Heist

As our unprecedented financial swindle continues apace, a couple things. We're now approaching $3 trillion in bailout commitments, with no end in sight. The US population is just over 300 million. What makes more economic sense, and indeed justice, if your goal is to stimulate the economy -- to give every citizen $10k to inject back into the system, or to give a couple thousand people (who, you know, lost the damned money in the first place) tens of billions of dollars each to hold over the remnants of the working class?

Clearly this is not economic stimulus so much as political stimulus; Wall Street is getting exactly what it paid for, which is political representation at the expense of all others. Hell, Citi and AIG won't even alter their grotesque stadium sponsorship deals, they're certainly not going to save anyone's job.

The stadium naming sponsorship thing is especially galling. First the taxpayers get rolled into building a new stadium for the Mets, and the personal seat license commitments are out of the price range of most working-class folk. Now, to add insult to injury, the taxpayers are again being rolled so that these assholes can, among other things, pay for their goddamned stadium naming rights. Nothing like getting taken by the same grift twice. Henceforth, the Mets' new stadium is Douchebag Field.

I've idly commented a few times recently about stringing these bastards up from the nearest lamppost or street light, but I'm not so sure I'm even half-joking anymore. Again, if the money's there for the doling out, why not give it to people who are going to spend it, put it back into the economy right away, rather than a select few who will simply hold our own money over us for the next decade or two, until their next eventual regulatory end-run ends again in predictable disaster, and we are all forcibly dragooned into saving their worthless hides yet again. Why not just cut out the middleman? It's our money; why keep rewarding the bookies for making stupid bets with it?

Another, more ominous problem is that the bailouts are there to preserve the existing system, which because of increasing resource constraints is going to need to be seriously readjusted, if it doesn't collapse outright. Kunstler has been the proverbial voice in the wilderness on this subject for many moons, and he's starting to look fairly prescient in a lot of areas.

There is money to be made, jobs created, economies and communities to be rejuvenated, by serious, careful retooling of our infrastructure, manufacturing, and finance systems. Localized and regionalized economies have been ravaged by national and international economic policy. Globalized capital mobility has been nice, and a balanced form of it is still desirable. But it must be complemented by realistic, sustainable, and above all tangible means of support and process. Bundling doomed-to-fail mortgages and putting them on 33 Black is no way to run a modern economic system.

It's natural for political systems to attempt their own continued perpetuation by any and all means. The only thing missing from these bailout episodes is a ski mask, a gun, and an impossibly large sack festooned with a ginormous dollar sign. This ripoff is truly cartoonish in scope and scale; who else gets a blank check after losing tens of billions of dollars that they'll never recoup or payback, and laying off tens of thousands of people that they'll never rehire? Even a shabby skid-row hustler has more morals than these animals.