Too Big Not to Fail

Many Americans are livid with the recent "Bailout", or TARP program enacted at the end of 2008 that sent billions of taxpayer dollars for Wall Street interests and added massive amounts to our national deficit.

If you follow the money (CNN), you will see that most of the funding given to the companies that were "too big to fail" was used for things other than what it were intended for. These companies used taxpayer dollars to invest in things that only diversified themselves instead of investing in us, as was intended. They used TARP funds to hand out massive bonuses to the very people that did the most to CAUSE the financial meltdown in the first place. They also ignored why they were so successful in the first place...because of every single American who aided them from the time they started as a small company and grew into the monsters they have become.

Now, many of them are attempting to speed up their repayment of the funds loaned to them in an attempt to bypass the "conditions" they are subjected to by being TARP recipients. They have spent billions of dollars on lobbyists in order to maintain the status quo and to prevent regulation.

This country needs to remember Phil Gramm, he was part of the "Contract For America" issued to us by the Republican majority several years ago. Gramm was the architect of the deregulation of our banking industry while Clinton was President. While John McCain's co chair, Gramm was being paid to push the agenda of a large bank onto our mortgage crisis. Our economy was in "great shape", according to Gramm...of course it was, he and his coworkers I the banking industry were making a killing at our expense.

What ARE we doing?

In 1984, AT&T was forced into divestiture by the Justice Department. The company wanted to expand into new territory (computers) and it was simply too big.

Divestiture definition.

There are many reasons for divestiture for companies like AIG, big banks like Bank of America and others.

1. One motive is a firm may divest (sell) businesses that are not part of its core operations so that it can focus on what it does best.

2. A second motive for divestitures is to obtain funds

3. A third motive for divesting is that a firm's "break-up" value is sometimes believed to be greater than the value of the firm as a whole.

4. A fourth motive to divest a part of a firm may be to create stability.

5. A fifth motive for firms to divest a part of the company is that a division is underperforming or even failing.

Bell system divestiture

Companies like AIG and others need to be divested in order to spare the American people from having to bail them out again. Big banks should be forced to divest, separating the commercial banking section from the investment banking and so on. There is absolutely no reason for any U.S. company to be "too big" to fail.

A Google search for executive pay disparity yields 6,750,000 results. Why is there such a wide spanse between what an average worker gets paid for doing the hard work and the executives that shuffle papers and have company cars?

Roosevelt's "New Deal" afforded aid for many Americans but many Americans today are not aware that the "New Deal" had to be pushed through the Congress and Senate on the backs of the poor and starving citizens of this country. Government did not want to do it for us, we had to force them to. The supposed "conservatives" have a serious problem with the word "socialism" but most of them would revolt if they could not have their Social Security or Medicare. WE fought for those things and the reason we did is they same scenario that we see today, yet instead of fighting for a more equitable piece of the American pie, the oxymoronic conservative "values" are deemed more important than taking care of our citizens. Democrats are not much better, if at all. Talk is cheap, cowering is even worse. Neither Republican nor Democrat is interested in doing what is necessary or making the sacrifices needed to restore our country to what it should be.

Reagan's legacy is "trickle down economics". I am still waiting for someone to explain how that is good for America. What "trickle down economics" actually is could be otherwise classified as a pyramid scheme, where the people at the top of the pyramid make loads of money from all those below them on the pyramid. For all intensive purposes, pyramid schemes have been deemed to be illegal by American law. Nixon once claimed that if the President did it, it wasn't illegal...I guess Reagan claimed his niche in that corner as well. If you were to be totally honest, Reagan was the first President in the history of the U.S.A. that blew the National Deficit through the roof and NEVER did anything to reduce it at all. Some of his deficit spending worked at first but then he just kept spending throughout his presidency. WHY?? He is a hero to Republicans yet he did a good deal of damage to our country. That does not speak very well of what the GOP considers "values".

George W. Bush seems to hold second place for uncontrolled spending yet he is also vaulted to celebrity status by most Republicans I've spoken to. I do not understand why those in the GOP are now fighting so hard against Obama's deficit spending in an effort to get us out of the mess Bush left us in, especially when they had a big hand in helping to put us in this situation. Bush and his GOP political cohorts wanted to privatize Social Security. Can anyone imagine what that fiasco could have cost us if they would have succeeded? Was that supposed to be the beginning of the end for any socialization of America?

I got very angry when the Republican, Tom Delay declared to the press "I AM the Federal Government!". I beg to differ Delay...you were supposed to be a representative for the people of Texas...and you were greedy, power hungry and enept at doing the job you were elected to do. Your inflated delusions of granduer are what saw you put out of office.

The mess this country is in took us years to get here and it will take Obama more than a few months to get us started on a way out. If the GOP has anything to do with it (by observation), Obama's every effort will be met with a brick wall of stupidity by putting our country behind a political power struggle.

We need limited socialization in this country to survive. The U.S. Constitution does not have an amendment that limit's the humanization of our citizens due to greed. There is not exclusion to equality for being poor and there is not a provision anywhere that limits us to being a corporate culture. The American government does not care for Hugo Chavez because he likes his socialistic policies. If we mixed a bit of socialistic policy into what we have, most of the country would be better off and the only ones that would complain are the people who have made a killing living off of the hard work and sweat of the middle and lower class.

The GOP seems to want to keep the class disparities alive and well, governing our country from the top of the hill without ever looking down to see who they are stomping over. I am tired of seeing Corporate America and the GOP ruin my country. We all should be tired of it. This is not what our soldiers fight to preserve but it is all that is left. The only real freedom in America is the freedom to fleece and destroy it in the name of greed.

The wealthiest of America continue to gain while the poorest of us suffer the most. Corporate America has cut jobs while expecting workers to do more for less pay. Bonuses for the "elite" could feed, clothe and house hundreds of Americans but are given to a relative few that have no idea what is means to be hungry or cold in the winter and we allow our tax dollars to pay for their greed.

If our government truly wanted to take care of the United States of America, they would reduce the disparity in pay between workers and executives, they would stop the power struggle and work together on health care reform, they would stop the legalized discrimination of our gay citizens (who pay taxes like the rest of us), close the loopholes that allow the wealthy to shift America's tax burden to the lower income and stop Corporate America from continuing the financial slave nation that our government has allowed us to become.

The absolute fact of the U.S. financial situation is that if we allow the corporate mentality to remain, the country that we profess to love and support will continue to have it's people leeched off of indefinitely.