Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [2]
We’re going to need quite a backbone to weather the economic storm that’s upon us. Let me start on a personal note by recalling something the legislature did to me in 2002 toward the end of my term as governor of Minnesota, because it has repercussions today. What I had proposed in my last budget, when we were in a milder recession, was to lower the sales tax rate but expand it to include services. This is something I’ll go into detail about later in the book, but basically I was trying to bring us into a twenty-firstcentury economy. In Minnesota, we still had a sales tax that was implemented in a ’60s economy, when it was 70 percent goods and 30 percent services, so they taxed the goods. Well, it’s flip-flopped now to precisely the reverse, where everything is probably 80 percent services and 20 percent goods. The sales tax isn’t doing what it was cut out to do.
The legislature claimed I was raising taxes, figuring “taxes” as a “death word” that would defeat the maverick governor in the next election. So they refused to implement my budget, overriding both my vetoes. With smoke and mirrors, they used up all the state’s reserves—including all the funds they got from winning a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the tobacco industry—doing everything they could not to pass the budget I’d proposed. Well, we’re talking Minnesota running close to a $5.8 billion deficit this year, which is probably one-sixth of the state budget. They have to somehow balance that. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be a recession in Minnesota today, because that’s everywhere—but now the state will get hammered worse than if they had passed my budget back in 2002.
On the federal level, really this whole housing mortgage crisis is a repeat of what happened to family farmers back in the ’80s. Farmers all over the Midwest were offered these fraudulent loans, told to grow-grow-grow, then the banks got them to buy-buy and mortgage-mortgage until the bottom fell out. And that brought in corporate farming. That’s the same thing they did—though I’m not sure exactly who they are—in the whole home mortgage industry.
I don’t want to hear a word from us criticizing Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez for nationalization anymore. Not that we go to the same extreme but, if what our government is doing isn’t nationalization to a certain degree, what would you call it? We’re investing $40 billion in AIG and giving them credit lines that could bring the federal funding up to $144 billion. That’s the biggest subsidy any American corporation has ever gotten. In exchange, the U.S. gets almost 80 percent of AIG’s stock.
I don’t like these huge bailouts, because there wasn’t enough stipulation put on them. These “wizards of finance” are the people who got us in trouble to begin with! The Associated Press did a 2008 analysis that showed the same banks getting taxpayer bailouts awarding nearly 600 big execs close to $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits. At the same time, this Wall Street icon named Bernie Madoff perpetrates what looks like the biggest financial fraud in history, while the Securities and Exchange Commission that’s supposed to enforce the financial laws is looking the other way!
This is way beyond a sub-prime mortgage problem. Our national debt stands at $10.6 trillion dollars and keeps going up. Our children’s children will be paying for these bailouts with higher taxes while the Federal Reserve prints more money that devalues the purchasing power we’re hanging on to. We’re looking at, I would say, if not a depression then a borderline hard-core recession, with a lot of destitution coming