Republicans change their mind: Nationalization of Fannie and Freddie a good idea

Republicans are Democrats now.  But haven't they always been?

Government service in the US is not what some people think. It is to serve the public, but which public is the issue.  Political positions in a capitalist state machine offer the road to riches for those capitalists that run for office to enrich themselves and their class at the expense of workers, the poor, and the middle class. This is especially the case in a wealthy and powerful global economy like the US; there is much plunder to be had through government service.

It is no accident that people like Casper Weinberger and George Schultz and others like them went from giant industrial firms in to government. These two crooks worked for the giant engineering firm Bechtel that gets the contracts to rebuild the infrastructure of countries the US war machine has destroyed in its efforts to plunder the world’s resources. Cheney and Halliburton is another example.

Capitalists enter government service and one of the plum jobs is to be on, or chair, the committees that appropriate the wealth workers in the US and around the world create.

Look at the article on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the Wall Street Journal today. Freddie and Fannie are the mortgage giants that were nationalized by the government. (the bourgeois use the term “government conservatorship” as they don’t want workers to get any bad ideas). Republicans before the recent elections, hammered away at these “communistic” measures. We could hardly have missed all the accusations of socialism that were thrown at Barak Obama, for this, always tinted with racism of course; the capitalist class doesn’t like to waste a good opportunity to sow division among the working class.

Freddie and Fannie were nationalized due to the sheer size of them was the argument. They have always been quasi-governmental agencies that bought your mortgages from moneylenders, packaged them in to some financial instrument they call securities and then sold them again investors. Every time something is sold, someone is making money and it ain’t us. They were considered too big to fail given their size in relation to the economy as a whole, and the nationalization of Freddie and Fannie was part of the entire rescue package as the taxpayer stepped in to save the capitalist system from the abyss after it almost collapsed in 2007.

So far, the US taxpayer has paid $134 billion keeping these agencies and the housing industry afloat. It has to be kept afloat from the capitalist’s standpoint not because people will lose homes, despite them saying this in the mass media; they throw people out of their homes every day. The real problem is that housing will lose its investment potential; it will not be a lucrative arena for profit taking. They need public funds to breath life in to it before they step in.

So now, the very folks who were not in control of the House of Representatives before the recent elections and who were the champions of privatization and the free market now find themselves in this lucrative position and are singing a different tune, supporting continued government control.

“Many Republicans now concede that a speedy exit (government control of Freddie and Fannie) may not be practical because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have such a dominant position in the nation’s housing market.”, the Wall Street Journal informs us this morning. The WSJ is the cheerleader numero uno for US capitalism. Within its pages it has accused all sorts of other bourgeois of communistic and socialistic tendencies. Heck, in the US, just supporting a nationalized medical system is “communism”. Capitalist propaganda touts Sweden and France as “socialist” states. The WSJ deplores state intervention.


“We recognize some things can be done overnight and some things can’t be” says Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican. And by a sheer coincidence, Scotty baby is the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee that, guess what, oversees Fannie and Freddie.

The Wall Street Journal literally rants frantically about the dangers of impediments to the free flow of capital and the private sector. But here it reports very calmly and rationally on the need to keep these agencies under state control. “A hasty end to the government’s support of Fannie and Freddie would mean fewer Americans could get home loans, causing home sales and prices to drop even further...” says Randy Neugebauer, a Texas Republican also on the Finance Committee. Nuegebauer is a former banker and real estate developer, a “land pimp” is what I call them, so his public explanation for concern, that the taxpayers will be forced to pay more if the state dumps Freddie and Fannie, is exposed for what it is, a lie..

Let’s think about it for one second. One of the key guys on the governmental committee that decides how we receive shelter in society is a banker and a developer. We all know which public he serves.

These crooks are using the same argument against some sort of regulation of the tech giants and how much they can control the content of the Internet. They are not opposed because such measures might give more power/freedom to the consumer and be an obstacle to profit taking; it will eliminate millions of jobs they say because the investors won’t invest. And the Afghan and Iraq invasions are not about investment and profit they are about democracy and making us safe in the US.

I am not saying here that the Democrats are the alternative to these few Republicans on this committee; both these parties are capitalist parties and hostile to the interests and well-being of working class people. I am also not saying that regulation of the market will solve our problems, even nationalization of industry by the capitalist class will not solve our problems, their interests are inherently hostile to ours; you can’t make capitalism “nice”. But this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t support measure’s that lessen the grip of the private sector on the levers of economic and political life.

By doing so, it helps to undermine their ideology that only capitalists can run society and opens the door to what will solve our problems, workers collective control and management of the means of producing the necessities of life. And that doesn’t simply mean machinery and structure, but surplus value, that wealth we create through the Labor process (work) that is the source of the capitalists profit and, in our collective possession, the source of our emancipation