Welcome to the United $oviet Union of America

I am trying to imagine my friend Mitchell walking into to the Secretary of the Treasury’s plush offices In Washington and asking for just a simple $1 billion loan to save his floundering pizza delivery business which employs more than one million pizza delivery guys and gals worldwide.

Mitchell is honest: “Look, we have delivered some bad pizzas, and we’ve invested in schemes that were not only stupid, but perhaps bordering on the illegal. We even delivered cold pizzas in Russia – but that was done from pressure by the ‘Agency’. Moreover, we charged what might be considered criminal rates for our services. But you know, the elite pizza delivery business is largely unregulated and we were not sure what we could or could not do.”

The Secretary remarks, “Well, it’s a bit ridiculous for me to entertain loaning you a billion dollars for a business that night declare bankruptcy tomorrow.”

Mitchell replies, “Might? Oh no, we surely will go belly up and all our ‘now potential’ employees – potential since they are already out of work today – will surely lose their jobs. Imagine the impact on the nation, on the world – no pizza deliveries at all, the children of pizza delivery guys poorly dressed for school and very hungry, maybe eating flies. I built this business from nothing. I brought all the pizza delivery guys in the world under our single multinational umbrella, and I made sure they got not only great salaries, but tips as well. Our pizza delivery business is second to none on the earth!”

...

The very banks who profited from lending money to homeowners in criminal ways are now taking those homes away because the world has collapsed on these lenders – they’ve been caught with their filthy hands in the cookie jar. ... They invented unregulated gambling devices with fancy names like CDO, CDA and the like. They sold those bad loans to people all over the world. They got caught. And to avoid having a scimitar cut his throat – the local Wall Street criminal tycoon took back some of the bad debt rather than being murdered in his Central Park penthouse along with his wife and kids.

Don’t let them fool you. Everyone knew what was going to happen – and long ago. The idea was – get as much money as possible and then run for it.