[R]ecent news reports suggest that many influential people, including Federal Reserve officials, bank regulators, and, possibly, members of the incoming Obama administration, have become devotees of a new kind of voodoo: the belief that by performing elaborate financial rituals we can keep dead banks walking.
(...)
[T]hey’re reportedly gravitating toward a compromise approach: moving toxic waste from private banks’ balance sheets to a publicly owned “bad bank” or “aggregator bank” that would resemble the Resolution Trust Corporation, but without seizing the banks first.
(...)
What I suspect is that policy makers — possibly without realizing it — are gearing up to attempt a bait-and-switch: a policy that looks like the cleanup of the savings and loans, but in practice amounts to making huge gifts to bank shareholders at taxpayer expense, disguised as “fair value” purchases of toxic assets.
As capitalism goes into crisis (again), there have been bailouts of the financial sector as well as calls for the bailing out of certain industries. There are many reasons for rejecting this, but the problem is that their workers will be harmed by this. (...)
May I suggest that in return for any bailouts, the company is turned into a co-operative? This is a libertarian alternative to just throwing money at capitalists or nationalising workplaces. (...)
Of course, it is unlikely that any government will agree to such a socialisation of companies. Unless pressurised from below, they will pick bailouts or (part/full) nationalisation in order to keep capitalism going. If ignored then people should simply socialise their workplaces themselves by occupying and running them directly. Nor should this be limited to simply those firms seeking bailouts. All workplaces in danger of being closed should be occupied – which will hopefully inspire all workers to do the same.
Bailouts, Double Standards and Hypocrisy, por Kevin Carson, no Center for a Stateless Society:
The Senate Republicans have made it clear they have no principled objection to bailouts. As The Freeman editor Sheldon Richman pointed out, if they’d been motivated by free market principle, they would have just refused a bailout–period. But instead, they demanded a rewrite of the House version because it wasn’t tough enough on auto workers. (Free Association blog, Dec. 13, 2008).
Richman cited a Wall Street Journal editorial of the same day that celebrated the extortion as “Mitch McConnell’s Finest Hour.” Shocked? I didn’t think so.
What’s really amusing is the WSJ editors’ obliviousness to their own self-contradiction. Using the bailout as leverage to extort lower wages, in WSJ parlance, is “reform” and “discipline.” See, it was all about making auto workers “show they were serious about making Detroit competitive again.” (...)On the other hand, imposing discipline on anybody besides auto workers is blackmail. A bailout, the WSJ complains, “would also give environmentalists huge leverage over the cars Detroit builds, a power they and Democrats have wanted for decades.”
* irá gostar das companhias em que pus o artigo dele?
**via Molly'sBlog
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