With Fannie and Freddie bailout, the U.S. officially becomes Socialist this weekend [View All]

And while there are pros and cons, I think on balance this is a good thing.

This is not a bail out. The stockholders will for the most part be whiped out -- they already have been in the amount of 80% of their shares' value.

While I agree that the Bush administration has engineered a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and poor to the rich, I don't see this transaction along those lines.

This is a nationalization pure and simple. The central government will assume control of the "commanding heights" of the financial sector.

If the housing market and economy eventually recover -- and unlike the "the worse it gets the better for us crowd" I hope these markets do recover -- the federal government may actually profit handsomely.

With the privatization of these previously government owned, New Deal institutions having officially failed, the federal government is stepping in again to assume the ownership that was always implicit in Freddie's and Fannie's unrealistic credit ratings.

Now, why would a bunch of Bush appointed Wall Streeters enact Socialism? Were they Manchurian candidate secret Marxists from college days who have finally implemented their plan to turn the U.S. into post war Labor Party Britain?

No, they are implementing Socialism for the reasons many Socialists have long predicted: because raw capitalism doesn't work. They are implementing Socialism purely as a Darwinian adaptation to reality.

Here's to you Maggie Thatcher, a response to your stupid slogan that about the rawist form of capitalism, namely that "there is no alternative":

Socialism: There is no alternative.

On edit: For a primer on the New Deal origins of Fannie and Freddie, see this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1561876