GETTING IT FREE AT THE "FREE MARKET"

The ‘free market’ seems to be taking on new meaning. The sub-prime suckers who took the mortgages they would never be able to afford are the patsys who enabled a swarm of inexorably unscrupulous mortgage brokers to make a profit ultimately at taxpayers expense. These brokers, for all practical purposes, did get it free. The mortgage loan profits were in fact free once they unloaded the packaged mortgages as securities on the banks. Then the mortgage brokers wouldn’t have to cover any losses when the interest on the bad mortgages went up, consequently became unaffordable and stopped being paid. The brokers no longer owned the mortgages. The banks did. What unscrupulous business sociopath wouldn’t sell worthless mortgages to effectively clueless and hapless members of the lower middle and middle class, knowing they would never have to suffer the losses. The banks would suffer the loss. And they did.

Now the banks who greedily and voraciously ate up the securitized mortgages got AIG to insure their investments. AIG, being the apparently crack institution it is, just knew such investments were beyond reproach. So they sold the coverage to the banks and pocketed the premiums as profit, dividends, bonuses and other loans. When the bottom fell out of the mortgage market and the banks ran to the insurance giant to collect, no one was home, so to speak. Apparently there is no law requiring the insurer to have the capital available to cover such losses.

So it seems various players on the market got theirs free at the free market, free for everyone but the taxpayers. The naïve and/or ignorant buyers got to live in their defaulted homes for free at least for a while until the Sheriff showed up; the brokers, who knew they couldn’t lose, (and therefore didn’t bother qualifying homebuyers) got theirs “free” once they dumped the mortgages on the banks; the megabanks who now know they are too big to lose are continuing to get theirs free (there’s just fewer of them, though they are even bigger); and the insurance giant, felled by carelessness and/or ignorance, or possibly ‘business as usual,’ also got theirs free on the “free market,” the same insurance giant who now has an insurer of its own called the American government, courtesy of the American taxpayer.

So it seems a lot of people are “getting it free” at the “free market.” They are getting it “free” on the backs of the “mortgaged” future of the children of the poor and middle class. The once charming and promising American Camelot is unraveling, if not intentionally being dismantled, on the ruins of the mythic “free market.” Apparently there are few crumbs left to fall off the table of the rich and superrich. Only the debt trickles down and settles on the disempowered and disenfranchised backs of the Client Class who can no longer pay the bill. The new international capitalist political class (call it the New Class) has sucked the blood and marrow out of the carcass and bones of the cadaver.

Alan Greenspan has since rode off into the sunset where rich capitalists go, returning to the scene of the ‘free market’ crime recently only to declare mea culpa, mea culpa. Ayn Rand giggles in her grave. Bill Clinton denies he had anything to do with unleashing the pitbulls of profit. And the neo-Reaganites inexplicably keep the faith, relying upon the short memory and myopia of the infinitely manipulable American electorate.

The government, capital, media and, of course, power become more and more centralized. The polity becomes more bureaucratized as the technocrats rule over all. The American people become essentially more ignorant of the fact and indifferent to the reality of the death throes of a participatory peoples’ democracy, a viable public sphere and a productive economy that makes self-determination possible.

Long live the once and great American dream.