Hear that humming sound? That's the printing presses at the U.S. Treasury running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, churning out an ocean of green paper to bail out the billionaire bankers, brokers and assorted brigands who are responsible for the economic disaster that's befallen us.
They're busy running off $3.7 trillion in bailout money for those who don't deserve it. It's a Happy Thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas to the very pirates whose greed got us, and them, in all the trouble.
Isn't capitalism grand?
We're daily treated to the spectacle of the fading remnants of a Republican administration working 24/7 to dump the tax money of hard-working Americans into the leaky coffers of the robber barons.
These are the same Republicans who have been telling us for eight years that we needed to get government out of the business of big business. Let the market decide, they crowed; it's more efficient. Get rid of all those pesky federal regulators, by hook or by crook, and everything will come up roses.
Well, the market decided. It decided that the whole thing was a Ponzi scheme, worth about as much as a three-legged mule. It decided that those who had cooked up all these derivatives based on bundles of bad mortgages were broke. Likewise for all the poor suckers worldwide who
bought those bundles of joy.
Suddenly all those free-market barons are pushing and shoving to get into the line for a government handout -- the corporate equivalent of food stamps and welfare checks.
We're treated to the spectacle of a treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, whose statements and declarations are no longer operative by the time they leave his lips.
With nearly two months to go before Barack Obama is sworn in as president of the United States, the man he'll replace, George W. Bush, has virtually disappeared. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.
But it begs the question: Who is running the railroad?
The stock market reacts positively to even an off-hand remark by Obama, and it's positively giddy when he does something like name those he plans to appoint to run the economy.
Suddenly we discover that rock-solid Citibank is awash in red ink and needs rescuing from its own miserable management, and we dump a fresh load of printed green paper -- $300 billion, a good dollop -- in food stamps on them.
And who can forget the spectacle of the men who have run the Big Three automakers into the ground boarding their private jets and zooming to Washington to get in the corporate welfare line?
What happened to letting the market decide?
|
