Confidence Game

Been sidelined with an early work schedule and a moderate ear infection all week. The right ear is still totally blocked, which drives me up the wall, and the scrip of prednisone and augmentin plays havoc with my usual diet of Seagram's and heroin. Hopefully the pred, which is a steroid, starts opening things up today.

I never had ear infections as a kid, which is usually where those things start. But I have had them chronically, about every six months, for the past three years -- oddly, it happens, about the time I started the job I am losing in several weeks. Whether it's induced by stress or environment (closed office with air ducted in from another room, and no cross-ventilation), it's probably not coincidence.

Even a minor incapacitation brings some things into sharp focus. For one, I still have insurance for now, so the meds and office visit run about $60 with the co-pay, as opposed to probably about three times that without. For another, I hate going to doctors. I don't have a needle phobia, and I don't care about the poking and prodding. I'm sympathetic to the beleaguered office personnel, dealing with donut-heads like myself all day, every day.

What I hate is the waiting, the knowledge that an appointment is only taken literally on the patient's end, that you wait whether you have one or not. Something like this is a walk-in. You give the rundown of your ailment to the PA, then wait some more. Then once you get the scrip, you wait even longer at the pharmacy for the medication. And that's if you're fortunate enough to have insurance to afford all this stuff, and get off work early enough in the day to do the drive-and-wait dance. For too many people these days, it's like something one would expect to find in a Third World country. This is not as coincidental as we would like to believe; aside from the preponderance of toys and gadgets and fattening foods, the Third Worldization of this country continues apace.

All these accruing infrastructural inconveniences are accepted as standard, part of the game. It's a pothole everyone walks around. It's a bad system, handled poorly. And yet health care is where the money will be for the next couple decades, till the last of these eternally damned narcissists quaintly known as baby boomers toddles the hell off the edge of the world already. My post-boomer gen is, as it turns out, the red-headed stepchild of American generational demographics. The boomers will suck up what remains of a fractured resource system, health-care and otherwise; the rest of us will be left holding a giant bag of dicks. So it goes.

Another thing brought into sharper focus by my new distractions is this week's economic news. Nobody knows a damned thing, that much is clear; every one of these talking heads is either a corporate wonk, a referee with only a peripheral knowledge of basic economics, or worst, a sideshow carny like Jim Cramer. All of their livelihoods depend on people believing in Tinkerbell. (I'll exempt, for the sake of argument, the CNBC econbabes, who actually do seem to be able to offer reasonably astute information without foaming at the mouth or wallowing in awful puns. Plus, the imminent economic destruction of the country sounds a little better all of a sudden.)

The problem is that, no matter how equitable a deal eventually gets struck, it won't matter without a commensurate gain in wages, which is just not going to happen. This is being portrayed in many ways -- as a credit crisis, a liquidity crisis, a regulatory crisis, etc. But it's a crisis of wages that have stagnated for over three decades, coinciding (or not) with increased global capital inflow and mobility. As far as the bailout proposals, the only things missing are the traditional ski masks, guns, and cloth sacks with dollar signs. This is as naked a shakedown as you can invent in a boardroom potboiler. "If we go down, we're taking you all down with us" seems an ideal summation.

And it will probably work; Americans have shown thoroughly that in the important subjects they are ignorant of -- that would be politics and economics, for those of you playing at home (or in your new cardboard box in the alley) -- you can never go wrong by scaring the shit out of them. One thing that should be communicated to every truly average American is that economic disparity is at the very heart of all this. It accounts for the unconscionable loosening of credit, and it accounts for the inability to handle the payments, which is why it's now being tightened and bailed out on our grandchildrens' backs.

In our rush to cover stupid loans made by greedy men, basic econ is forgotten. Nobody is going to buy anything if they don't have any money, and nobody is going to make anything if there's no one to buy their products. So why the hell should the peons care -- either morally or economically -- if a small but potent cadre of regression analysis grifters go broke? Bail 'em out, they still have no product and no customers if there's an insufficient spread of liquidity. All that's been accomplished is that their entitlement to upper-tier schools, housing, and health care for their families, has been underwritten by the government -- that is, by the taxpayers they shucked and jived in the first place.

On the other hand, I do not understand the utility of bailing out each and every bad loan and foreclosure at the street level. What does that say to people who worked hard, scrimped and saved, managed their money properly, watched the market, observed the bubble inflating, did all the right things? Why exactly should those folks have not gone out and bought overvalued property with money they didn't have, would never have without substantial income gains, and then used those houses as massive credit cards in order to buy that Expedition and take the family to Hawaii? Any asshole with a brain and a pair of eyes could see the dynamic of East Bay yuppies making $60k/year and flipping $800k tract homes in Concord or Antioch, and know that it was doomed to fail. I'm not sure why we're supposed to underwrite their greed and their bad decisions any more than we should do so for some suspendered spreadsheet monkey with a six-figure bonus.

Perhaps most notable about this looming crisis is how effectively it has squashed the final embers of hope the Bushie dead-enders had for their boy. He is nothing more than a spectator to history at this point, his final gambit seeming more and more like yet another desperate maneuver to saddle his unfortunate successor with yet another eminently preventable crisis to deal with. History will not vindicate him; it probably won't bother to wipe its ass with him. Trot him off to the ash-heap or the dung-heap already, before he finds yet one more thing in these final weeks to completely fuck up.

Bush likes to think of himself as the steady captain of a ship beset by storms, when he's really Joseph Hazelwood. If there is one thing he should be remembered for, it's for demonstrating that all the Smart Set quals derided by the Jebus-and-oxy-addled plebes -- silly things like intelligence and aptitude and accomplishment -- matter. If you give a chimp a loaded gun, he's probably going to just shoot things at random. Don't be surprised if you take one in the neck. Not sure why anyone thought otherwise, or per Palinfest '08, why they would still think so.

The House Republicans did the right thing for all the wrong reasons on Monday. This bailout proposal should be thought through and measured out sensibly, not just doled out to every grasping hand. Instead it's being approached in a state of panic and ignorance, stoked by the very incompetents who engineered the problem in the first place. That should be enough of a hint as to the right action and the right proportion.