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Wall Street on Welfare: The Taxpayers Pick Up the Trillion Dollar Tab for Riverboat Gamblers on the Dole

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 6:30am.

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

By Mark Karlin

Ronald Reagan's evocation of the infamous and racially charged fictional image of a welfare mom driving a Cadillac doesn't hold a candle to the welfare CEOs of Wall Street -- still living the lavish lifestyles of Robin Leach's "Rich and Famous."

Rick Santelli's now famous stunt denouncing government intervention to stem the tide of foreclosures because taxpayers would allegedly be helping to bail out people who "knowingly" took risks is based on a flawed premise and completely overlooks the role of the moneyed class predatory loan industry.

But what isn't debatable -- even remotely -- is that all the so-called "socialist welfare" given out to help poor moms and their kids eat and stay alive doesn't hold a candle to what may be $2 trillion in welfare to Wall Street riverboat gamblers who took risks amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars and lost at the casino.  In Santelli's eyes, apparently, welfare for people who travel in a chauffeured limo is a duty of the taxpayer because the super rich deserve to have their vassals tithed to subsidize the risk taking of the wealthy.

The Wall Street economic implosion is due to many things, but, as Jon Stewart so devastatingly pointed out, it primarily came as a result of accumulated gambling debts.  Wall Street companies didn't play with poker chips: they doubled down again and again with the games of chance produced by deregulation such as derivatives and default swaps (not to mention the hedge fund industry, among others). 

Wall Street's complete meltdown -- which we learned about suddenly over one weekend that produced a $700 billion welfare bill (followed by more) -- wasn't exposed in advance by the mainstream corporate press, because they are part of the moneyed class that loves to take risks and live lavish styles at the public's expense.

Essentially, if you are wealthy enough and are a higher up at a Wall Street financial firm (they are not really banks anymore; they are financial-gambling companies that include banking to finance their gambling addiction) you know that the U.S. governnment will bail you out with welfare for the rich. 

Poor welfare recipients -- who were dramatically downsized as a result of "welfare reform" in 1996 -- never took our hard-earned money and wagered it in a game of roulette, but the Wall Street "free market" freeloaders did: to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

What happened on Wall Street was not due to poor people over reaching; it was the result of super-rich people gambling with the fate of our economy (as allowed by the systematic "Reagan Revolution" de-regulation), losing it all (as the mainstream financial media -- particularly television -- cheered them on), and then asking for hundreds of billions of dollars in limousine welfare.

There was nothing free about the Republican "free market" mantra of cutting taxes and letting our financial industry run loose with our hard-earned money.  These "masters of the universe" in the financial industry got enormous tax cuts, deregulation, multiple homes, servants, mistresses and the like -- and we got the privilege of picking up the highest welfare check in history due to their failure at the gaming tables.

Socialism for the Wall Street barons and a "free market" mugging for the rest of us.

They picked our pockets clean.

A BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG




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Get a Copy of "Free Lunch" to get

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 11:43am.
an even better look at the cost of "Welfare for the Rich". It revealing and disgusting. The Oligarchies own the Govt. and are reaping billions of tax payer dollars while we sit and twiddle our thumbs. How many end up in an offshore secret account? No subsidies for any business might be a program we could all embrace. The subsidies and bailouts have hidden the real failures in our so called "Free Market". Many of our sound, locally owned, well run businesses are being put out of business by these Corporate Welfare Queens and Kings. End Corporate Welfare, yesterday.
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How much does the average

Submitted by daniel.hkcs on Tue, 08/03/2010 - 4:13am.

How much does the average taxpayer contribute to the social security system?

 

Brito - high interest savings account

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I don't believe the common wisdom.

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 2:16am.
I doubt there's more than 100 people nationwide that bought a house knowing they couldn't afford the mortgage payments. Anyone that's bought a house knows it's a long, drawn out process that takes up a lot of time and energy Then you have to move into it, get your kids set up in school, you've got to figure out how to get to work and where the supermarket is. To think that people would do all that with the full knowledge that they would be out on the street with their lives and their kids lives turned upside down is absolutely ludicrous, and both racist and classist. But this really is all about race and class. What most likely happened was that people were sold a bill of goods that they didn't understand all that well, and relied on the nice mortgage person to take good care of them, then found out that the mortgage had changed and THEN they found out they couldn't afford their mortgage. I would bet that, assuming all things being equal, these people would not be being foreclosed on if their mortgage payments were what they started out at. But it's so much easier to blame black people for bringing down America, than the banko-terrorists that actually did. I want the names of these "irresponsible losers" that the Santellis of the world want to blame. I doubt they exist.
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Millions of people were misled

Submitted by Mike5000 on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 2:46am.
A lot of people bought more house than they could afford long-term on the basis that (a) their short-term mortgage payments would be low and (b) they would be able to sell the house at a tidy profit before the payments increased.

Everyone who's spent more than an hour thinking about economics knew the bubble had to burst, but most people have more important things to do with their lives than thinking about economics.

A major cause of the real-estate bubble was the deliberately false predictions by economists and realtors and mortgage brokers that growth would continue forever.

However the real-estate bubble is not the major cause of the economic meltdown. The credit default swap gambling was more than ten times larger and, unlike houses, had no more productive value to the economy than a roulette wheel or lottery ticket.

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Maybe you're saying it better.

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 5:48am.
I said "What most likely happened was that people were sold a bill of goods that they didn't understand all that well, and relied on the nice mortgage person to take good care of them, then found out that the mortgage had changed and THEN they found out they couldn't afford their mortgage. I would bet that, assuming all things being equal, these people would not be being foreclosed on if their mortgage payments were what they started out at." You've added the idea of flipping the house, but I really don't think that there was much of that going on in the areas that those being blamed live. I see loads more "For Sale" and "Forclosure" signs in the McMansion areas than I do in middle and working class areas. A few years ago a friend who had just gotten a hefty inheritance wanted to start flipping houses. I read her the riot act, and she thanks me every time we see each other.
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Lottery tickets

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 2:00am.
Go out and buy a million dollar lottery ticket. You can call it a credit default swap if you like but it's just a lottery ticket.

If your lottery ticket comes up - you're a winner.

Otherwise, just tell Bush-Obama to make the taxpayers buy your useless lottery ticket at face value or else the sky will fall.

Sounds bad but that's not the half of it. Not by a long way. Wall Street gamblers did this 55,000,0000 times. That's 55,000,000 million dollar lottery tickets, and the taxpayers have to buy all the losers.

The billionaire bailouts have barely begun. Our children and grandchildren will work like dogs their entire lives to pay back the trillions that Bush-Obama is borrowing from Wall Street gamblers to give to Wall Street gamblers.

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Welfare on Wall Street

Submitted by Musing on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 2:03pm.
Until there is a worldwide agreement that national banking secrecy laws will be suspended for a couple of years with the the threat of permanent trade sanctions, any attempt to sort out the worldwide banking mess is like pissing in the wind. So where are the profits hidden? I ask this question because I see the mention of Enron in the replies. Enron gambled on energy prices and we now know they also manipulated the market. There were days when this combination allowed fabulous profits so extreme that they had offshore accounts to hide those profits. We have to assume that the contrition as bankers get their huge welfare checks could have a darkside. Kind of like financial entity A goes to the casino and bets equally on red and black. Entity B records most of the losses, and entity C keeps most of the profits. Mugs like us bail-out entity B and thereby A: and entity C exists somewhere else protected by privacy laws. Say someone sells a bundle of 100 mortgages as AAA. They slip in 10 subprime mortgages - this is a picture we are being presented. Does the bundle now contain 100 or 110 mortgages. Makes much more sense to keep the bundle at 100, get the commission, sell the 10 AAA mortgages to yourself as if they were subprime, get the discount, get the commission and hide the 10 out of sight.
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AH, HOW SOON WE FORGET!!

Submitted by josephconrad on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 1:53pm.
THE MAJORITY OF POOR, STUPID AMERICANS ALWAYS WHIMPER & WHINE 'AFTER THE FACT'! BUSH, JR. & THE GOP PULL OFF 2 COUPS IN A ROW FOR THE PRESIDENCY & THEN LOOT, RAPE & MURDER AMERICANS 'FOR DRILL'! ALL STUPID TAXPAYERS CAN DO IS TRY TO STOP THE BLEEDING FROM THEIR BELLY WOUNDS! SUCH PUNKS! Madoff STEALS BILLIONS & SOCKS THEM AWAY IN 3 ISRAELI BANKS. RUBIN & PRINCE STEAL TRILLIONS OVER AT CITIGROUP & HIDE IT ALL WITH EQUAL FACILITY. PAULSON, GREENSPAN & CO. COME UP WITH A 'WALL STREET BAILOUT' SCHEME THAT KILLS 6 REVERED FIRMS & LEAVES ONLY GOLDMAN-SACHS & JPMORGAN STILL STANDING! JPMorgan & AIG CONJURED UP the CMO & CDS crap & Goldman-Sachs sold 10's of MILLIONS of them! 3 of the MAJOR NAMES in the WALL STREET BANKING FRAUD attend the SAME synygogue - for years. Another 4 of them have been a FOURSOME in golf since they made it BIG. COINCIDENCE?! ASK SATAN!
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You left something out.

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 2:21am.
A lot of Italian construction workers in Brooklyn go to the same Catholic church together. Coincidence? Ask Tinkerbelle.
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"free market mugging"

Submitted by Dorothy on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 12:00pm.
We all had a glimpse of the coming catastrophe in Enron's collapse. Complicit in that malevolence were today's same cast of characters: commercial bankers, investment bankers, national accounting firms, large attorney firms, auditors, national rating bureaus and--lest we forget--media pundits and politicians of all stripes. Enron's fraudulence amounted to complex slight of hand trickery constructed mainly to hide a continual blowing of hot-air into an ever-expanding Wall Street balloon. The eventual burst was no accident. Anyone, apparently with less than a Harvard or Yale education, could have seen it coming--had the facts been presented. The same is true with today's broader calamity. Of course, there are apt and trustworthy people among us who could and would manage our affairs better. But, it seems it is never they who are able to rise to the top. Rather, we keep getting the same old mix, highly educated, high-powered, purveyors of fraud! I'm afraid no amount of bail-out is ever going to fix that problem.
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A Poem - NOT by Henry Gibson

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 10:20am.

The rich will led the poor to strife
So they don't lead the Happy Life
And once poor blood has flowed away
The rich live on another day

- neoconned

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President George W. Brown

Submitted by tinker_toy on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 7:52am.

has the power to end all that. Democrats control everything, there's no excuse.

But they won't do anything. In fact Obama's Wall Street on Welfare puts Reagan's to shame. Obama's mask is coming off soon, revealing Dick Cheney's face, though many here on BF remain fooled.

President George W. Brown never fooled me, not even for a second, but I can't wait to see the reaction of the Dem Party Apologists and Lesser Evilists of Buzzflash when it becomes impossible even for these cowards to embrace the truth. Maybe not, maybe they'll be too busy trying to make a buck selling premiums off this "news" site.

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President George W. Brown

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 2:33am.
There was a President George W. Brown of the Belknap Motor Company of Portland, ME,, but he's been dead for over 80 years. He made many advances in electric motors, and also invented the cyclonic coffee grinder, but it's not available as a premium on any "news" site. So I don't know what your post refers to. Please explain.
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George W Brown

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 1:25pm.
George W. Brown, apparently one guy's idea of a clever name for Obama as a brown version of the real "W" enters the scene having to clean up Reagan's and Bush's messes. Obama did not create any of this. It's a lot easier to destroy something, such as our economy and perhaps the future well-being of our country, as was done so capably by Reagan and W, than to have to put it all back together somehow. And as long as there's only 59 Democratic Senators there's still the potential for Republicans to screw up any rational attempt at fixing this mess. Let's see, what do the Republicans want to do? Oh yeah, cut taxes for the wealthy and impose a spending freeze on the federal government. Yeah, really great ideas. Let's further depress all purchasing in this country while continuing our reverse Robin Hood economics that got us here; that'll solve everything. Obama's going to make mistakes; who wouldn't? There are not a lot of proven game plans for fixing a mess like this. But federal spending that actually gets purchasing of goods and services active again, which then begins creating jobs for Americans, has to be a big part of it. (I'm still hacked over having to remove American steel-making from the STIM because of "fair trade." How exactly does fixing our infrastructure with steel from Japan, South Korea, China and South America put Americans to work? Why are we sending our STIM dollars to these countries?). In any case, one thing is absolutely clear. The Reagan Revolution is over! It was financed on credit and ultimately failed miserably as was so easily predicted for years. Reagan is the new Hoover. Anyone got a dam that needs a name?
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I'm sorry

Submitted by tinker_toy on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 11:37am.

if the truth offends you. Obama did not create any of this? Yes, he did. He voted to fund the wars. He voted for the bailout, 300 billion dollars down the drain last year. He's President now, he can call the troops home, will he? Never, in fact he's escalating the war.

I don't know why I bother with brainwashed people like you who still think there's a dime worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats.

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Its Ralph Nader, that if you

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 12:16pm.
Its Ralph Nader, that if you took off his mask, you would have Dick Cheney. Remeber how Bush was "less than a dimes difference from" Al Gore - that wasnt true - that was a known lie at the time - and we could have had Al Gore.
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Yes it was true.

Submitted by tinker_toy on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 11:41am.

There never was a dime's worth of difference between Repubs and Dems. Look at what happened during the 8 years of Bush, Democrats granted him each and every one of his wishes, not a single filibuster. They funded his wars, they knew about torture, illegal wiretapping, etc.

You're a hopeless idiot if you believe Bush acted on his own.

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"George W. ...

Submitted by Yman on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 8:12am.
... Brown".

WTH is that supposed to mean?!?
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Y(es)man is a loser

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 2:14pm.
Y(es)man, you really embarrass yourself by keep posting here. I hear Newt Gingrich calling you...
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Ouch!

Submitted by Yman on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 2:58pm.
"... by keep posting here"? ESL, or just poorly educated? Such stinging criticism coming from ...... "Anonymous"????

But if it bothers you so much, I guess I'll have to ....

... keep doing it. ;) BTW - You know I love you, Norm.
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Tinker_toy's Secret Word

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 10:21am.
If you look in tinker's closet, you will find his hooded sheet.
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Typical Dem Party Apologist,

Submitted by tinker_toy on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 1:22pm.
Lesser Evilist copout. Can't attack the message, so they attack the messenger.
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Talk about a "copout"

Submitted by Yman on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 2:57pm.
You never explained why you referred to Obama as George W. "Brown".

If you don't want to answer the question, that's fine, but it appears that you were making a gratuitous reference to his skin color.

Hard to believe, but someone might interpret that as a racist comment.
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Only an idiot

Submitted by tinker_toy on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 3:27pm.

would call that racist. Since when calling someone white or brown is racist?

You should ask me to explain why I called him George W. instead. But I'm sure you're afraid of the answer, since Dem Party Apologists and Lesser Evilists can't handle the truth.

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It's all about the context, Tinker

Submitted by Yman on Mon, 03/09/2009 - 8:37am.
Nice try, Tinker Tot. Of course calling someone white or "brown" is not, per se, racist. But making a gratuitous reference to someone's race while criticizing/attacking them, when race isn't even remotely related to the issue at hand, is racist. I already knew why you called him "George W." It was the "Brown" part that required an explanation. Of course, ...

... now it's obvious why you called him "George W. Brown.
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WS on wefare

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 10:43am.
The Fed must die. Until that is done, nothing can be done as our money goes into the black hole of WS never to be seen again. Do the research to see why our monetary system is a laughing stock while the banksters keep laughing at us while raking in tax paryer money. Unreal and yes, I don't think Obama's got the guts to abolish the private cartel that's killing us via trillion dollar bailouts. See Bloomberg if you don't believe what is happening to our once great nation.
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It's not about Obama's guts

Submitted by tinker_toy on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 1:19pm.
it's about his deceit, what are you talking about? He only got elected thanks to this private cartel that you're referring to and that's why he's rewarding them with trillion dollar bailouts, wake up.
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