SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Soak the Poor The Congress of the United States, always on top of things, is now working itself into a lather over the S&L crisis. Great! We had an S&L crisis here in...
...You notice these S&L bailout packages are following a pattern—odd-years after the November elections...
...The Campaign for Financial Democracy has just such a plan, but the only politician they could get to carry it was young Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts, who is not the brightest porch light on the block...
...M. Danny was not only the architect of deregulation back in 1981, he was also the bright boy who kept the lid...
...The worse news is that they're not through shafting us yet...
...He got no votes...
...Folks, this scandal was created and brought to us by our fine feathered friends in D.C...
...Breeden and Bush worked together in 1985 on Ronald Reagan's Task Force on Financial Regulation, which naturally concluded there was too much of it...
...There is an alternative: We could make the people responsible for the mess pay for it...
...Texas's only contribution to the deal was the same one we always make— we're just like everybody else, except more so...
...Their argument is that we have to create huge megabanks to compete with the Japanese, as in, gee, it's a tough, competitive world out there and we can't afford to have a nice, little regulated banking system any more because we have to get out and compete on the international scene...
...They want to let the banks go into insurance and stock brokerage and let industrial and retail corporations go into banking...
...I get back two weeks later, and it's $750 billion...
...We now have a budget crisis, and I love the way it grows...
...Poot...
...When we first starting writing about this in Texas, my paper scandalized everyone by predicting it would ultimately cost $7 billion...
...So now we're down here picking through the briquettes, and the boys in D.C...
...Twenty Federal suits marched into the newsroom the next day to demand that our guys be fired for saying such a thing...
...Contrary to popular mythology, Texas is not full of rich people...
...That nifty move was Made In Our Nation's Capital...
...But no one here set it up so they could legally loot the S&Ls...
...The Bush bailout plan is to give oceans of our money to the flock of buzzards now circling the S&L corpses—right out of our pockets and into the hands of wealthy financiers...
...And if that doesn't make you mad, we ought to put your brain in a bumblebee and watch it fly backwards...
...In D.C, their idea of a solution is to put the dodo-heads who made the mess in charge of cleaning it up...
...Tucked inside next year's bailout you can expect a splendid assortment of pernicious proposals for more deregulation—junking the Glass-Steagall Act, implementing deposit insurance "reform" along with regulatory "streamlining...
...explain why making loans to his business partners who were in turn feeding him money was not a conflict of interest at all...
...These same bright boys are now about to tell us that further deregulation of our financial structures will solve all problems...
...When I left on vacation, it had just gotten up to $500 billion...
...We had an S&L crisis here in Texas back in '83 and '84, and it was a hell of a blaze...
...The Crime of '89 was bad enough, but now they're planning to do it again...
...Banking-industry lobbyists are gearing up to use this meg-abill as a pocket-liner of epic proportions...
...It may be true that greed and stupidity got us into this mess, but greed and stupidity ain't gonna get us out of it...
...We don't have an S&L crisis: It's over...
...And now we're all being dunned to bail out a bunch of broke S&Ls where none of us could ever get a loan anyway...
...I also love the folks in Congress standing around blaming Texas for the whole thing...
...are looking up saying, "I think I see smoke...
...It is full of poor people...
...This kid has the ethical sensitivity of a walnut...
...on the size of the problem until after George Bush had safely been elected...
...Speaking of Brother Bush, his shrub Neil made a stunning appearance before the House Banking Committee to Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
...Keep an eye on George Bush's man Richard Breeden, now head of the Securities and Exchange Commission...
...I especially liked it last year when they stuck in M. Danny Wall, protege of Senator Jake Garn, as director of the Office of Thrift Supervision...
...Recall the major economic premise of the Reagan Administration—that the rich weren't working because they didn't have enough money and the poor weren't working because they had too much...
...In keeping with the eternal exaggeration of Texian culture, our crooks were, naturally, bigger and badder than everybody else's crooks...
...We are watching the most massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in our nation's history—and it's being conducted by Federal fiat...
...The last time these folks deregulated financial institutions, it cost us $750 billion and rising...
Vol. 54 • September 1991 • No. 9
