The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today discussing the dangers posed by the multi-trillion dollar debt the US government has hidden from the official public balance sheet.
The bigger issue is that all of Fan and Fred’s liabilities, whether kept inside the companies or hidden in a dark corner of the Treasury, are now Uncle Sam’s responsibility. Moving their bad assets into a new Baddie Mae would only preserve the fiction that there is a difference between the government’s obligations and those of Fan and Fred. Not even Barney Frank could believe that any more.
The Journal goes out of the way to highlight the similarities between government bookkeeping and Enron bookkeeping.
The danger is that the federal government will itself become the next Enron, with its biggest liabilities hidden from view, officially denied or tucked away in special purpose vehicles like Fannie Mae. Until the next crisis hits.
We wonder how many SEIU and ACORN members were rightly outraged by the Enron fraud, but can’t find an ounce of anger for the government doing the EXACT same thing, only on a scale so grand it makes Enron look like an overdraft fee for a bounced check?
The definition of hypocrisy might be found in there somewhere.
“That dirty, no-good rotten, Baddie Mae”
LOL, Al!
Our liberal media refused to tell us after the Enron scandal that it was Kenneth Lay who loaned his private jet for George Bush to campaign for president for the 2000 election.
Why doen’t our so-called “watchdog” press connect the dots? Could it be because they are run by corporatism as well? Could it be that they have a major part in a long-range plan to get working people to vote against their own economic self-interests?