As it is called by E.J.Dionne in what is likely the last word on corporate America’s newly found use for government and Wall Street’s currently hypocritical stance towards government and its utility:
Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.
The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost “confidence” in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another’s portfolios.
Of course, plenty of conservatives will make the case that to let the Market be damaged, damages all of us. They may be right, but they’ll be tone deaf to the fact that they are hijacking the position of folks who want to preserve some portion of the social safety net. They’ll keep lobbying not just for bailouts, but for their endless subsidies which conservatives will continue to support, because the American conservative vision of free markets always needs a government handout. And while conservatives continue to argue for the transfer of taxpayer funds to corporations that simply don’t need it, they’ll continue to try to bamboozle the rest of us with the idea that somehow we are all getting paid way too much, have overly costly benefits, will cost too much at retirement (and are, therefore, the real cause for the failure of these businesses).
While I understand what Bernanke was trying to do with this bailout, I don’t think that he went far enough. If the Fed is to provide a safety net to these corporations, they should get something in return — including the removal of the management team that got the firm to needing the bailout AND a restructuring of labor and other obligations that minimizes the overall risk to taxpayers taking on this new business risk.