To Nationalize?
Behond, the funniest-but-truest political cartoon I’ve seen all week:
Like most Americans, I find myself thinking about the bailout a great deal these days. We are pumping money into the very companies that are responsible for this mess just to keep the whole system afloat long enough to fix it. It seems to be a delicate dance between rewarding the crooks and keeping the working man from losing his retirement.
In 1933, one of the most helpful and immediate things that FDR did after becoming President was to nationalize the banks. He then either re-opened them as re-privatized banks when they were solvent or shut them down gracefully if they were beyond hope. Regarding today’s complicated mix of banks, i-banks, and sophisticated-financial-instrument-clearinghouses (i.e. crooks), I wonder if a similar move is (1) already slowly happening, (2) an option to exercise later, or (3) not gonna happen.
I suspect that outright, wholesale nationalization of banks will probably not happen. So many things are different now — a globalized economy, an order of magnitude more banks, an opportunity to take action years ahead of when FDR could act (think 1929->1933 versus 2008->2009), and the fact that many of the safety net programs from the New Deal are still with us.
However, here’s a bit of depressing commentary about our national dialogue on this issue:
That’s right: we see a 20 point swing in opinion because people do not know what the word “nationalize” means, but BOY IS IT SURE SCARY.
(Limbaugh and the Dittoheads shoulder most of the blame for phenomena like that, I say. His overused tactic of slogan-rinse-repeat has been cratering our national political discourse for nearly two decades.)
Whatever next step is taken to stabilize our economy, I hope it works.
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