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              Η εταιρική εγκατάλειψη σκάφους αρχείων αποκαλύπτει την πτώχευση της αμερικανικής κεφαλαιοκρατίας
Κυριακή, 14η Σεπτεμβρίου 2008 WSWS | Η ανάληψη αμερικανικής κυβέρνησης της MAC Fannie Mae και Freddie γιγάντων χρηματοδότησης υποθηκών έχει ασχοληθεί ένα χτύπημα καταστροφής στην ιδεολογία της κεφαλαιοκρατίας αγοράς, η οποία έχει χρησιμοποιηθεί για δεκαετίες για να δικαιολογήσει μια ανηλεή επίθεση στην εργατική τάξη και μια απέραντη μεταφορά του πλούτου στην αμερικανική κυβερνώσα ελίτ. Οι ατελείωτες επικλήσεις των αρετών της ιδιωτικής επιχείρησης, του μεμονωμένων επιχειρηματικού πνεύματος και της αυτάρκειας, χρησιμοποίησαν για να δαιμονοποιήσουν το σοσιαλισμό και να υπερασπίσουν ένα σύστημα που εκμεταλλεύεται τη μεγάλη πλειοψηφία προς όφελος μιας οικονομικής ελίτ, έχουν εκτεθεί ως απάτες. Όταν το μεγάλο κεφάλαιο, οι απώλειες κοινωνικοποιούνται. Μόνο τα κέρδη παραμένουν ιδιωτικά. Οι ίδιες δυνάμεις που έχουν χρόνο με το χρόνο ενάντια στη «μεγάλη κυβέρνηση» προκειμένου να δικαιολογηθεί η αφαίρεση όλων των νομικών εμποδίων στη συσσώρευση των εταιρικών κερδών και των ιδιωτικών τυχών, και να πραγματοποιηθεί η καταστροφή των κοινωνικών μέτρων προστασίας για την εργατική τάξη, έχουν κατασκευάσει μια ογκώδη επέκταση της κυβερνητικής δύναμης να προστατευθούν τα συμφέροντα της οικονομικής ελίτ. Η εγκατάλειψη σκάφους έχει όπως καλά εκτίθεται οι πραγματικές σχέσεις της πολιτικών δύναμης και της επιρροής πίσω από την πρόσοψη της αμερικανικής δημοκρατίας. Η μεγαλύτερη κυβερνητική εγκατάλειψη σκάφους των ιδιωτικών επιχειρήσεων στον κόσμο το ιστορία-του οποίου τελευταίο κόστος στους φορολογούμενους είναι πιθανό να φθάσει στις εκατοντάδες δισεκατομμύριο-εγκρίθηκε εκ των προτέρων από το δημοκρατικό συνέδριο και τη δεδομένη στιγμιαία έγκριση από την ηγεσία και των συμβαλλόμενων μερών και οι δύο από τους προεδρικούς υποψηφίους τους. Δεν έχει υπάρξει καμία έρευνα σχετικά με το μέγιστο οικονομικό σκάνδαλο στην παγκόσμια ιστορία. Κανένα συμβαλλόμενο μέρος δεν έχει οποιοδήποτε ενδιαφέρον για να φέρει στο φως και το skullduggery της Γουώλ Στρητ moguls, επειδή είναι και οι δύο συνδεδεμένα χέρι και πόδι στα άτομα για την οικονομική καταστροφή. Αυτό που έχει αποκαλυφθεί είναι η ύπαρξη στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες, πίσω από τον όλο και περισσότερο κουρελιασμένο καπλαμά των δημοκρατικών οργάνων, πλουτοκρατία-πολιτικός κανόνας των πλουσίων. Όταν τα βασικά συμφέροντα της οικονομικής αριστοκρατίας, και τα συμβαλλόμενα μέρη και όλα τα επίσημα όργανα της κοινωνίας σπάζουν απότομα στην προσοχή και κάνουν την προσφορά των κυρίων Γουώλ Στρητ τους. Η εγκατάλειψη σκάφους της υποθήκης δύο ο γίγαντας-της οποίας απολογισμός για 80 τοις εκατό των νέων εγχώριων υποθηκών εμάς-είναι μια επίδειξη της ιστορικής αποτυχίας της αμερικανικής κεφαλαιοκρατίας και το σύστημα κέρδους σε μια παγκόσμια κλίμακα. Κατακρημνίστηκε από τη βαθύτερη οικονομική κρίση από κατάθλιψη της δεκαετίας του '30, το της οποίας επίκεντρο είναι οι Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες. The Bush administration moved to take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under conditions of a rapid erosion of international confidence in the solvency of not only these two companies, but of the United States government itself. Over the past several months, global investors, including central banks and government investment funds, primarily in Asia and Russia, have been dumping their vast holdings in mortgage-backed securities issued by the US government-sponsored firms. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a combined liability of $5.3 trillion in mortgage-backed securities which they own or guarantee. The run on their assets has not only intensified the crisis of the two companies, which are massively leveraged and have suffered billions of dollars in losses as a result of the collapse of the US housing market, it has thrown into question the status of all US government debt, including US Treasury bonds. The US, by far the world’s largest debtor nation, with a current account deficit of nearly $800 billion, is sustained by the inflow of hundreds of billions of dollars from abroad. It currently imports $1 trillion in foreign capital every year, or over $4 billion every working day. But the assumption by the US government of the debts of the two mortgage companies, while averting an immediate financial meltdown, only compounds the crisis of American capitalism. As Martin Wolf, the financial correspondent of the Financial Times, wrote on Tuesday, “As a result, US housing finance has been brought under direct government control and, in the process, the gross liabilities of the US government, properly measured, have increased by $5,400 billion, a sum equal to the entire publicly held debt and 40 percent of gross domestic product.” At a stroke, US sovereign debt has doubled and is now roughly equal to America’s gross domestic product. On July 14, one day after US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called for legislation to give him unilateral and unlimited powers to use public funds to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Wall Street Journal editorialized on the implications of a government bailout of the two companies. It wrote: “But with financial woes mounting, some investors are betting they may profit from weighing the unthinkable question: Could the US government default?” This immense increase in US government indebtedness can only further undermine international confidence in the credit-worthiness of US Treasury bonds, resulting in a further decline in the dollar and a sharp increase in the interest paid by the US to borrow from its international creditors. The claims made by the Bush administration, echoed by the US media, that the bailout of the two mortgage finance companies will consume at most $200 billion in public funds—itself a massive amount that eclipses previous corporate bailouts, including the $160 billion bailout of the savings and loans industry less than two decades ago—are not credible. An indication of the sums envisioned by US policy makers is the fact that the legislation passed last July giving Paulson the power to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac raised the US debt limit by $800 billion, increasing the cushion between the debt limit and current government indebtedness to $1.1 trillion. Some sense of the social priorities of the US ruling elite and its two parties can be gleaned from a comparison between the sums being extended to bail out just these two companies and those allocated by the federal government in 2008 for education ($67.5 billion), unemployment benefits ($37.3 billion), highways and mass transit ($53.1 billion) and housing ($7.4 billion). Moreover, the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is only the prelude to a far broader use of public funds to bolster the balance sheets of major corporations. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his Republican opponent John McCain are both supporting a $50 billion bailout of the US auto companies, which will inevitably entail further cuts in jobs and wages. And the plunge of the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers toward bankruptcy—the firm’s stock fell by 45 percent on Tuesday—poses another rescue operation similar to the $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns last March. It is already being widely broached that the government establish a permanent mechanism for using taxpayer funds to buy billions of dollars in failing assets from major banks and financial companies. The Wall Street Journal wrote on Tuesday, “Creating a government-backed entity to buy up these assets could jump-start the market for home loans and relieve banks and other financial institutions, which are taking big hits to their balance sheets as they fall in value.” The Financial Times sounded the same theme, declaring, “The US government might end up having to support the recapitalization of a much wider range of financial institutions in order to curb the credit crunch.” These statements give the lie to the attempt to portray Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as aberrations, which in their reckless speculation and pursuit of super profits departed from the norm. On the contrary, they typify the financial parasitism and outright criminality that have become pervasive characteristics of the workings of American capitalism and the social physiognomy of the US corporate elite. The operations of the two government-sponsored firms are entirely in line with the unbridled speculation, based on an immense expansion of debt, that has become the hallmark of American capitalism. Their role in the housing and credit boom that has now come crashing down was of a piece with the creation of the vast edifice of paper values, engineered through the so-called “securitization” of debt, which sustained the super profits and immense salaries raked in by Wall Street. In the wake of the bailout, press reports have noted the bloated salaries of the companies’ CEOs. Before they were sacked as part of the government takeover, Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd and Freddie Mac chief Richard Syron took in between them $29.5 million over the several years they headed their respective corporations. And they stand to receive another $29 million as part of their exit packages. But these sums are by no means exceptional. The Financial Times reported last week that compensation for major executives of the seven biggest US banks totaled $95 billion between 2005 and 2007. The collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a paradigm of the US economy as a whole. Over the past three decades, the decay of American capitalism has taken the form of a vast growth of financial parasitism. At its heart, this involves the separation of wealth creation from the creation of real value in the production process. The American ruling elite has largely dismantled the productive base of the US economy, ruthlessly downsizing manufacturing at the cost of millions of jobs and the destruction of working class living standards, in order to reap higher profits from increasingly reckless forms of financial speculation. The indices of the growth of financial speculation in the US economy are staggering: In 1982, the profits of US financial companies accounted for 5 percent of total after-tax corporate profits. In 2007, they made up 41 percent of corporate profits. This process has generated ever greater levels of social inequality, the most telling symptom of the degenerate state of the US profit system. A report by the Congressional Research Service, updated July 31, provides a measure of the ever growing chasm between the ruling elite and the broad mass of the American people. It states that the share of national income accounted for by the top 1 percent of earners (as reported on tax returns) reached 21.8 percent in 2005—a level not seen since 1928. The report further noted that in 2006, corporate profits totaled 12.4 percent of national income, a level not reached in 50 years. The cost of the ever-expanding bailout of American big business will be borne squarely by the working class. Even in the midst of growing unemployment and poverty and a flood of home foreclosures, there is much talk in the media about the American people “living beyond their means.” That the next administration, whether headed by McCain or Obama, will sharply intensify the assault on working class living standards was spelled out by the New York Times, which editorialized Tuesday: “Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have both voiced support for the bailout, which shows good judgment. But what the next president will need to worry about, and both candidates need to talk about, is the depth of the country’s economic problems. It will take discipline and sacrifice to address them.” The only alternative to a rapid lowering of working class living standards and the only rational and progressive solution to the financial crisis is a socialist program of nationalization of the entire financial system under the democratic control of the working people, with provisions to secure the investments of small depositors and share-holders. The wealth and resources of the country must be developed and allocated to meet the social needs of the population, not the money-mad strivings of financial speculators. This policy can be carried out only through the independent political mobilization of the working class in opposition to the two-party system and the financial aristocracy which it serves. The Socialist Equality Party is dedicated to the building of such a mass socialist movement of the working class. Copyright 1998-2008 - World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved Have Your Say: Record Corporate Bailout Reveals the Bankruptcy of American Capitalism Please read our posting guidelines before posting. Alternatively you can discuss this report here. Related News
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