For those of you who aren’t yet onboard with the progressive movement, let me make you a proposition: say your business has failed, you are going to to end up on the street, so I’ll provide you a no interest, no repayment schedule loan for billions of dollars. You can do anything you wish with it!

Do you think you could make some money that way? Maybe buy some guaranteed CDs or T-notes? Well then let me sweeten the deal! Even if you avoid the sure thing, sink it in some risky derivatives and lose some of the principle, I’ll not only let you keep millions of dollars, you’ll get more no interest, no repayment schedule loans. That’s the deal the Bush WH gave Wall Street in 2008, and the creditors who signed their names on those dreamy giga-loans? That was you, hard working taxpayers.

But finally, today, one of the CEOs of one of those Wall Street banks found himself under oath facing the people’s elected representatives. How do you suppose that went?

WaPo — But rather than castigate Dimon for his firm’s egregious mistakes, Senate Republicans treated him like a wise sage. They pointed to JPMorgan’s ability to withstand mismanagement and billions in losses as evidence of the bank’s health — and solicited Dimon’s own advice on how Washington should treat Wall Street.

“What would you do to make our system safer?” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) asked Dimon.

“What should the function of regulators be?” asked Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Ida.).

“How much have regulation costs increased?” asked Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.).

Let’s put that into perspective. No doubt you have read about an event called the Great Depression. One of the things that made that depression so bad was how banks woked back then. There was no FDIC, those deposits were not guaranteed. When a bank failed people’s life savings went up in smoke, from 1929 through 1932 banks failed left and right.

One of the things the government did in response was to create the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It’s one of the most successful financial government programs ever created. Odds are decent you’ve had money at a bank at some point in your life that did fail. But you probably barely noticed it, because your deposits were insured. Your money was so safe you didn’t even have to think about.

In return for insuring deposits, the government set up two basic requirements. Commercial banks had to meet specific guidelines and were subject to audit by federal banks examiners to make sure they were in compliance. And commercial banks had to be standalone entities; they couldn’t play the stock market with deposits or be owned by a larger company that had access to customer deposits to play the market. Money had to be invested into things like home and car loans, revolving lines of credit for small business, and government securities. As long as banks played by those rules, they could tell customers their money was completely safe and customers flocked to the new banks like moths to flame. Today we take it for granted as surely as the sun rising. Today when we say money in the bank, we mean a super safe, done deal.

Those are the rules the GOP wants to eliminate — while still keeping taxpayers on the hook for the banks if they fail. In fact, conservatives have been hugely successful in eroding those regulations starting about thirty years ago, which is exactly when banks and savings and loans started collapsing every few years. Over the last two decades this deregulation fever grew more and more extreme, until finally, in 2008, the entire banking system finally collapsed — thanks to hundreds of billions in bad loans and trillions in bad bets on those loans — so completely, that the only way to keep the system alive, barely, was to pump in hundreds of billions in direct taxpayer dollars and trillions more in those sweetheart loans. What’s astonishing is even as the financial sector was still burning to the ground, the GOP and Wall Street had already begun lecturing and scolding the rest of us on bad debt and large deficits, while doing everything in their power to deny help of any kind to those of us who bailed them and their Wall Street pals out of that jam.

Yeap, that really happened, and it continues to happen every day of every week of every month of every year. It’s like having to hear LiLo or Steven Tyler call from the prison rehab and scold you every night about drinking a glass of wine.

It’s an awful deal for taxpayers, but if you are a banker, there could be no better gig than being able to risk all that despositor gravy in a system where you get to keep all the profit as long as the risks pan out, but avoid blame and keep your cushy seven figure job and bonus courtesy of Joe and Jane punchclock when they don’t. That’s the system the GOP wants to perpetuate forever, and moreover they want to eliminate the last few regulations protecting we the taxpayers who are protecting depositors, the regs they never had a chance to get around to trashing. In other words the conservative party now champions the worst, absolute shitstorm of all corrupt socialist systems: privatize the profits for the benefit of a select few zillionaires and socialize the losses onto you and me.

Mitt Romney is literally running on this platform, it is the centerpeice of his campaign. He’s not just bragging he will reenact the exact same policies that crashed and burned three years ago, he’s proudly saying he’ll put them on steroids and double down! And it’s not just Romney, it’s the entire fucking Republican party that has gone collectively insane. They have utterly convinced themselves that it will really work this time, they have deluded themselves in to thinking that it wasn’t their fault when it failed in 2008, and they are as certain about these false beliefs as they are that global warming is a myth or that evolution has been disproven.

Which is why I say it’s conceivable that if Romney wins,  this whole script will play out all over again, except we may not have the resources as a nation to absorb it for a second time, or third, or a fourth. Soone ror later, if we go over that cliff again and again, we’re gonna land hard. I’m talking about the kind of collapse that would be of such far reaching global magnitude that it cannot be quantified, the consequences cannot be predicted, they cannot even be accuratelu guessed at; there is nothing like it in all of modern history. Just for starters, money in your mattress could cease to have value, and you better believe you can kiss your Social Security and Medicare goodbye no matter how much money you invested in those programs over the years.

The scary thing? I think Romney has a better than 50/50 chance of winning this election. The only thing that brings a me a shred of cold comfort: the zero point one percent will lose way, way more than the rest of us.