Lucid Culture

Here’s who’s taking money out of your pocket in order to cover their losses in the Bear Stearns fiasco, whose holdings are now guaranteed by the United States treasury:

Texas multimillionaire investor James Barrow, of Barrow, Hanley, Mewhinney & Straus Inc., owns almost ten percent of the company. Billionaire British golf enthusiast Joseph Lewis, a native of the Bahamas, owns just a bit less.

Florida multimilllionaire investor Bruce Sherman, who runs Legg Mason subsidiary Private Capital Management Inc. owns about five percent, as does another multimillionaire, former Bear Stearns chairman James Cayne (who resigned two months ago, just before the firm imploded). These are the people your tax dollars are going to bail out. Not ordinary Americans whose pensions, property and lives’ savings may be at stake, but a secret society of super-rich robber barons who, even if their Bear Stearns holdings were reduced to zero, would still have the means to live comfortably for the rest of their lives without lifting a finger.

Here’s a proposal, not a modest one, but in cases like these we need to make immodest demands in order to walk away with even meager results: if the government must guarantee anything (which is an eminently debatable issue), why not limit guarantees to small holders and let the big gamblers live with their losses? Let’s say a Federal or state employees’ pension fund held a small piece of what’s left of Bear Stearns. Why not save the retirees from destitution, instead of making a vast, multibillion dollar money grab, transferring wealth out of the pockets of middleclass American taxpayers and into the secret accounts of ultra-rich Wall Street gamblers? Why should the American middle class continue to subsidize the gambling addiction of a cabal of billionaires, many of whom aren’t even American citizens?