Fannie and Freddie Get a Helping Hand

While individual citizens get shitted on by the government.  The New York Times reports:

Alarmed by the sharply eroding confidence in the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, the Bush administration on Sunday asked Congress to approve a sweeping rescue package that would give officials the power to inject billions of federal dollars into the beleaguered companies through investments and loans.

…

While senior Democratic and Republican officials in successive administrations have for many years repeatedly denied that the trillions of dollars of debt the companies issued is guaranteed, the package, if adopted, would bring the Treasury closer than ever to exposing taxpayers to potentially huge new liabilities. The two companies could face significant new losses this year as the wave of housing foreclosures continues.

From Clive Crook’s blog:

Covering the agencies’ losses on their loans and guarantees is going to require an actual outlay, which will fall on taxpayers. You could plausibly call the rest – namely, bringing these “government-sponsored enterprises” explicitly inside the public sector – just a bookkeeping entry. But what an entry! It would surely shake financial markets, raise the government’s cost of funding and put heavy downward pressure on the dollar. Meanwhile, the turmoil impedes or paralyses the GSEs in their crucial life-support role for the housing market.

So we can afford “socialism” for mutli-billion dollar corporations but not the masses?

So we’ve got corporations divesting capital from America and interjecting it into developing countries, further exploited Third World peoples and causing Americans to loose good paying jobs, we’ve got gas ready to hit $6 a gallon within the next half year, and there was a near food riot in Milwaukee plus a 20% increase in demand for food at food banks.

The only reason why most of the American petty-bourgeoisie and proletariat are able to afford certain amenities is through exploiting the labor-power of Third World workers.  We’re all going to hell in a gift-wrapped hand basked made by a young Cambodian child for 5 cents (via Nike).