Everyone's freaking the fuck out about Bush's "Neverending Pot 'o Gold" strategy for healing an ailing economy, and for good reason. The bailout is no longer a gambit to unfreeze credit markets and buy up toxic mortgage securities, but an orgy of feeding by the world's largest financial institutions. Not that any of us were stupid enough to believe that Bush was suddenly going to show a modicum of responsibility with American tax dollars, but there was hope that something useful would have come out of the plan. Now we learn that the only thing useful happening is that America's wealthiest, best-represented and most comfortable citizens will be placed into an even higher echelon of plutocratic nirvana.
Want to know where your money is going, America? Too fucking bad, it's a secret! But here's a few places to look when the torches and pitchforks get handed out:
- As intrepid RadicalHead reporter Dave notes, the Big Three auto companies might get a slice of the greasy, lardy pie that our betters are battling for. But that would be on top of a 25 billion dollar bailout given to them two months ago. I guess 25 billion just doesn't go as far as it used to.
- Welfare queen/crack whore extraordinaire, AIG, continues to get truckloads of cash dumped off at its loading docks for no particular reason. AIG has now broken the $100 billion mark, representing about 20% of the original 700 billion dollar bailout. They're predicted to break $200 billion by next year.
- Bonuses! Yay! Everyone likes bonuses, right? While the government pumps over a hundred billion into large investment firms and banks, they pump 70 billion right back out into the hands of the assholes who are ruining the companies. The rationale? You need those big bonuses to attract the top talent. Imagine how much worse things would be without all of those brilliant minds. The super-geniuses running the banks right now have probably prevented a $1 googolplex bailout. And that would have totally sucked.
Angered at the bailout, Americans are turning to the tried-and-true response of Americans throughout history: hypocrisy. What is this, some kind of socialist, commie haven for corporations? Move over comrades, its our turn. A "stimulus package" is an almost foregone conclusion at this point, the mechanics of which still boggle the mind: the US government will be giving checks made of taxpayer money to... tax payers? Uh... thanks, me, for all of that money I gave you.
I jest, of course. We'll be borrowing the money from our good friends, the autocratic government of communist China. At least it's thematically consistent.
4 comments:
Why this is not the top story in the MSM is well beyond my powers of comprehension, but still not as baffling as why there are not millions marching on DC to put a stop to this madness.
I want to point out one thing: while we borrow a lot of money from China, they are not our biggest donor. We borrow more money from the UK, France, and Japan than we do from China -- and China is holding about $500 Billion of our debt. Furthermore, I hasten to add that those sugar daddy countries of ours are having their own, interconnected economic problems. Just ponder for a moment the morality of borrowing money from countries in economic trouble in order to hand that money over to the super-rich and to companies that failed because of Enron-style accounting practices and immoral, incompetent leadership.
And btw -- any stimulus check you get isn't really coming out of your own pocket. It's coming from the taxes that your children and future grandchildren will one day pay. The revenue collected from taxing us isn't even enough to cover the govt's operating expenses and pay the interest on our astronomical debt.
And I STILL don't hear anybody saying anything about cutting our 'defense' budget, which is still greater than those of the rest of the world's countries combined.
FUCK!
I thought it was more like a trillion and a half. In any case, yes, other countries own a huge portion of our national debt, including European countries and wealthy OPEC nations. The Chinese were just buying it up at a much faster rate than any other nation over the past decade. Maybe that's no longer true, as the American-Chinese trade surplus is drying up and the Chinese banking system is collapsing right along with ours.
I agree that's it's not as simple as money coming out of our pockets - I said as much in my post. But we're borrowing for everything, including our wars and our social security and our medical system. We're so deep in the red before we tack on a 'stimulus' package that it's just a drop in a vast sea. If we were shareholders in a company and we saw spending patterns like this, we'd sell our stock.
So I likely read wrong about the amount of our debt that China holds. My main reason for bringing it up was simply to point out that other countries own even more of our debt, and that given all these countries are suffering economically as we are, it's endlessly stupid to continue to think we can spend our way out of this mess. But that's a point you made perfectly capably in your original post. I was merely amplifying it.
As for my point about the transfer of money from one pocket to another: the way you explained it was more entertaining and illustrative of the stupidity of the consumption-based 'stimulus'. I only wanted to point out that it's our kids and future grandkids who will actually be paying for it because that elevates the offense from foolishly imprudent to downright immoral.
But I guess discussions of 'morality' these days are constrained primarily to the topic of who gets to marry whom.
Well, that's probably where the focus should be. Imagine living in a home where your mother and father are constantly going on vacations, buying fancy shit and generally going on like wealthy assholes. Except they're not wealthy, and most of the luxurious crap they're buying is all on a credit card. "This is all going to be yours someday, buddy!" they say with a winning smile, but you have a sinking feeling that what you're really getting is a mountain of debt that will crush you for the rest of your life.
It is immoral, because we're literally impoverishing future generations. Currently as a nation we spend 1/4 of our budget paying interest on the debt. One in four of your tax dollars goes to paying off the excesses of the past three Republican administrations. I wonder what kind of debt our children will be indentured servants to?
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