Jan Baker

Geithner's Financial Reform Is Doomed to Fail

Why aren't all banks cooperative, like my own? (Riverset Credit Union in Pittsburgh, formerly the Pittsburgh Teachers Credit Union--it is small compared to the one in Hillsborough County, Florida.) Does anyone know how a cooperative bank is structured, compared to the plan here? I know they didn't invest in any of the bad mortgage investments--so they told me when I moved my retirement money out of the market and into their cd's.

Steven's scheme here is such a powerful analysis of the problem. He keeps trying to get down to the structure of the problem.

Geithner's Financial Reform Is Doomed to Fail

There is a 'social justice' political party called the American Revolutionary Party (they have a website if you google it) that calls for a kind of taxation platform that penalizes businesses that grow over a certain size. I think the schedule was designed so that the hit would be gentle enough to promote sell-offs over generations, not abruptly. I believe they were speaking of all businesses, not just banks, but I offer the idea here as a way to keep banks from getting so big that they 'cannot fail.' I think this is the heart of the problem over-all.

It is a principle of distributism that ownership (as opposed to income per se) needs to be widely dispersed for healthy capitalism. 'Back in the day' they were speaking of land ownership and had programs to literally move the poor out of cities and onto small farms, but I keep musing that it could apply to anything, and waiting for someone to apply it to more intangible capital.


On Mar 27 07:06 AM Chezfrederick wrote:


>
> A cheaper solution is not to allow any one organization to become
> too big to fail

AIG: Fear and Loathing on Wall Street

The whole shebang reminds me of the cultural revolution in China, which effectively destroyed, erased, Chinese history before the revolution, and all without a single law being passed that might have failed even the comintern's stress test, and even without undue bloodshed. All they had to do was stir up public sentiment, and "the kids" took over from there, running through the streets, entering homes, humiliating their teachers and business leaders (God knows our kids are getting plenty of training in similar uncivil behavior, internet and from the dems themselves, apparently). The cultural revolution was one of the most inhuman events in all of history, but because it was relatively bloodless it has faded in memory. It turned people into a mob that took authority over books, music, love and marriage, clothing styles, architecture, you name it, if it didn't fit the image it was destroyed. We are now practicing the same.

I noticed when Obama defended the request for more government power over financial institutions other than banks he had no specific example of how that power would be exercised other than to bring down salaries that are "too high." Based on what? The mob already brought down the merely middle-class pay of auto workers on the perception that those wages were "too high" (in the auto bail-out negotiations), and Obama, who complained last night of stagnant wages, did nothing to stop it or defend what had been labor's crown jewels. To the most vocal and vigorous in our US mob, a moderate income is "too high." We are, with this, unleashing hell, and it's not even a socialist hell, it's a socialist-fascist inferno. As was China's.