Mock Investment Bank Exposes GOP Insanity

By James Donahue

We recently found a story on the Daily Kos about a clever scheme by a group of unemployed and underemployed Americans that have conceived a way to legally create a failing investment bank out of nothing and then seek Congressional support to win a “large-scale” cash bailout.

The idea was dreamed up by Tim Goldman, an Ohio factory worker who has been out of work for so long that his unemployment benefits dried up in 2010.

In the Kos story Goldman was quoted as saying: “For millions of Americans like me, we’re nearly out of options. But the only way to gain attention of Washington seems to be to screw up the economy in some giant way, so I thought, hey, what’s the best possible way to screw up the economy? Call yourself a failing investment bank.”

To make the scheme about as ridiculous as it could be, the plan is to found the new bank on a single dollar bill. The participants then would use leveraged trading, sketchy hedge funds and outright fraud to give their bank a paper worth of about $1.5 trillion.

“Then we’ll flush that original dollar down my toilet, collapsing the whole thing. It will be a spectacular loss,” Goldman joked. “Even Wall Street derivatives traders wold be hard pressed to fuck things up as badly as we intend to.”

He said the group is also thinking about “branching into swipe fees. The idea is that you, a consumer, can give us your money. We’ll swipe it, then charge you an additional fee for doing it,” he said.

The story also quoted Steven Ross, representing a Washington thinktank, the National Institute of Bipartisanship. “It’s a bold move, but it takes more than being an investment bank to receive a federal bailout. You also need to demonstrate a high level of incompetence, hopefully the kind of incompetence that could destabilize the nation without federal intervention.”

Goldman said he was confident his group could prove incompetence of the required magnitude. “A lot of us voted for Republicans in the last election. If that doesn’t show catastrophic incompetence, I’m not sure what would,” he said.

Goldman said just the idea of representing himself as a spokesman for the nation’s largest failing investment bank gets high ranking officials in Washington to answer telephone calls. “I’ve had private lunches with nearly everyone in leadership,” he said.

“As an unemployed person or as someone advocating for the unemployed, I couldn’t get anyone in Washington to take my calls,” he said.

While Goldman and friends may never really try to pull off such a scheme, the idea has helped expose the corrupt minds of Washington's political leadership. Their loyalty is on the wealth and power and not on the struggling masses that voted them in office.