Four years ago, the few people I knew who still supported George W. Bush promptly abandoned him when he announced the Wall St. Bailout. Sure there was some logic to the case that said, if we don't bailout Wall St., main street will suffer, but whether you were Republican or Democrat, the bailouts seemed immoral and wrong. "Too big to fail" companies held a gun to the head of the US economy and fleeced us. The US jobs market and economy has still not recovered, yet the big companies like Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Bear Stearns, and AIG, who dealt in the toxic mortgage backed securities, received a bailout from their pals in Washington. Obama was elected to office in the midst of the outrage, supposedly as a champion of Main St, not of Wall st, yet now that we have three years of his record to look at, what do we see? Those "too big to fail" companies on Wall St. and the revolving door between the White House and Wall St. are bigger as ever. What could he have done differently? The answer is as simple as it is obvious. Break up every company that would have failed without an extorted government bailout Its that simple. Without the bailout our economy would have supposedly collapsed and those companies would no longer exist. Some of those companies, like Bank of America, are an order of magnitude larger in size, meaning that if they were too big to fail in 2008, they are WAY too big to fail today. Breaking them up would not only help prevent a repeat of 2008, it would do wonders to spur on the US economy. Think about it. Bank of America, like AT&T, could accurately be described as one of the most lethargic companies, with the worst customer service on the planet. They don't care because they don't have to care. Their existence is tied at the hip to the existence of the US government, both by threats to the economy, and by the revolving door of executives on hire to the White House. I watch the losers of Occupy Wall St asking for higher taxes on these, and every other business, so they can get their chunk of the free gubment money. After all, Obama just used it's incestuous relationship with BofA to get them to forgive ~$100k in debt to almost 200,000 homeowners. In a population of 300 million people, I sure would like to have been in the less than 1% that got a $100k payday after leveraging every dime out of my house in rising market,. Apparently, the 99% are mostly stupid. We stupid folk who rent, or pay in cash and diversify, or don't over leverage ourselves, we are the idiots. We morons who have spent four years belt tightening under uncertain economic conditions, unstable employment, and lower pay if we were lucky enough to retain a job, we did it all wrong. Had we been smart and worked for a private or public sector union (<6% of all Americans), we could have benefited from nearly a trillion dollars in taxpayer money, exacted from the other 94% in taxes and debt, and given to the 6%. Lesson learned. The new american dream has nothing to do with work hard, innovating, and succeeding. The new american dream is to work for someone with connections, or to lobby your way to success through government transfer of wealth. If you are connected enough(or lobby well enough), you can connect your umbilical cord directly to the feeding trough of taxpayer dollars and money borrowed from china. Perhaps Earlpearl, or someone else in touch with Occupy Wall St thinking can explain to me why, with all the supposed outrage directed at the 1%, it is only people on the right is calling for the breakup of companies like Goldman Sachs, AIG, and Bank Of America. The folks on the left seem entirely content so long as they get their cut. Do you have any idea how embarassing it is for a fiscal conservative to be calling for the block of mergers like AT&T/Tmobile, and the break up of these companies? Hell, some of the top 1% of the people inside these top 1% companies realize the obvious truth of what needs to be done here.
Well ATT and Tmobile merge did get blocked so no worries about that. In fact the funny part about the tmobile/att merger is that tmobile came out WAY a head on that deal. Sounds like you have read up on it but for those who haven't, the deal was if the FTC didn't approve the deal; Tmobile would get something like 2 Billion (might have been 3 not sure on the exact number but it was billions) and they would get an additional spectrum. Great news! Deal didn't go thru. Tmobile got the cash and the spectrum. And guess where thats going.... LTE tmobile network! Its confirmed all over the net. By 2013 tmobile will be on an LTE network! Which is great since tmobile customers won't see a price hike for the upgrades and they will get more coverage in areas they never had service before. Might even bring tmobile up in the ranks. I digress. Its a good rant you wrote. People may not realize this but our government has been in the bailout business since the 30's and they don't plan on stopping anytime soon. I think with more and more people speaking out there is a chance of a change. But really only in the private sector. The real change that needs to happen is not the private sector. Its all government. They need to reshape the way we run, how taxes are collect, and protection among other things. I could go on for days.
While I am a tMo customer, I'm not overly thrilled that tMo or Sprint made out on the deal, or one could argue that they used FTC, FCC, and Justice Department to accomplish business objectives. I think the real people who benefited from the deal were the US telecom consumers. AT&T is much bigger now than Ma Bell was in 1984 when it was broken up. What, we roll the clock forward 30 years and suddenly dysfunctional monopolistic companies are good for us? For the record, once the merger failed, both AT&T and Tmobile offered new, discounted plans to their subscribers. No merger = more competition= more value to the consumers. The obvious proof was in the pudding. That is spot on. Its a cause Occupy Wall St, the Tea Party, or anyone who opposes corruption should be able to get behind. Check this out. This from a magazine started because the owner thought Bush stole the 2000 election. Going a step further, citizen.org, a left wing political action organization started by Ralph Nader has a petition out to the Federal Reserve to initiate a managed breakup of Bank Of America. [video=youtube;cWV_jwYGzPA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cWV_jwYGzPA[/video] This is not some ridiculous call to corporations by US Uncut or the Occupy movement which asks that corporations employ more people, pay them more, or that they not spend money on political advertisements for fear of boycott. This action is specific, realistically achievable, and is indisputably beneficial to the American public, businesses, and the economy on the whole. It is the type of thing that, despite the fact it's initiator is a bit of a left wing lunatic, should have bipartisan support. No, its not going to fix the problems at Goldman, or any of the other too big to fail institutions, but change happens in baby steps. After enough small changes, perhaps our government will get the message that too big to fail is too big to exist, even if the organization is populated with your political supporters. Can't believe I'm putting a link to a Ralph Nader site in my siggy link.
Who does he have on his side ? The billionaire Warren Buffet ?. lol.. A person who is now worth over $50 billion claiming he "should be taxed more".. . . Does it make any logical sense to say he "should be taxed more now" ??? Um, no. The OWS movement is a joke.