alt.politics.republicans

Saturday, September 15, 2007
Open Letters to George W. Bush
Letters to the president from his ardent admirer Belacqua Jones

Dear George,

Many different talents are needed to become obscenely rich. The man
on the make needs the hubris of the psychopath, a childish belief in
eternal growth, and a paranoid fear of the public. But the most
important quality is the simpleton's ignorance of the past. The first
thing a corporatist does when he screws up is to forget about it and
look for an opportunity to do the same damn thing over again in the
belief that, "it's different this time." It never is, and that's what
makes life such a gas.

One of the leading causes of the Great Depression was too many banks
playing the stock market with their depositors' money. When the
Democrats came to power in the wake of the economic meltdown, they
surveyed the rubble and found a frightened banker cringing under his
desk. This resulted in the Glass-Stegall Act, which prohibited banks
from dabbling in the stock market.

Wall Street was contrite given the scope of the disaster it had
caused. But, thank God for the simpleton's defective memory. Before
long, the street was pissing and moaning over the burden Glass-Stegall
had laid across their shoulders. With Ronnie's coronation, the
pissing and moaning swelled to a full-throated lamination. The
corporatist inalienable right to exploit was drowning in a sea of
arbitrary regulations.

They claimed, "it's different this time" because three outside checks
on corporatist corruption had emerged from the Great Depression.
These were the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), more
sophisticated investors, and the emergency of rating agencies.

They overlooked the fact that the SEC had demonstrated the political
law that over time a regulatory agency crawls into bed with the object
of its regulation.

The definition of a fool is an investor who thinks he's
sophisticated.

Finally, the rating agencies were corruptible. When an investment
house receives a Collateralized Mortgage Obligation (CMO), or any of
the other multiple forms of debt instruments, the first thing it does
is to slice and dice it into tranches, usually consisting of one big
tranche and a lot of baby tranches. Wall Street has convinced the
rating agencies to give the big tranche an AAA rating and the little
tranches junk bond ratings, even though all the tranches are of junk
bond quality.

Incompetence has never stood in the way of greed. So, financial
lobbyists doled out $300 million in bribes repositioned as campaign
contributions, along with other perks. Their efforts paid off with
the passage of Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which
allowed the merger of banks, securities firms, and insurance companies.
[1]

America owes her greatness to the childlike simplicity of her
financial geniuses who are hell-bent on giving the American people
another Great Depression because Wall Street is convinced that "it
really is different this time." And indeed it is: corruption is now
respectable.

Your admirer,

Belacqua Jones
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