U.S. as Banana Republic--'Socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the rest.'

With the ever-increasing 'bailout' the United States resembles Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Equatorial Guinea. Also, it did not have a media out in front of the problem.

• (Hitchens, Vanity Fair): "...(The) actual situation...is: “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest.”...

(an)apt summary of a

• collusion between the overweening state and

• certain favored monopolistic concerns,

whereby the profits can be privatized and the debts

• conveniently socialized, but another term for the same system would be

“banana republic.” What are the main principles of a banana republic? A very salient one might be that it

• has a paper currency which is an international laughingstock: a definition that would immediately qualify today’s United States of America.

We may snicker at the thriller from Wasilla, who got her first passport only last year, yet millions of once well-traveled Americans are now forced to ask if they can afford even the simplest overseas trip when their folding money is apparently issued by the Boardwalk press of Atlantic City.

• But still, the chief principle of banana-ism is that of

kleptocracy, whereby those in positions of influence use their time in office to maximize their own gains, always ensuring that any shortfall is made up by those unfortunates

• whose daily life involves earning money rather than making it.

At all costs, therefore, the one principle that must not operate is the principle of

• accountability.

In fact, if possible, even the similar-sounding term (deriving from the same root) of accountancy must be jettisoned as well.....

• ...In banana-republicland, like Alice’s Wonderland, words tend to lose their meaning and to dissolve into...

• neutral, responsibility-free verbiage....

And still, in so many words in the phrasing of the first bailout request to be placed before Congress, there appeared the brazen demand that, once passed,

• the “package” be subject to virtually no more Congressional supervision or oversight. This extraordinary proposal shows the utter contempt in which the deliberative bodies on Capitol Hill are held by

• the unelected

• and inscrutable financial panjandrums. But welcome to

another aspect of banana-republicdom. In a banana republic,

• the members of the national legislature will be

• (a) largely for sale and

• (b) consulted only for ceremonial and rubber-stamp purposes some time

after all the truly important decisions have already been made elsewhere....

• Referring to those who had demanded—successfully—to be indemnified by the customers and clients whose trust they had betrayed,...

These are people who want to be rewarded as if they were entrepreneurs. But they aren’t. They didn’t have anything at risk.

• That’s almost exactly right, except that they did have something at risk.

What they put at risk, though, was

• other people’s money and other people’s property.

How very agreeable it must be to sit at a table in

a casino where nobody seems to lose, and to play with a big stack of chips furnished to you by other people, and

• to have the further assurance that, if anything should ever chance to go wrong,

you yourself are guaranteed by the tax dollars of those whose money you are throwing about in the first place!...

These members of the “business community” are indeed not buccaneering and risk-taking innovators....Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron, the former

• bosses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have departed with $9.43 million in retirement benefits...

(On) the theme of falls and collapses,...the findings of the Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration that followed the plunge of Interstate 35W in Minneapolis into the Mississippi River last August. Sixteen states, after inspecting their own bridges, were compelled to close some, lower the weight limits of others, and make emergency repairs.

• Of the nation’s 600,000 bridges, 12 percent were found to be structurally deficient. This is an almost

• perfect metaphor for Third World conditions: a money class fleeces the banking system while

• the very trunk of the national tree is permitted to rot and crash....

Another question. ...Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)?

• Has anybody even offered to resign?

Have you heard anybody in authority apologize, as in: “So very sorry about your savings and pensions and homes and college funds, and I feel personally rotten about it”?...

• ...has anybody been fired? Any regulator, any supervisor, any runaway would-be golden-parachute artist?

Anyone responsible for smugly putting the word “derivative” like a virus into the system?

• To ask the question is to answer it. The most you can say is that some people have had to take a slightly early retirement, but a retirement

• very much sweetened by the wherewithal on which to retire. That doesn’t quite count.

These are the rules that apply in Zimbabwe or Equatorial Guinea or Venezuela,

• where the political big boys mimic what is said about our hedge funds and investment banks: the stupid mantra about being “too big to fail.”... via Lucianne.com

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