A Glimpse at Re-Birth Instead of Melt-Down
Are we “man-enough” to turn around and walk away? 74
George Bush (GWB) (Oh hell, why not both of them...?) has always done his very best “work” when he paints his pitch with the direst urgency. Texas style, hair on fire, save America urgency. Recalling what may be the most calamitous deceptions he has “sold” to the American public, we are impressed with the sinister alacrity always present.
A breathless pharmaceutical bill passed a 3 AM half by exhausted, threatened senators and half by others wildly drunk on avarice, a panicked Patriot Act recklessly perched on choreographed “facts,” an emergency $300 billion dollar Christmas present to an unnamed “black hole” filled with “special bankers,” the only ones who could be trusted to save the country from “special bankers” who had just finished looting it -- all these are but a few of the more public outrages.
“Gee whiz, they all seemed to make sense for a little while!” Is anyone else getting tired of listening to this endless toothache of, well, emergency emergencies?
Now it’s hangover time. There’s simply nothing to do but have another drink.
We don't even know who got our money. We don't even know what who ever got it, did with it! Sure, we asked, but those in charge told us to "Shut up." They told us we didn't know enough about such things to even ask questions like that one, let alone expect that we could understand the answers. "Just keep paying." "Otherwise, melt down! Whatever we decide that is, it will be lots worse than this!" "Just keep paying."
Sorry, maybe not. What exactly happens if we bravely turn our backs on this whole collection of vipers? What exactly happens if we just lean back, relax and let the whole financial “whatever it actually is” demolish itself? It’s pretty clear that the hardest part of fixing things is finding anyone to trust long enough to do the work.
Maybe these fun loving opportunists need a stake through the heart. Yeah, their movie making machine is running full steam with yet another saga of precisely how awful things would get if we don’t keep paying. Yeah, they’ve managed to recruit some otherwise credible voices to join their well paid choir of impending disaster. The economic charts and graphs are flowing like a river at flood stage, every one of them portraying something akin to a Biblical disaster.
There is even a short hesitation generously injected to attempt to educate us about the difference between “financial” and “economic” disaster. The “financial” disaster is the one to be suffered by our road weary billionaires if the bail out should so much as pause in its progress. You know, billionaires. The people who make campaign contributions because they love our country so much that it hurts.
The “economic” disaster, I suppose, is the one we will be feeling. The story line says that the billionaires must always be considered first. Something like the instructions to the mother on the air line. “Put the oxygen mask on yourself before the baby.” We have been artfully convinced that the billionaires are the ones who will need to keep breathing if the rest of us are going to make it. An interesting coincidence when, not long ago, they were the ones in favor of "drowning the government in a bath tub."
Owning the media, lock, stock and barrel, comes in handy for stuff like that.
Well, if these old banks fall apart, isn’t it the American way to expect new banks to rise up out of the ashes? If the stock brokers take the hit they are always claiming to be ready to take, why not let them take it? If the dottering bigots in the Congress cut loose with their practiced screams about “good Southern ideology” and “American ideals” and “founding fathers” and the like, what happens if we don’t dance?
Wouldn’t honest, hard working Americans recreate the stock market if it turned out to be something we needed? Wouldn’t American voters realize what kind of crooks we had been electing if we saw, first hand, the damage they had inflicted all these years while they were convincing us they were actually doing something else? Something honest? Something American?
Could the United States somehow just dump all this crud and start over? We started from scratch more than once before. The wealth of the country remains. The old owners are such toothless whiners we start to suspect they never really owned everything anyway. We start to suspect that our indebted servitude to them doesn’t actually amount to much more than hot air, the rancid stench of something dead in their over burdened digestive tracts.
These "old owners” have now perfected their endless ranting about the sanctity of capitalism, at least capitalism as they have always promoted it. Leaving them on a street corner with their fancy paper and their shrill voices doesn’t really seem like such a bad idea.
Time for a realization. They aren’t capitalists. These unquestionably elite "Captains of Industry" haven’t “competed” or "invented" for decades. This sacred economy that we are being told that we must save -- for them -- is about as capitalistic as a bunch of over weight oligarchic pigs with trust funds squawking with screams of desperate urgency in a belching contest. They bought all these politicians, judges, media corporations. They dreamed up all the “financial doo dads" that they lost their shirts selling to each other.
So? Let’s honor our traditional ideas about “private property” and let these clowns keep all these expensive folks they’ve bought. We can elect new politicians. If it turns out that we need to, we can create a new stock market based on capital that actually exists. We’ve already started the replacement of their crooked, worthless media machines. (You’re reading this blog right now! Ain’t it great? No newsprint!)
Oh gee. What about all those honest foreigners who lent us all that money? They shouldn’t have to take a bath just because they tried to help us out with a few trillion. They only had our best interests at heart. They only wanted to take a small, honest advantage of our great capitalist system. Right. None of us has ever even seen anything that money bought! It certainly doesn’t seem to have bought anything for us. We don't even know where in hell it went.
If we walk away, we will be standing there without any hope that these hard working billionaires and their honest, compassionate "foreign friend" billionaires are going to “help” us any longer. We would just have to look after ourselves.
We could start looking after ourselves with whatever is left in the treasury.
I think we could make it.
One of our founders said that democracy needed to be covered with the blood of patriots every decade or so. He was close. Our democracy needs to be covered with the blood of crooks and cheats, their professional liars and their private collection of “bought and paid for" politicians.
Time to clean house, take our lumps and get this thing back on the tracks.
Gosh. Did I tip my hand?
For more insight concerning the"Extra, extra complicated" melt down picture, the following explores the question, "How many different directions can a room full of bankers point their fingers?"
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-cra25-2008oct25,0,394443.story
Are we “man-enough” to turn around and walk away? 74
George Bush (GWB) (Oh hell, why not both of them...?) has always done his very best “work” when he paints his pitch with the direst urgency. Texas style, hair on fire, save America urgency. Recalling what may be the most calamitous deceptions he has “sold” to the American public, we are impressed with the sinister alacrity always present.
A breathless pharmaceutical bill passed a 3 AM half by exhausted, threatened senators and half by others wildly drunk on avarice, a panicked Patriot Act recklessly perched on choreographed “facts,” an emergency $300 billion dollar Christmas present to an unnamed “black hole” filled with “special bankers,” the only ones who could be trusted to save the country from “special bankers” who had just finished looting it -- all these are but a few of the more public outrages.
“Gee whiz, they all seemed to make sense for a little while!” Is anyone else getting tired of listening to this endless toothache of, well, emergency emergencies?
Now it’s hangover time. There’s simply nothing to do but have another drink.
We don't even know who got our money. We don't even know what who ever got it, did with it! Sure, we asked, but those in charge told us to "Shut up." They told us we didn't know enough about such things to even ask questions like that one, let alone expect that we could understand the answers. "Just keep paying." "Otherwise, melt down! Whatever we decide that is, it will be lots worse than this!" "Just keep paying."
Sorry, maybe not. What exactly happens if we bravely turn our backs on this whole collection of vipers? What exactly happens if we just lean back, relax and let the whole financial “whatever it actually is” demolish itself? It’s pretty clear that the hardest part of fixing things is finding anyone to trust long enough to do the work.
Maybe these fun loving opportunists need a stake through the heart. Yeah, their movie making machine is running full steam with yet another saga of precisely how awful things would get if we don’t keep paying. Yeah, they’ve managed to recruit some otherwise credible voices to join their well paid choir of impending disaster. The economic charts and graphs are flowing like a river at flood stage, every one of them portraying something akin to a Biblical disaster.
There is even a short hesitation generously injected to attempt to educate us about the difference between “financial” and “economic” disaster. The “financial” disaster is the one to be suffered by our road weary billionaires if the bail out should so much as pause in its progress. You know, billionaires. The people who make campaign contributions because they love our country so much that it hurts.
The “economic” disaster, I suppose, is the one we will be feeling. The story line says that the billionaires must always be considered first. Something like the instructions to the mother on the air line. “Put the oxygen mask on yourself before the baby.” We have been artfully convinced that the billionaires are the ones who will need to keep breathing if the rest of us are going to make it. An interesting coincidence when, not long ago, they were the ones in favor of "drowning the government in a bath tub."
Owning the media, lock, stock and barrel, comes in handy for stuff like that.
Well, if these old banks fall apart, isn’t it the American way to expect new banks to rise up out of the ashes? If the stock brokers take the hit they are always claiming to be ready to take, why not let them take it? If the dottering bigots in the Congress cut loose with their practiced screams about “good Southern ideology” and “American ideals” and “founding fathers” and the like, what happens if we don’t dance?
Wouldn’t honest, hard working Americans recreate the stock market if it turned out to be something we needed? Wouldn’t American voters realize what kind of crooks we had been electing if we saw, first hand, the damage they had inflicted all these years while they were convincing us they were actually doing something else? Something honest? Something American?
Could the United States somehow just dump all this crud and start over? We started from scratch more than once before. The wealth of the country remains. The old owners are such toothless whiners we start to suspect they never really owned everything anyway. We start to suspect that our indebted servitude to them doesn’t actually amount to much more than hot air, the rancid stench of something dead in their over burdened digestive tracts.
These "old owners” have now perfected their endless ranting about the sanctity of capitalism, at least capitalism as they have always promoted it. Leaving them on a street corner with their fancy paper and their shrill voices doesn’t really seem like such a bad idea.
Time for a realization. They aren’t capitalists. These unquestionably elite "Captains of Industry" haven’t “competed” or "invented" for decades. This sacred economy that we are being told that we must save -- for them -- is about as capitalistic as a bunch of over weight oligarchic pigs with trust funds squawking with screams of desperate urgency in a belching contest. They bought all these politicians, judges, media corporations. They dreamed up all the “financial doo dads" that they lost their shirts selling to each other.
So? Let’s honor our traditional ideas about “private property” and let these clowns keep all these expensive folks they’ve bought. We can elect new politicians. If it turns out that we need to, we can create a new stock market based on capital that actually exists. We’ve already started the replacement of their crooked, worthless media machines. (You’re reading this blog right now! Ain’t it great? No newsprint!)
Oh gee. What about all those honest foreigners who lent us all that money? They shouldn’t have to take a bath just because they tried to help us out with a few trillion. They only had our best interests at heart. They only wanted to take a small, honest advantage of our great capitalist system. Right. None of us has ever even seen anything that money bought! It certainly doesn’t seem to have bought anything for us. We don't even know where in hell it went.
If we walk away, we will be standing there without any hope that these hard working billionaires and their honest, compassionate "foreign friend" billionaires are going to “help” us any longer. We would just have to look after ourselves.
We could start looking after ourselves with whatever is left in the treasury.
I think we could make it.
One of our founders said that democracy needed to be covered with the blood of patriots every decade or so. He was close. Our democracy needs to be covered with the blood of crooks and cheats, their professional liars and their private collection of “bought and paid for" politicians.
Time to clean house, take our lumps and get this thing back on the tracks.
Gosh. Did I tip my hand?
For more insight concerning the"Extra, extra complicated" melt down picture, the following explores the question, "How many different directions can a room full of bankers point their fingers?"
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-cra25-2008oct25,0,394443.story
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