"Dear George, The ideology of free market fundamentalism rests on three pillars..."

Open Letters to George W. Bush
Letters to the president from his ardent admirer Belacqua Jones

21 Oct 2007

 

Dear George,

 

The ideology of free market fundamentalism rests on three pillars of bullshit:  deregulation, privatization, and the elimination of the social safety net.  They are all scams, but the one that tickles my follicles is deregulation.  In that one word, Orwellian language transcends itself and in doing so establishes a new aesthetic standard for duplicity.

 

If done honestly, deregulation is a misnomer.  Instead of deregulating, business is simply exchanging the benign regulation of the government for the harsh and unyielding regulation of the market.  Under the millstone of pure market regulation, if you screw up, you go under and take a lot of people with you.

 

Ronnie kicked the whole thing off the second he’d sworn to uphold and protect the Constitution.  No sooner had he began his orgy of deregulation then the Continental Bank of Chicago started to go under because of a cluster of bad loans it had made.  Right away, we learned our first lesson about deregulation:  corporations can’t handle freedom.  Immediately the wails and lamentations arose that Continental couldn’t be allowed to go under because its financial web was spread so wide it would cause irreparable damage to the economy!

 

So, the government bailed them out, deregulation became a scam, and the savings and loan industry took note.

 

However, there was one area in which business had total, unregulated freedom:  the creation of financial bubbles.  And, oh, how they blew those babies up until they popped.  There was the 1990 bond bubble, the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble, the subprime bubble that was followed by a liquidity crisis and a credit crunch.  Our financial adventurers could move with impunity knowing that the Fed and Congress stood ready to pump more cash into the system should their fuckups overtake them.

 

You see, personal responsibility is an individual virtue, not a corporate one.

 

Once again, the Fed is coming to the rescue as the banks sink beneath reams of Asset Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP) nobody wants.  So, we are seeing the creation of a $100 billion Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit (M-LEC).  This fund will buy the banks bogus paper and put it on hold, thus moving the banks’ liability off their books.  Otherwise, they’d have to increase their cash reserves, which would give them less money with which to fund the next bubble. 

 

Nobody has quite figured out what to do with the other $400 billion in toilet paper they are holding (there’s a lot of give and take in that figure because nobody is really sure just how deep in shit the banks are).

 

It really doesn’t matter because the benevolent hand of the government will bail them out.  Might I suggest that when you give your radio address next Saturday you thank America’s taxpayers for their generosity in allowing their tax dollars to be used to fund corporate ineptitude? As a reward,  allow their pensions funds to invest in the next bubble. 

 

What the hell, no matter how many bubbles pop, we still have the national security bubble, and that will keep the economy humping along the road to oblivion. 

 

Your admirer,

Belacqua Jones

 

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