Is the government turning socialist?
By DAVE LINDORFF After watching the markets plunge and the credit freeze become glacial, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson backed away from his scheme to rescue his investment banking colleagues by spending hundreds of billions of dollars buying up worthless credit derivatives. His new strategy: follow Britain’s lead and invest that same money–$250 billion for starters—into the banks as equity—specifically into the shares of nine of the country’s largest banks. This might sound a little like socialism—the kind of mandatory nationalization that the US has devoted decades, and tens of billions of secret dollars to trying to undermine and attack when practiced by leaders in countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Chile or post-war Italy. But Paulson’s no red. To avoid this government investment in the US banking industry being labeled “socialist,” Paulson and his fellow conspirator, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, are only buying non-voting shares of the banks. Get it? They’re giving hundreds of billi
