid assets, no matter the loans could ever be recoverable or not and we too were making hay while the sun was shining as happy bankers earning profit for our banks and at the same time pocketing a plethora of fat bonuses that at times were equivalent to five basic pays a year. All on a sudden some American white men on behalf of the World Bank came to Bangladesh to gauze the health of our banks and were surprised at our fraudulent ways of making paper profit without taking into consideration the real worth of assets we showed in our balance sheets.
Sermons from Washington started pouring in for Bangladeshi banks to learn how to compute profit in the truest sense of the term. Their slogan was: “Lesser the government, better it is for the country”. For more than a year in early 80s World Bank consultants (mostly Americans) with high pays and perks set up their air-conditioned camps in all the government-owned Bangladeshi commercial banks to reform financial disciplines under the banner “Financial Sector Reform Project”, in short FSRP, with a long sight to denationalizing the government-owned banks. They have been superbly successful. Now all the commercial banks in Bangladesh are already public limited companies on their journey to be completely private banks within a year or two. And, of course, we are also grateful to them that they taught us, through FSRP, how to classify performing and nonperforming assets.
A loan amount which is not repaid within a specific period of time is treated as ‘past due’ or overdue and the banker is put on a red alert when the possibility of recovering the loan gets thinner and thinner with days passing. At one stage the loan is worth nurturing as a special loan to take care of and is termed a nonperforming asset of the bank to be appropriately classified depending upon the loan’s present status. Nonperforming assets are categorized mainly as Substandard, Doubtful, and Bad in accordance with the guidelines from our central bank and as was prescribed by World Bank in FSRP. The bank which is too burdened with too many of bad loans and too few of good loans is destined to be liquidated and dead. That is what we know as modern and healthy way of doing banking business based on the capitalistic mantra: ‘survival of the fittest’.
‘Bad’ loan, as we have been taught, is the worst asset to a banker and is usually written off from the ledger when the chance of its recovery is thinnest. To my surprise, I have been introduced by newspaper reports in America to some financial assets which are worse than ‘Bad’ and are popularly termed here as ‘Toxic’ assets.
When I first read about American government’s plan of gulping toxic assets of sinking banks and financial institutions in an attempt to salvage them through 700 billion dollar bailout package my mind—-to grasp the meaning of the word ‘toxic’—-traveled to nuclear plants where millions of gallons of ‘toxic’ radioactive wastes are dumped in heavily guarded underground concrete vaults to prevent contamination of soil and water.
My head simply reeled when the other day I watched on TV American bankers—-many of whom were primarily responsible to create those toxic assets and who took for themselves millions of dollars as pay, perks, and bonuses—-invited and cajoled by the Treasury Department as guests of honor and were reassured that they had nothing to worry about their jobs if only they restart their lending businesses as usual among themselves and to businesses and consumers—-not out of their hard-earned deposits, but from new funds of 250 billion dollar the government will make available to help recapitalize their banks. In addition US Treasury Department would also guarantee new debts to be issued by those banks for three years.
To me, a kindergartener, it sounded like “Give the addict a bigger dose of narcotic drugs to calm him”. Again in delirium I visualize Mr. Kajal of Court Chandpur in the ornate office of the US Treasury Department shaking hands with Mr. Henry M. Paulson, Secretary of Treasury, while receiving a check amounting to 25 billion American dollars!
Markets around the world, to everybody’s surprise, have rebounded on just hearing the news of the socialistic efforts of the governments on both sides of the Atlantic to salvage the bad lenders. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 936 points or 11 percent on Monday, the largest single-day gains in the American stock market history since the 1930s. On Monday, big banks like Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America agreed to take investments totaling about $125 billion. Another $125 billion is allocated for thousands of small and midsize banks.
The government hopes to earn from the recipients of the funds a reasonable return from investments in the form of preferred shares and warrants for common stock. Fantastic! Now the American taxpayers, who should now practically be shareholders in these banks, may keep their fingers crossed that they would also receive some stock dividends from the shares bought by their tax money! Now each and every American citizen should have a say which executives of which banks get hired and fired and how much they get paid. Who knows one day the government, as a fulltime trader in the Wall Street, will soon start earning enough money to completely rid the citizens from the hassles of paying taxes!
But there is a bad news from Britain, which injected its first capital into three newly nationalized banks: Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and Lloyds, whose shares slumped on Monday, despite a surge in banks elsewhere.
The whole Occident is now doing what Bangladesh did in 1973 by nationalizing the banks and most of the American bankers are now doing what the nationalized banks in Bangladesh had been doing in the 70s and the early 80s to inflate profit on the balance sheets on the strength of all loans—-both toxic and non-toxic.
The governments in Europe and America are becoming bankers either by nationalizing the banks or by injecting funds as equities to transfuse blood into anemic financial institutions with a view to thwarting a repeat scene of 30s economic depression.
Such bottle-feeding the adults may keep them asleep for a while. But, in the long run these drunken adults, I am apprehensive, may not garner enough strength to stand on their own feet. A short-sighted strategy to stabilize the financial system, a poor design to help the economy recover as has been proven time and again in Bangladesh!
For invigorating an economy winners should always be separated from the losers the way weeds and dead plants have to be cleared for healthy growth of a garden of vegetables. By artificially checking the recession—-which is a natural business phenomenon—-the American and European governments are trying their best to prevent small pox from reappearing—-unaware that nature will take its toll of death through a different gateway such as an entry of a new disease like AIDS if the door is sealed for a re-entry of small pox. Recessions are healthy and necessary. Recessions weed out the inefficient and the marginal and expose fraud and corruption.
The way the American government is injecting money directly into banks is creating a bad precedence for future banking industries some of whom may—-by fraud, negligence, or pretension—-fall sick in the expectation that the Treasury Department, like Social Security, would always be there by their bedside with a briefcase full of dollars.
Some optimists, with the sudden surge in the Wall Street, are finding at last ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’. But, many experienced Americans are finding the light at the end of the tunnel ‘not as a light of relief’, but a dazzling headlight of another giant train rushing from the opposite direction.

(Maswood Alam Khan; General Manager, Administration; Bangladesh Krishi Bank. E-mail: maswood.gm@krishibank.org.bd )

[Exile]

Bush, describing his bailout, avoids the "b" word | Main | Tracking L.A. prices: $700K range is slipping, slowly »
<DIV class=entry id=entry-55867148>Bailout rage: "Socialism in America ... Welcome to the Third World!"

<DIV class=entry-content><DIV class=entry-body> Backlash against the unprecedented taxpayer bailout for banks is building, with critics ripping recent U.S. economic policy as "punch drunk," "casino capitalism" and "socialism in America."

"The free market for all intents and purposes is dead in America,” said Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Kentucky, the most vocal bailout critic in the Senate. “The action proposed today by the Treasury Department will take away the free market and institute <STRONG>socialism in

[Hortical]

Boss, do you consider increased government oversight in the banking industry to be financial socialism? I consider that to be better governance.

[Mosiah]

same thing.

[Don1]

I remember....

...with lines like "...do you know that Socialism is a must".....now could we set that to say an American tune? Who would have thunk?

... I believe the song was "Social Living" not Socialism

[MdmeX]

Don't bother with that crap, Exile! I don't know how old you are, but while i was a young schoolboy back in the 1970s, I was old enough to remember what socialism Jamaican-style was! It's a period that I don't particularly want to remember!

Just because America is going through rough economic times now doesn't mean that socialism, a discredited and failed system (even Russia was forced to change) will be the automatic answer! So don't start singing your song as yet!!

America will pull through, just as it did after the depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. Granted, we don't have anybody of the superior qualities of a Franklin Delano Roosevelt today, but America will recover!!

Tell them Historian, - you're not chanting the Democratic socialism crap

[Don1]

Don't bother with that crap, Exile! I don't know how old you are, but while i was a young schoolboy back in the 1970s, I was old enough to remember what socialism Jamaican-style was! It's a period that I don't particularly want to remember!

Just because America is going through rough economic times now doesn't mean that socialism, a discredited and failed system (even Russia was forced to change) will be the automatic answer! So don't start singing your song as yet!!

America will pull through, just as it did after the depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. Granted, we don't have anybody of the superior qualities of a Franklin Delano Roosevelt today, but America will recover!!

The US will recover from the latest disaster.. yes. The question is.. recover to what??

The US is in an accelerating decline as a great power.

Living way beyond its means, addicted to expensive wars and military spending, heavily indebted to its adversaries and increasingly morally bankrupt.

There is no way to go but down.... slowly yes... but inevitably down.