Nationalize the Banks Right Now!

We need to nationalize all American banks RIGHT NOW!  We’re already down the rabbit hole and sinking fast and there’s no way out of the haze and mass hysteria created by the previous administration that Barack Obama must now set right now. 

Citigroup, already a morass of multiple failures, now expects the US government to prop it up with a 40% stake — which will likely rise to 80% if the rule of “doubling what you read in print” is pressed forward into the hard reality imprisoning us all:

Citigroup Inc. is in talks with federal officials that could result in the U.S. government substantially expanding its ownership of the struggling bank, according to people familiar with the situation. While the discussions could fall apart, the government could wind up holding as much as 40% of Citigroup’s common stock. Bank executives hope the stake will be closer to 25%, these people said.

Just buy the bank and put it out of its misery! Do the same thing for Chase and Wells Fargo and all the other banks:  Federalize all of them!

I’d much prefer to bank with my national government than my local private wacko who has no idea how to make money without losing taxpayer shirts in the process.

I was immediately appalled during the recent banking hearings when Representative Maxine Waters asked all those bankers perched before her like hungry vultures just how many of them had RAISED the credit card rates on their consumers AFTER taking the first round of bailout money.

Each bank representative reluctantly raised a hand.

Shocking!

Waters then accused the CEOs of raising interest rates on credit cardholders, and suggested that this is inconsistent with their simultaneous acceptance of billions in bailout money from American taxpayers. Bank of America executive Ken Lewis responded that his bank raised interest rates on only 9 percent of its customers in 2008.

I was filled with rage watching those millionaires gloat over their plan to puncture their consumers by plunging us all further into debt with higher interest rates — and, yet, I was content because Janna and I have been so conservative and careful with our minimal credit card use.

Then, of course, over the weekend Janna and I both received notices from our credit card company — we each hold a single credit card — that our bank was raising our interest rates across the board by 5%!

We do not play late. We have a low balance. We are excellent customers and careful consumers — and yet out credit card bank is punishing us with a higher interest rate?

Where is the justice in that scheme?

The banks take our bailout tax money because they are financial failures and then, to make it worse for everyone, they raise interest rates on their best customers to further help shovel them out of a horrible hole they alone created?

Nationalize the banks right now!

Even the conservative Wall Street Journal is with me on that argument:

Last Sunday on ABC, George Stephanopoulos asked Lindsey Graham, the conservative Republican senator, what he thought about all this talk of bank nationalization. Mr. Graham said that he wouldn’t take the idea off the table. And on Wednesday, Alan Greenspan told the Financial Times that “it may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring.”

Mr. Roubini tells me that bank nationalization “is something the partisans would have regarded as anathema a few weeks ago. But when I and others put it in the context of the Swedish approach [of the 1990s] — i.e. you take banks over, you clean them up, and you sell them in rapid order to the private sector — it’s clear that it’s temporary. No one’s in favor of a permanent government takeover of the financial system.”

The current banking system is broken and dangerous — and get ready for all your interest rates to skyrocket if they haven’t already — and mark that rise up as yet another chunk of coal from Republicans who, over the last eight years, were intent on deregulating the financial system for their personal and political benefit.

After the Great Depression, banking regulations were set in place by law to take care of the regular, ordinary, citizen and, ever since, rich Republicans have been working to undo those careful safety nets.

Conservatives can’t stand that there are rules-without loopholes to protect the good of the fabric of society and, so, when they’re in power, they set out to destroy every protection we have in the system. They only care about their money and not the rest of us. They live on trust funds and inheritances and foreign bank accounts while the rest of us suffer wounds inflicted for their private benefit.

You see this viciousness of self-interest in the refusal of some Republican governors to take the stimulus money because they do not want to be beholden to Washington. If they ran their states better, they wouldn’t need federal bailout money. I hope those conservative Republican governors lose their re-election bids for putting their private political gains over the public desperation of their states.

As California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “I’ll take the money the other states don’t want.” Now that’s a smart guy. Arnold knows how to read the fury of the land and he is quick to understand his state’s needs are more important that his personal beliefs as a solitary man sitting in a temporary governmental seat.

Do the right thing for the citizens of your states!

TAKE THE MONEY!

Nationalize the banks!

Give us a new day from our dimmer tomorrows!