Finally--as All Else Fails--the Extortion of America
U.S. to Invite The Wealthy To Invest in The Bailout
By David Cho
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 6, 2009; A01
The government is seeking to resuscitate the nation's crippled financial system by forging an alliance with the very outfits that most benefited from the bonanza preceding the collapse of the credit markets: hedge funds and private-equity firms.
The initiative to revive the consumer lending business, outlined by officials this week, offers these wealthy investors a new chance to make sizable profits -- but, thanks to the government, without the risk of massive losses.
The idea is to entice them to put their huge cash piles to work to stimulate the financial system. They would be invited to buy up recently issued, highly rated securities. These securities finance consumer lending, such as credit cards and student and auto loans.
The program, which could involve the government lending nearly $1 trillion to these investors, exceeds the size of every other federal effort to address the crisis so far.
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A trusting nation watched as this new president surrounded himself with old guard and privileged insiders. We knew there was an agenda to be served, but we trusted him to select that agenda with care and reverence to the principles he so eloquently espoused in the run-up to election. No one expected the extortion of Barack Obama.
Extortion (noun) The felonious act of extorting money (as by threats of violence)
Winston Churchill said that "America can always be depended upon to do the right thing--after exhausting all other efforts." We are, by allowing the rich who sold us out to profit again and profit from the resuscitation of their own criminal efforts, at but a mid-point of all other efforts. The shame of this bright and shiny new administration is its absolute and complete lack of guts (which would have now, to include a lack of integrity).
It pains me beyond words to admit that. As a nation, we are better than that. We are not cowards, we are mostly not idiots.
The solution to our national extraction from this current financial death-spiral is--and always has been--the establishment of a parallel and unfettered system of Federal Banks, financed by the several trillion dollars we are currently throwing down the rat-hole of failure and avarice. Such a banking system would attract capital and loan to the credit-worthy businesses and individuals who need money for purposes other than the perpetuation of consumer-spending.
Consumer-spending (among other things) got us here. We need not restart that engine. We seriously need once again to become a productive nation of industrial, agricultural and innovative activity. In a national priority aimed at our salvation, we must have the courage and integrity to build upon what is sound and let fall that which has brought us to our knees.
It's painful. It's necessary. It's a national agenda worth following; one for which we put an elegant majority of electoral trust and purpose into the hands of a new man and a new administration.
The worst possible failure of that trust and purpose is to succumb to the extortion of this vicious and unprincipled investment cabal of co-conspirators who so nearly destroyed America.