President Bush loves to pass out corporate welfare.
The logic is impeccable.
The government bails out American International Group Inc., a private insurance company, with an $85 billion loan largely because the mortgage-related securities it insures are based on subprime loans now in default.
The government bails out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which trafficked in subprime home loans, because the companies claimed to be too big to be allowed to fail
And now we face the Mother of All Bailouts—a government purchase of dangerous financial instruments based on subprime mortgages, taking speculators off the hook and leaving taxpayers with the bill. Once again, the story is that we must do this because otherwise the worldwide financial system will crumble. And once again, the blame falls on subprime lending and the culture of deregulation that fostered it.
Lost in the headlines are the families who signed their names to subprime mortgages, not knowing or caring that the pieces of paper they signed would become one of the cards in the house of cards that now threatens the U.S. economy. No less visible are the people who have lost jobs as the economy reverses, the students who can’t pay for college without taking on ruinous loans and the millions of families who turned to credit cards and payday loans as they have been caught in the squeeze between declining wages and skyrocketing costs. They are casualties of a financial system that saw them not as customers, but as prey
The logic is impeccable: The big need protection, and the small pay for it.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-oped0922familysep22,0,936232.story
