Solving the Financial Crisis. A Modest Proposal

As much as it disgusts me, the bailout of the financial institutions run by greedy, egotistical managers and executives presents a less devastating result than letting them go under.

Ten years from now, my family, my friends, the working people who make this country great and ask for nothing more than a fair shake, will be better off with a properly structured loan to an industry run amuck.

Before we get into the details, the first thing we must understand is that bailout or not, the Republican Party, the author of this ideological meltdown, is responsible for the biggest tax hike and the biggest waste of taxpayers dollars in history.

For a bailout to work:

• There must be a return to Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era body of law that provided safeguards against these excesses.
• No foreign banks deserve one cent of American money. If their respective nations wish to save them, they can bail them out. They already made enough money in the past decade.
• A special investigator should be appointed to look into the relationship of banking lobbyists and the principals responsible for this former disaster, special financial guru to John McCain, former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, and hit man Newt Gingrich, who thinks the solution to this problem is eliminating the capital gains tax.
• Any borrower should be allowed to extend their home loan one month for each year left on the mortgage and those deferred payments should have a maximum interest rate of 3%.
• No executive of a bailed-out company shall be compensated more than $1 million annually, and that will include company cars, homes, boats, contributions to retirement plans and life insurance. Life insurance can be taken out on the executive if the United States government is the beneficiary until the institution's loans are paid off. Frankly I am being too generous, but I cannot stand to see pirates cry.
• Labor, real work that contributes to the growth of the economy has to be recognized as being more honorable, more noble, and more essential, than flim-flam paper exercises that are nothing more than speculation in industries that are exporting jobs to countries where workers are paid less than $5 a day.
• For every million dollars a financial institution receives, they must repay the entire amount at an interest rate of 3.75%.  All loans must be repaid within a decade.

  
   

Comments

[antpoppa]

They are coming for the Corporate Retirement and Social Security funds, Bush and the Barons told us that years ago. First drain the treasury then to save that bone-headed move, seize the Funds.
America I never knew ya.

[Anonymous]

The democrats control both houses and should be holding hearings to get to the bottom of this. If the democrats really wanted to do something for the working people in this country they would find out what caused the problem and tell the people that it will never happen again.

Of course, they would have to expose that it was their own policy during the Clinton administration that created this problem and that Obama voted against the reform proposal that could have prevented some of the problem.

The truth is getting out.

[jim guilfoil]

We need a new Bretton Woods type agreement to regulate the exchange of monies around the world.
After WWII the US used its powers to regulate monies favorably to the US, setting a standard to secure monies from wild speculation. President Nixon promoted the elimination of the Bretton Woods agreement and 'deregulated' the movement of monies,encouraging the strong to secure their interest at the expense of the weak.
Today we have virtual monies, hedge funds, derivatives, algorithms for financial markets...we have odds and bets on money.
How do we teach our children that money is an agreement based on the confidence we have in one another...not the interests of the stronger.

[Anonymous]

Jim -

We also had the sub-prime rate thanks to Clinton that caused this crisis.

[Katrina]

I don't know much about economics or how we got to where we are. I do know that I don't trust anyone in the Bush administration and that this issue is uniting conservatives, who hate governement bailouts, and librals who hate Bush.

[Brian]

Looks like a good plan.

Anonymous is correct about Clinton. He had the votes to block the ending of Glass Steagal and could have gone to the public and defended it as a populist. But, no, being the market fundamentalist that he is, he signed on to deregulation and crowed about it at the time. Clinton, and his buddy, Robert Rubin, were definitely major factors in causing this crisis.
Rubin is now advising Obama. Now, why would a change candidate even listen to one of the trouble makers?