Just after the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rightwing ideologues began to rail against this supposedly socialist measure.

One of the more agitated among them is a Houston based venture capitalist named Bill Perkins who has bought a couple of full-page N.Y. Times ads warning about the communist threat to American capitalism. Here’s the latest that includes a cartoon exploiting the famous (but bogus) photo of wartime troops planting the stars and stripes on Iwo Jima:

It took me a moment to figure out that the rightmost soldier was President Bush since the features were decidedly Semitic, especially the nose. Just a couple of days ago I told my wife to expect a spasm of anti-Semitism around the bailout since so many of the hated Wall Street firms have traditionally been Jewish-owned-like Bear-Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Goldman-Sachs. Furthermore, AIG’s past chairman was Maurice Greenberg, a Jew whose close ties to the Reagan administration (the Gipper offered him the job of Deputy Director of the CIA) would probably not compensate for having killed Jesus and destroying the livelihoods of good (Christian, in other words) Americans.

In a September 24th Guardian article, Perkins explains: “I think it’s a kind of trickle-down version of socialism or communism, when you say certain institutions can’t fail, when you have the government nationalising more institutions than Venezuela, I don’t see why you shouldn’t call a duck a duck.”

Ironically (although maybe not so ironically) Perkins hosted a fund-raiser for Barack Obama recently despite the Democratic candidate’s full-throated endorsement of the 700 billion dollar bailout.

full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/are-bailouts-marxist/
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