Let Them Eat Cake- No To Government Bailout of Financial Institutions

Short Note

Build a Workers Party That Fight For A Workers Government!

Centralized planning, anyone? Yes, that fundamental principle of the socialist transformation of society should look pretty good right now, even in its old threadbare Stalinist bureaucratic form, as the height of rationality now even to hardcore plebeian anti-communists. Those old grey Soviet bureaucrats (and today’s Chinese bureaucrats) had at least to mouth some phrases about the interests of the working class. No such need here in the heart of imperial society as the capitalists have just taken the money and run- and now are back for a hand-out. The world financial markets have exploded as a result of their own overweening hubris, to speak nothing of garden variety greed, but they are nevertheless looking to be bailed out by their respective governments, in the first instance the American government.

Hell, these Wall Street guys and their hangers-on (and their international compatriots in the London Exchange, the French Bourse and elsewhere) obviously missed that class at the Harvard Business School about the relationship between actual capital on hand in a business and borrowing the bejesus out of someone else’s money. That is called, in other than polite society, larceny by fraud- grand larceny in this instance. The lowliest Soviet bureaucrat had more understanding, if less scope for his or her actions, than that. In fact, I recently read an article where some American high school business class students had, a couple of years ago, called this meltdown as it was forming- without an MBA. Go, figure. I have never aspired to be a financial officer but I do believe that I could have done as well in screening out the creditworthiness of the applicants that flowed in these institutions. Being able to breath in order to receive a big loan doesn’t seem all that difficult to figure out. Heck, sign me up for one. Oops, too late.

That is the nut here. Many commentators have waggled their fingers at those who were forced to face foreclosure on their homes and other credit instruments when pay-up time came. Yes, it is always easier to blame the guy or gal down at the bottom of the chain for the in-your-face greed exhibited by financial institutions and their expert staffs over the last decade or so. Look though, even in my poor bedraggled family the desire to have one’s own home in the 1950’s drove my parents’ imagination to distraction. That the house we lived in was not as good as the apartment in the public housing project where we had previously resided is beside the point. The dream, one way or another, was single family home ownership for that generation. Why should it, all things being equal, be different now? The wisdom of the struggle for that dream to the exclusion of other dreams is a debatable point, as Friedrich Engels the old socialist and companion of Karl Marx pointed out long ago in his essay On The Housing Question. But we need not get into that here as I will address that later in a longer commentary when the dust settles over this whole episode.

Here is the bottom line for now. The “invisible hand” of the market has been exposed for all to see. The relationship between the capitalists on Wall Street and elsewhere and THEIR government has been exposed for all to see. The usually do-nothing and lethargic Congress has stepped all over itself to do the masters’ bidding. Obviously their time to run society in some rational form is objectively over and has been for a very long time. Capitalists, financiers, their agents, sycophants and hangers-on- move over. Let working people run this society to fit their needs. And from the look of things it better be sooner rather than later. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government!