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But How Do We Get There?

by: Dean Barker

Sat Mar 07, 2009 at 07:32:34 AM EST
NYT on the Obama mortgage help plan:
Homeowners - like the banks, much of corporate America and the government itself - are suffering under the weight of excessive debt. The Obama plan will make mortgage indebtedness more manageable, but ultimately the debt itself needs to be greatly reduced. The sooner we as a nation move in that direction, the better.
This is a better written and more concise version of what I've been ranting about.

But how do we get there? The NYT suggests finding ways to reduce principal on the various debt instruments.  One different idea unrelated to reducing principal I've been kicking around in my head is muscling banks into absurdly low interest rates (below 5%), and perhaps repackaging various consumer debt items into one or two loans.  I think this would save banks a whole lot more money in the long run, and give middle class America a means to an ongoing stimulus to, say, fix that leaky roof that's been put indefinitely on the back burner.

My sense is that The 21st Century's Great Recession is so wide, and deep, and particular in its origin, that we need to think more boldly and outside of the box than perhaps is the case. Keeping insolvent zombie banks "alive" by an IV drip of taxpayer money, for example, is likely not bold enough.

Adding: and by thinking more boldly, I mean re-examining the values we hold about banks, about debt, about the role of government, about the commonweal. I think the nation is already having an internal conversation re-examining the values of health coverage, so this is not an impossible place to go.
Dean Barker :: But How Do We Get There?
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But How Do We Get There? | 2 comments
It's my sense that what's being demonstrated is that (4.00 / 1)
money has no intrinsic value and it's this reality which has led speculators to play with it as with casino chips.

What the Treasury is doing in printing up money and handing it to banks is demonstrating that the value of money is directly related to the credibility of the individuals or institutions using it.  The banks have no credibility because they assigned value to non-existent assets--no land, no labor, no product, no natural resources.

Now some Republican politicians are suggesting that if the economy doesn't go back to the way it was working (mostly by blowing hot air), businessmen are just going to give up.  The reality is that's what they've been doing for some time, declaring bankruptcy, taking their marbles and retreating to Cancun or Barbados or Davos.  Mainly, IMHO, that's because these fellows are basically lazy.  They think that making deals and having lunch and organizing power point presentations are work.  It's not.  It's not work in the private sector and it's not work in the public sector.  Persuading people to do what's not good for them is hard, but it's not work.

Republicans are the party of public relations.  That's because extracting value from people and giving them nothing in return requires a lot of lying and persuasion.  In the rest of nature, organisms that take without returning a benefit are referred to as parasites.  Most natural parasites do not attack their own kind.  Humans do.

How do we defend ourselves?  Regulation and removal.

This is good. (0.00 / 0)
"extracting value from people and giving them nothing in return requires a lot of lying and persuasion"

birch, finch, beech
[ Parent ]
But How Do We Get There? | 2 comments

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