Feeding Frenzy

Sometimes it seems too discouraging even to use the energy to comment on the world. Like most everyone else all I can do is hope that Obama’s plans for rescuing us are going to work. I don’t know if they will. We’ve never been in this position before. I just know that what we’ve tried for the past eight years has created millionaires and billionaires for whom competition and power were the issue, leaving me and other little people, for whom money was the issue, to pay for their folly. Yes, economics, like politics, is local.

It's been dismaying to watch these captains of industry circle like sharks in a feeding frenzy swimming with opportunist crooks such as Bernie Madoff, all busy tearing away pounds of our flesh. We’re told we have to sacrifice to save these corporations and yet we learn from Goldman Sachs that the failure of AIG wouldn’t even have made a ripple. It seems corporations and banks wanted the bailout to write off bad debts so they could continue their entitlements like bonuses and Las Vegas conventions undisturbed.

Like many others, I'm bitter. Bad investments? Not a problem. Manipulate the media and Congress, count on (or lobby for) a non-regulatory business climate and a compliant administration, and the party continues. I’m all for breaking up these huge banks and making them accountable to their communities. I’m all for limiting their ability to create new policies that increase charges for their miserable services. I’ve switched to the credit unions, which are community based. I’m all for the regulation that greases the wheels of our economy, restrains the worst abuses the strong can inflict on the weak, and educates all of us that—despite Ayn Rand and what I see as an adolescent theology of the virtue of selfishness—greed and self-interest are not appropriate or rewarding goals for a government representing all the people.

Going further--yes, you can say I’m angry. I am sick of the results of unregulated greed and cutting corners with ethics. Personally, I’m tired of watching the chain effect that started with unregulated loans and moved on to the devaluation of assets, retirement savings, house values, and lives. I’ve done everything I should—paid my bills and saved—yet my house has lost value along with everyone else’s and I can’t help feeling is was so that some corporate Galt could earn a bonus larger than my entire life earnings.

Bad as all that is, though, I have come to resent listening to the architects of our current mess mount personal attacks on the one person trying to do something other than hand out tax cuts to the wealthy. I have been subjected to what passes for humor from the righteous right, including cartoons of watermelons on the White House lawn as if this passes as intellectual insight. When I objected, I was told I'm a humorless liberal. In fact, I'm an independent. I have even voted for worthy Republican candidates. I bet the sender of the watermelons never voted Democratic in his life. When it comes to economic and political theory, give me something substantive and I’ll consider it carefully as I did reading William Buckley. Send me insulting drivel and I’ll not waste my time.

On the more positive side, though, I know things will get better in the long run. They always do. The Salem Witch hunts ended when the so-called victims started pointing to relatives of important people; those important people used their influence to expose the young women accusers for the neurotics they were. So it all depends on whose ox is being gored. Rush and his pals will finally go off the precipice in their chase for ratings. Power corrupts as we’re told and very few can keep their heads when they imagine millions of people listening to them when they flick on the mike switch. They will make some fatal error. People will then stand back shaking their heads and making pious confessions of their own gullibility.

Reversals are the nature of the world. In the Middle Ages, they talked of this inevitable turn around as being on Fortune’s Wheel—sort of an old version of “What goes up must come down.” I firmly believe that one day, hopefully soon, people will regain their ability to judge and not treat the political process as if it is a Super Bowl where their team wins or loses. Eventually, they will understand the world is evolving to reflect what America has become. We aren’t who we were a hundred years ago. Until then, I shall freely use my delete button.