Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Good Question

Dean Baker has a question:
Who cares if some banks don't participate in getting handouts? Citibank, Bank of America, and many other major banks have no choice. They will go bankrupt without assistance. If some banks actually can get by without the government's assistance, why would we want to force it on them?

I'm no Dean Baker, but it seems to me that many CEOs (and one-day would-be CEOs) sitting atop massive shitpiles of their own making still seem to labor under the impression that they are King of the Mountain, throwing tantrums at the very insinuation that unprecedented taxpayer bailouts of their irresponsible looting spree might come at the price of their unearned multimillion dollar bonuses and lavish crapstyles or subject them to more public scrutiny or regulatory oversight.

If they refuse to concede the fact of their failure let them experience the reality of it. I say, nationalize anything failing that is "too big to fail" by buying it at its bargain-basement price in failure, workably break it up into competing enterprises, and then run it with qualified public servants working at middle-class wages until it returns to solvency and can be reprivatized at a profit that benefits the taxpayers who bailed it out. If it can't be broken up or profitably reprivatized and yet still remains "indispensable" to the economy, it needs to be considered a permanent not-for-profit public institution.

Those who think "qualified" people won't work as public servants for middle class wages don't understand the world we are living in, and need to be educated, if you ask me (and many punished), before they do more damage to the world on the basis of their seriously skewed self-congratulory elitist assumptions and greedy superficial short-term priorities.

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