“You don’t tell deliberate lies,”
explained Britain’s right-wing political icon Margaret Thatcher,
“but sometimes you have to be evasive.”
If only such honest dishonesty were practiced on this
side of the pond. Unfortunately, in the Bush regime, the art of evasiveness
has given way to the pervasive use of blunt falsifications — i.e.,
deliberate lies. Take the ones we’ve been getting from Hank Paulson,
George W.’s Wall Street bailout czar. This guy is now rivaling Donnie
Rumsfeld for the Least Trustworthy Bushite in a Leading Role.
The Goldman Sachs CEO-turned-treasury-secretary has
gone from confidently assuring us that he had “contained” the
financial problem to frantically demanding that Congress federalize
America’s credit system. However, even before Congress had passed his
bill to buy up the bad investments created by Wall Street’s
“innovative” bankers, Paulson was secretly changing course. By
executive fiat, and with no notice to Congress, he shifted into a bank
nationalization plan. He is presently spending $250 billion of our tax
dollars to purchase stock in the nation’s biggest banks, including
giving $10 billion to the one he had headed.
Using our billions to save high-rolling, high-finance
billionaires was not enormously popular in this presidential election year,
so Paulson came up with this cover story: It’s not about Wall Street,
he and his minions rushed to assure us, it’s about your street. We
must put government funds into these banks in order to unclog their credit
flow, as though we were buying $250 billion worth of Liquid-Plumr. With
this federal investment, the Paulsonistas promised, banks would again begin
to make loans to America’s businesses and consumers — and
bluebirds of economic happiness would once again twitter across our land.
They lied. The billions are now being distributed to
bankers with no strings attached — no requirement whatsoever that the
banks actually start making loans to help “your street.” The
unclogging rationale was a scam.
Sure enough, the big financial houses say they have no
intention of increasing their lending, with some privately admitting that
they’ll make even fewer loans than before receiving Paulson’s
generous gift. Noting that they’ve taken huge losses in the recent
collapse, they say they’ll apply much of the taxpayers’ money
to their own bottom lines, trying to shore up their corporate profits.
If that’s not enough to disgust you, it now
turns out that Paulson & Co. have quietly been pursuing an even more
pernicious purpose with our bailout funds: oligopoly. That’s the term
for a non-competitive market that has hordes of consumers left to the
mercies of only a handful of giant providers. Behind the scenes, Treasury
is actively encouraging big banks to use their taxpayer windfall to buy out
our regional and local banks, eliminating these competitors from the
marketplace. “One purpose of this plan is to drive
consolidation,” says an agency official, off the record.
New York Times columnist
Joe Nocera quotes a top executive of JPMorgan Chase exulting to his
colleagues about the oligopolistic potential that his bank has gained with
the infusion of $25 billion from us: “(We’ll) be a little bit
more active on the acquisition side or opportunistic side for (taking over)
some banks who are still struggling. … I think there are going to be some
great opportunities for us to grow in this environment, and I think we have
an opportunity to use that $25 billion in that way.”
Thanks, Hank.
By forcing this wrenching round of mergers, Paulson
will reduce banking choices and services for you and me, and almost
certainly drive up the fees we pay. At the same time, he’ll
drastically increase the size of the very giants that made the mess
we’re in — outfits that he tells us are already “too big
to fail.”
He has moved this bailout from scam to scandal. Where
is Congress? Not only must Paulson be stopped, he should be impeached.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist and author.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2008.
